Chloe Dalton

Dalton set herself limits from the start. She did not name the hare, tried not to touch it, and kept it shut in only briefly. Those rules are what kept the rescue from becoming ownership.

Dalton chose not to name the leveret, because a name would have made it hers. It stays the hare. That small refusal keeps her attention, and ours, on the animal rather than on the person caring for it.

Dalton did not pick the leveret up at once. When she came back hours later it was still there, alone, and only then did she take it in. Mother hares leave their young alone for most of the day, so a lone leveret is not always an orphan.

The house changed more than the hare did. Dalton hare-proofed her home, gave up her garden plants and had a flap made so the hare could come and go. Respect showed up as a list of small household changes.

Hares and rabbits share an order but not a way of life. Leverets are born furred and with their eyes open, in a shallow dip in the open rather than a burrow, and hares are not domesticated. Knowing what an animal actually is comes before knowing how to help it.

As the hare grew, it came and went through its flap on its own schedule, and Dalton had to accept not knowing where it was. In HourLife's reading, care without control is the hard part of the book.

Dalton had lived by flights and deadlines. Following a crepuscular animal pulled her into dawn and dusk, the seasons, and the fields and hedgerows around the barn. The book is partly about what that attention did to her.

Dalton reads myth, poetry and the history of hunting, including William Cowper, the 18th-century poet who kept hares. Hares have been omens, jokes, prey and sport. She sets those stories against the animal she actually lived beside.

The hare was never trained or handled into closeness. Over months it chose when to come near and when to stay away. The book treats that choice as the whole point, and refuses to turn it into a pet story.