Leverett House, my dormitory at Harvard, has something that no other House can claim: a mascot derived from its name. “Leverett” comes from Boston’s Leverett-Saltonstall family, which has a long connection with Harvard, but the word itself originally comes from the French lièvre, which means “hare.” Thus, a “leveret” is, in English, a baby hare, which happens to be the official symbol of the House.
Most Americans likely have little familiarity with hares. They are often confused with rabbits and are much less commonly sighted. Hares have never been domesticated and are thus truly wild. These elegant creatures, however, have seen their habitat shrink rapidly due to climate change, deforestation, and the rise of mass agriculture; in the United Kingdom, some areas have lost sixty percent of their hare population in just the last decade. With the long-term survival of the species at risk, Chloe Dalton’s memoir “Raising Hare” is a much-needed tribute to the beauty and humanity of hares. The connection that Dalton forges with a leveret stands for the fundamental link between all of us and the wilderness that surrounds us.
I read “Raising Hare” on a cold January day as a foot and a half of snow fell over Boston. Dalton’s prose called out to me as a college student at an urban school, and one who was then missing the rabbits nibbling on the grass of the Leverett House towers’ courtyard. Her book asked me to thoroughly consider my love for the outdoors and remember just how impossible it is to divorce the human experience from nature’s unexpected joys. This poignant, self-contained memoir follows Dalton’s quest to raise a leveret in her country house in the UK, after she finds it abandoned on her driveway. Unsure of whether or not the leveret will survive and totally in the dark as to the proper ways of caring for hares, she nonetheless brings it home. As the leveret gains strength and explores farther, she finds herself awed by the loveliness, comfort, and strange unfamiliarity of nature, the sorrow of watching an animal grow up and grow old, the importance of caring for the wilderness, and the human growth that comes with inviting a part of nature into one’s life. She also takes the opportunity to become much more knowledgeable about hares, given the veterinary establishment’s comparative ignorance on the subject.
Hares face grave challenges in a warming and ecologically degrading world. The white coat of the mountain hare in England’s Peak District no longer camouflages it against the snow-free landscape. Studies have shown that the replacement of forests with sprawling, monocultural farms has negatively affected hare populations. These are political problems across the world; the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and designation of millions of Alaskan acres of previously-protected lands as open to mining and drilling only increases the hare’s endangerment.
“Raising Hare” responds to these political issues by implicating those who are responsible and shifting the focus from despair to hope. Dalton’s memoir carries a strong message against those who casually hunt hares for sport, plow hedgerows without thinking twice, or use tractors that leave a trail of blood behind their harvest. However, she weaves political dimensions into her overarching narrative of discovery. Debates around the humankind-nature relationship so often get wrapped up in the politics of blame, victimhood, superiority, rights, freedoms, and money. Instead of loudly accusing farmers of murder in her discussion of the threat of mechanical farming equipment, she transitions from descriptions of destruction to an account of how she becomes “mesmerised by the land” and absorbed in the study of its sounds and colors. Her investigations of the natural world become an implicit rebuke of the callousness that one might demonstrate by “pulveriz[ing]” hares in a combine harvester. She asserts that wonder, curiosity, and immersion are powerful antidotes to the challenges facing the hare today, chiefly ignorance.
For all its descriptions of hares in motion, the book has an underlying “atmosphere of calm.” Rarely does Dalton describe herself in motion or speaking: vivid descriptions of the leveret’s explorations and adventurousness take up the majority of the writing, and academic investigations into the cultural and scientific history of hares fill out most of the rest. Seldom does “Raising Hare” turn inward to focus on Dalton herself. Largely out of the picture are her daily Zoom calls, or her life beyond the fields in which the leveret eventually roams freely. Each night it returns to Dalton’s house is a chance for her to be grateful for its continued presence. This creates a meditative tone. Silent observations of the leveret become silent observations of ourselves, or more precisely, how we see our human emotions, curiosities, and instincts intimately reflected in the leveret’s behavior. For instance, Dalton discovered that the leveret loves sunbathing as much as she does. What is so masterful about Dalton’s writing, in essence, is her ability to turn a study of a small animal with an inhuman and primordially wild soul into an exposition of the qualities that make us human. By invoking the unity of spirit between ourselves and hare-kind, she shows that the most powerful reason to save hares from extinction is that they are like us.
I like to think that the awe we feel when faced with nature is equally the hope and gratitude that we might be worthy of such beauty. “Raising Hare” is, among other things, an expression of Dalton’s optimism that she has been changed for the better by simply allowing herself to become irrevocably linked to such a wild, beautiful animal. At the end of the memoir, Dalton articulates the variety of ways in which that chance encounter with the frightened leveret on her driveway changed her life:
“She [the leveret] has taught me patience. And…the dignity and persuasiveness of silence. She showed me a different life, and the richness of it. She made me perceive animals in a new light…She made me re-evaluate my life, and the question of what constitutes a good one. I have learnt to savor beautiful experiences while they last…The sensation of wonder she ignited in me continues to burn, showing me that aspects of my life I thought were set in stone are in fact malleable as wax, and may be shaped and reshaped. She did not change, I did. I have not tamed the hare, but in many ways the hare has stilled me.”
By giving a part of herself to the leveret, Dalton not only received part of it in return but part, too, of a wild spirit far more ancient than both of them. This book is, above all, a reminder that personal growth proceeds at a mysterious pace outside of our control. Between the celestial sphere and the earthly, “unfathomable gaze” of the hare, there is much in the world that moves beyond the bounds of human thought and action. Who can say how I might be changed tomorrow, what I might learn and discover, or what I could do with a little more love and patience? When I graduate in May, I will carry with me “Raising Hare”’s invocation of the connection between me and the unknown.
