The path near the barn where I lived was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield. I was deep in my thoughts one day, walking down this slope towards a narrow country lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.
The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving.
The gaping mouths of rabbit burrows, and the flash of their inhabitants’ white cotton-ball tails, were familiar sights from my childhood. But hares were rare and secretive, only ever glimpsed from afar, in flight. To see a leveret lying out in the open – or at all – was very surprising. The most likely explanation for its exposed position was that it had been chased, or picked up and dropped, by the dog I’d heard barking a few minutes earlier, and had ended up lost on the track.
I considered the options. I could leave it where it was, hoping that it would find its way back into cover and be retrieved by its mother before it was found by a predator or crushed by the wheels of a passing car. I could pick it up and tuck it into the long grass, with the risk – I thought – that its mother might not be able to find it, as it could have been carried or chased some distance from its original hiding place, or that she might reject it. Transferring my alien scent on to the leveret by picking it up – even if just to move it by a few feet – might be to kill it with kindness.
It seemed impossible that the fragile animal at my feet could survive by itself in a landscape teeming with dangers, including foxes and hawks. But I decided that I had better let nature take its course. I would leave the leveret where I had found it, in the hope that it would hurry into the long grass as soon as I had gone, and be reunited with its mother. I counted the number of fence posts so I could remember the spot, and went on my way.
When I returned, four hours later, I had almost forgotten the leveret. But there it was, on the open track, exactly as I had left it. I weighed the possibility that the young hare had been injured by the dog, or that its mother had been killed. In either case, if it did not move from the track, the chances that it would be hit by a car or attacked and eaten increased the longer it lay in the open. I decided that I would take the leveret home until nightfall, when I would return it to where I had found it. To avoid touching it with my hands, I gathered several handfuls of the dead grass fringing the track. I crouched down on the ground, half expecting it to dart away. It did not flinch. I placed one hand on either side of the leveret’s body and lifted it carefully to my chest, wrapped in the grass, before walking the few hundred metres to my back door.
Once home, I placed the leveret anxiously on a countertop so I could examine it for injuries. To my relief, I could find no sign of bleeding or a wound. It pushed itself up on trembling front paws, each barely half the length of my little finger and as slender as a pencil, and sat unsteadily on its hindquarters, blinking, its nostrils flaring as if it were taking in its strange surroundings. The leveret looked even smaller in the house than it had on the track, dwarfed by any object designed for human purposes.
I rang a local conservationist, formerly a gamekeeper, to explain what had happened and ask for advice. He quickly dispelled my notion that I could return the leveret to the field. He told me that even if it could somehow find its mother, she would reject it, as it would now smell of humans despite my precautions. Moreover, he said that in decades of working on the land, he had never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret. “You have to accept that it will probably die of hunger, or shock,” he said, speaking kindly but bluntly. “I’ve met people who have reared badgers and foxes, but hares cannot be domesticated.”
I felt embarrassed and worried. I had no intention of taming the hare, only of sheltering it, but it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgment. I had taken a young animal from the wild – perhaps unnecessarily – without considering if and how I could care for it, and it would probably die as a result.
I grew up abroad with my parents, who worked overseas, and my three siblings. We returned to England during the holidays, to visit family, and my childhood summers were spent at our home in the countryside. I loved those days but, as I finished school and later university, I set my face towards London and the world beyond.
In the city I was drawn into the world of politics and foreign policy, working as a political adviser, first in parliament and then at the Foreign Office, where I was adviser and speechwriter to the foreign secretary, William Hague; and later as a consultant to other high-profile people in the humanitarian and philanthropic sphere. I developed ideas and strategies, helped put others’ thoughts into words, and stood by them in the “war room” in a crisis, working with a close team of equally committed people. If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do at a few hours’ notice. I avoided fixed plans that would remove the flexibility to take a bag and go, and what I missed of holidays and family occasions I believed I gained in novel, unrepeatable experiences and exposure to parts of the world I might otherwise never have seen. My time was spent in offices, meeting rooms and airports.
When the centrifugal forces of the pandemic flung me to the countryside – where I could be close to my parents and other family – relief and awareness of my good fortune warred inside me with a deep restlessness and anxiety about the future. I struggled with the change of pace. A friend and colleague came with me when we shut our office and moved it temporarily to my home. She and I maintained the strict rhythm of our working days and planned our return to London. A baby hare had no place in any of the scenarios we had discussed or that I had envisaged for myself. But now – improbably – I stood over a wild creature that I would have to find a way to feed and keep alive.
The leveret waited patiently, oblivious to my thoughts. My colleague, observing the scene, put my doubts into words. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she ventured. “What will you do with it when you go back to London? Wouldn’t it be better if you gave it to someone else – someone who actually knows about animals?” I had been thinking the same thing, but as she spoke, I felt an inner stubbornness stirring. I will work it out.
Learning to care for the leveret was a process of experimentation, painstakingly hand-feeding it with powdered kitten milk, which it consumed in microscopic quantities. Warm and soft and almost weightless, it fitted easily within the curve of my hand. I moved it to a bedroom at the farthest end of the barn, where I thought it would be least disturbed, and with a door opening on to the enclosed inner garden. I cut a hole in the side of its box, so the leveret could come and go as it wished. Later, following the advice of a hare protection website, I ordered the components for a basic pen or run, which I carefully assembled, but abandoned after a few days when it became apparent to me that being confined caused the leveret distress.
When I put the leveret down after feeding, it would run around the room and climb over my legs, its stomach taut and bulging. I then saw that a hare’s tail is not the round fluffy cotton ball of a rabbit, but a long stub that it can flick from side to side, fold underneath its hindquarters when it sits or extend out behind it when it lies down. While I let the leveret climb on me, I was careful not to hold it and stroke it, as one might a pet rabbit. As adorable as it was, I could not forget that it was a wild creature, born into a landscape of ice and snow and lashing winds. I worried, too, that if it became habituated to humans, it would not know that out in the fields it should fear us, with our dogs and guns.
The leveret took to sleeping under my bed during the day, directly above my office as I worked. In truth, the animal soothed me. I began slipping away from my desk just to look at it, amazed by its calmness and tranquil demeanour. I couldn’t help but compare its serenity and steadiness with the sense of frenetic activity that had pervaded my life for years, marked by constant vigilance, unpredictability and stress.
The leveret grew at an astonishing rate, particularly its ears and paws, which appeared to expand more rapidly than the rest of its body, perhaps because of the role speed and hearing play in a hare’s safety. I later learned that by the time they are weaned, at roughly 30 days old, leverets are more than eight times as heavy as they are at birth, a rate of development far faster than that of humans. The hind foot of the leveret alone would grow to 15cm.
As the Earth’s winter palette gave way to the lush green growth of spring, the leveret’s colouring shifted. Its fur lost its dark chocolate hue, until its paws, flanks and chest were the colour of spilt cream, and only the fur on its back and ears still recalled its newborn pelt. The leveret’s eyes also began to change colour, from their original inky black. Hares aren’t born with the amber eyes they are known for. Over the course of a month, a pale outer ring developed round the black pupil, turning gradually into a striking, glowing iris. A hare’s eyes are positioned on the sides of its face and stand out from its body. When the leveret really wanted to look at me, it would turn one eye towards me and look at me from side on, but even when it was facing away from me, I knew it could see me. This gave the leveret a watchful, careful air, and also suggested that it felt comfortable with me. I was able to share its space only because it allowed me to.
At 10 weeks old the leveret had survived longer than anyone had expected, and suggestions for names for it came in thick and fast from friends and family. Comments such as, “It seems to be doing all right” and, “You’ve brought it this far” were usually followed by, “What are you going to call it?” I tended to try to change the subject, to which I had developed a curious aversion. To name the hare was to proclaim it a pet and that would, I felt, be to take something away from it. I’d already changed the course of its life. Now my responsibility was to prepare it for freedom.
By early summer, the leveret slept outside at night, and I wondered if I ought to open the garden gate so it could wander further. I looked at the fields, smooth as velvet with the green shoots of the new crop. The wild grass was waist-high already, thick with seed. It was inviting, it was warm, and I regularly saw leverets smaller than this one making their way down the track, surviving in nature. But I wavered, as once the leveret was out, I would have to shut the gate behind it, leaving it with no possibility – or so I thought – of return.
The day the leveret left, it gave no sign of its intentions. It fed, and played, and rested under its favourite bush in the garden, just as usual. Just as usual, my afternoon was spent in online meetings. At a certain point I drifted into the kitchen to get some water. Glass in hand, gazing idly out of the window, I saw the leveret poised on the crest of the garden wall, looking back in my direction. Its ears twisted minutely, like fingertips gently probing the air, as it sensed its environment. I had never before seen the leveret even attempt to jump on to the wall, which was many times its body length in height. My astonishment – how did it get there? – turned rapidly to anxiety about what would happen next. Which way would it jump? I did not move or call out to it. I hardly breathed. One moment it was there, looking straight at me. The next, its place on the wall was empty. It had dropped down to the other side. I walked to the gate and looked over just in time to see it canter leisurely down the track, away from the house and into the fields.
I had raised the leveret with the goal of its return to the wild, and it had decided that it was ready. I had been spared the decision of when to open the gate and to expose it to the dangers in the landscape. It was always going to leave, as I was. All my plans were built on the idea of returning to work in London at the earliest opportunity, and now the way was cleared for that. This was surely the best possible outcome. This thought sustained me for as long as it took me to walk back through the house and into my office. As I pulled my chair out from under the desk, my eyes fell on a single porridge oat, dropped from the leveret’s paw on to the carpet – the only mess it ever created. I fought back a sob.
I puzzled hard over what to do next. The leveret had vaulted the wall at its shallowest point, where a bank of grass sloped up to the side of the house. On the other side of the wall, which was well over 4ft tall, there was no such bank. More in hope than in expectation, I propped the gate ajar with a stone and went back inside.
Early evening arrived without any sign of the leveret. Then, just before dusk, it appeared in the open gateway, a slender silhouette against the tall wooden posts, its ears raised to the fullest extent as it listened intently, so that it seemed more ear than hare. For what felt like an age, it waited at the very edge of the divide between the two worlds, and then slipped into the house. I shut the gate behind it while it ate porridge oats in front of the fireplace as if it had never left, before leaving for the night and leaping over the wall into the wild.
So began our new rhythm. At first light, I would find the hare crouched in the flowerbed by the glass doors to the sitting room, sopping wet. It would not wait for me to open the door fully but would step over my arm as I fiddled with the bolt at floor level. During the day I left the doors of the house open on all sides, for it to come and go at will. Sometimes it would appear for only a few minutes before leaving again. On those days, I wondered if the leveret’s link to humans – established out of necessity, not through its own choice – might be gradually becoming more tenuous, dissolved by the appeal of the wild. More often than not, however, the leveret would rest beside me in the office by day. It would rise only when the mood took it, often after six in the evening, to take a few mouthfuls of porridge before leaving for its night-time ranges across the beckoning fields.
Living side by side with the leveret changed me in unexpected ways. Before it came into my life, I had put work ahead of almost every commitment. I realised now that I had toughened myself up to cope with a demanding work environment, adopting a persona and way of working that was in some respects exhausting and alien to me. Beneath the carapace was a temperament that longed for quieter, more gentle rhythms. Whereas I had been impervious to warnings about burnout from friends, the leveret worked on my character soundlessly and wordlessly, easing some of the nervous tension and impatience that I had been living with as a result of a life constantly on the move and on call for others.
The seasons changed, February returned, and at one year old the leveret passed imperceptibly into adulthood. It had not lost its energy. It loved to race in through one door of the house, out through another, and back around, jinking in the air and turning 180 degrees while airborne, then accelerating off in the opposite direction. But it began spending more and more of its time beyond the wall.
I, too, felt the pull of the world beyond. I could no longer put off travelling to London for work, and further afield, to the Middle East; and, in truth, I was eager to go. It would be the first time that I had been absent from the house for more than a few days since the hare’s arrival, and I would be gone for several months. I worried about leaving it. I knew it was not dependent on me for its survival, but I still felt that having accustomed it to my presence, disappearing might be a form of cruelty. I also faced the prospect that it might not be there on my return, because either some ill fate had befallen it, or it had faded away into the landscape. But I also knew life could not stand still, and I wanted and needed to go.
I invited a carpenter to the house to see if it might be possible to create an opening in the plateglass that the hare could use. “Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good door?” he asked me. I could hear the unspoken question: why would you want to have a hare in your house? I let the matter drop, and my mother agreed to feed the hare in my absence. She accepted in good humour the instructions I left, which included in minute detail the hare’s habits, preferences and requirements as I imagined them, such as the timings of its daily comings and goings.
I returned home to the news that the hare had vanished. Days passed without a glimpse of it. I busied myself with work and gave philosophical replies to anyone who asked about the hare, hiding my sadness at its disappearance, and feeling guilty for my absence. But two weeks later, as I looked out of an upstairs window, I noticed a movement in the long grass at the top of the garden, which had grown to knee height. By mere chance, I glimpsed the tips of the hare’s ears. For reasons unknown, it was hiding, its body camouflaged by the dense grass. It was unmistakably “my” hare, as no other hares leapt the garden wall.
As dusk deepened, I stared out into the garden, puzzled. I saw a faint stirring in the flowerbed, and what I thought were three baby rabbits emerging one by one from the undergrowth. Just as I was about to curse the rabbits that had somehow dug their way under the fence, I realised what I was witnessing. These were three leverets. The question of the hare’s sex, and of its ability to integrate into the local population, was finally answered.
For the next month, I watched the hare feed, protect and discipline her leverets. In the early morning light, they played in the flowerbed amid the lavender and the roses, tumbling over each other and delicately nibbling at the flowers. Eventually, the young leverets melted into the landscape and stopped returning. I was sad to see them go, but it felt as if the circle had been completed, and I was pleased that her offspring were fully wild.
When I first found the mother hare as a leveret, I had thought of it as a creature that depended on me, as perhaps it did for the first few weeks of its life. But I realised now that she knew everything necessary for her own care, survival and indeed reproduction. All she required from me was a little space, a patch of sun in which to lie, and peace. This realisation made her continued presence in the garden and the house all the more precious, as it was by choice.
The hare will soon be three years old. She has survived three winters and three harvests, given birth at least three times to at least six leverets – and probably more – and she has survived one serious injury: damage to her front paw that made her hobble and run on three legs for months, leaving her vulnerable to predators. She has already lived a long life for a hare in the wild. Every minute she chooses to spend in my vicinity feels precious and fleeting. I know that one day soon she may drop her guard and be caught unawares by a winged killer falling down from the sky, or a fanged hunter creeping up on her through the grass, or the menacing steel of a giant machine bearing down on her in the field.
Since that first day when I found her, it has felt as if a spell was cast over this corner of the Earth, and me within it. I have stepped out of my usual life and had the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary. Had it not been for the hare, my life would have continued along its familiar grooves. I may never have questioned my habits or career, and missed out on so much as a result. I now split my time between the countryside and the city, spending as much time in nature as I can, and after years of writing for and with others I am striking out on my own. I have slowed my pace a little, although some habits die hard, and my interest in the complex dance between humans and the natural world, inspired by the hare, is only growing.
The hare has taught me patience. She showed me a different life, and the richness of it. She made me perceive animals in a new light, in relation to her and to each other. I have learned to savour beautiful experiences while they last – however small and domestic they may be in scope. 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 as malleable as wax, and may be shaped or reshaped. She did not change, I did. I have not tamed the hare, but in many ways the hare has stilled me.
