Raising Hare - Chloe Dalton

When I first saw this in Hardback last year my initial reaction was that they'd made a lot of book out of relatively few words. I'd wait for the paperback. Well, better late than never, and the paperback has the advantage of being easier to carry around. 

Raising Hare is a beautiful book, Canongate have done it proud on the production front, it deserves every award and plaudit it's had, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. 

Chloe Dalton has an impressive CV and a job as a foreign policy advisor which pre lockdown kept her on the move and frequently out of the country. Covid took her to her home deep in the countryside, and there she comes across a probably more or less newborn leveret on a winter's day. It's sitting in the middle of a track, and is still there when she returns 4 hours later. The choices seem to be to leave it to die or take it in and see if it might not die. Hares aren't domesticated and are apparently notoriously difficult to hand raise. 

Long story short this one survives, possibly because it was so very newborn when she found it. Dalton doesn't name the leveret, her end goal is for it to thrive as a wild creature, and she tries to be as hands off as possible. There were two things that had made me wary of this book - one was that it would be sentimental, and the other was that the hare would die. Happily, the hare is still alive as she closes her narrative, and though she clearly deeply loves the creature she nurtured this isn't a sentimental story either. 

The experience does change Dalton, or at least it makes her more aware of the countryside around her and encourages her to re-evaluate her relationship with place, but lockdown did that for a lot of us anyway, and so does ageing in my experience. I don't doubt the hare changed Dalton but I think the point is you don't need the privilege of her particular position to be able to look around and think how can I make a little bit more space for nature, or to see what's in front of you.

I've thought a bit about Ring of Bright Water whilst I read this and how Gavin Maxwell took exactly the opposite approach in his efforts to make pets out of his otters, and also about the really beautiful film Billy and Molly where Molly the Otter becomes an almost surrogate child to the man who finds her - and maybe that happened to Dalton too, more than she lets on. Both stories are also deeply hopeful at a time when hope itself can feel like a luxury and a privilege.

So read this for its quiet charm, for the wealth of information about hares you will learn, and to really think about what each one f us can do to make a little more space for nature around us - because we will reap the benefits of that in a thousand small ways.