The Beauty of the Wild: A Guest Post by Chloe Dalton
In the digital age, it’s easy to forget to look at the nature around us. But thanks to Chloe Dalton and her unexpected furry friend, this memoir is as much a thumper of a personal narrative as it is an ode to earth’s natural gifts. Read on for an exclusive essay from Chloe on what inspired her to write Raising Hare.
Hardcover $27.00
Raising Hare: A Memoir
Raising Hare: A Memoir
By Chloe Dalton
In Stock Online
Hardcover $27.00
A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.
A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.
I wrote Raising Hare with the subject of the book lying asleep near me in my office. Not so unusual, you might think, if you share your home with a cat or a dog. But the hare of this story is a wild creature. She roams the fields and woods of the north of England by night and, by day, returns of her own accord to the house where I hand-reared her during the pandemic.
Each dawn, as I wrote the book, she would appear at my door: her fur gleaming with dewdrops, her long limbs spattered with mud, fresh from running with the other hares and dodging the sharp-toothed predators that roam the countryside.
Hares are increasingly rare, elusive creatures that have never been domesticated by humans. They live wild, hard-pressed lives, squeezed into ever-smaller patches of land by new homes and expanding roads, walls and fences. They are threatened by heavy machinery and modern intensive farming methods, and frequently hunted and shot all year round. They have every reason to fear humans and little incentive to linger close to our homes. In the book I tell the story of one extraordinary hare that chose to trust a human and, in the process, opened my eyes to the beauty of the wild.
Before I met the hare, I lived a busy life in London, working in politics and foreign policy and travelling abroad constantly. The seasons passed me by. I didn’t realise that I had become detached from the nature I had loved as a child and alienated from one of the single greatest sources of comfort, inspiration and healing available to us as humans. Hare made me slow down, reconnect with nature and reappraise my life. She showed me the possibility of coexistence between humans and the wild. And she inspired me to write this book: a silent creature enabled me to discover my own voice.
Raising Hare tells the story of the first three years of the hare’s life, from my stumbling early efforts to learn how to care for her when she was a newborn leveret about the size and weight of a small apple, to her decision to raise her family in my home and garden.
It felt as if a spell had been cast on this stretch of countryside and my home within it, enabling me – for a short period of time – to see into the world of hares: dissolving the barriers that normally exist between humans and the wild. I wrote never knowing what the next day would bring, or how long the experience would last. I was suffused with a feeling of peace, joy, curiosity and gratitude that the hare inspired in me, that I hope readers might sense on the page, and that lingers with me still.
The most joyful, beautiful and transformative experiences in life often arise when we least expect them.
