★★★★★ | Nature | Digital + Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Chloe Dalton, burned out from a hectic career as a crisis-management policy expert, leaves London to work remotely near her family in the English countryside. She stumbles upon a helpless baby hare and rescues it from certain death. Thus begins a story of how this woman raised a wild hare.
Underlying the wonderful and often humorous stories of coexisting with this wild animal, we watch an adrenaline-addicted professional find balance and peace through a connection with nature. Thoreau had Walden Pond; Dillard had Tinker Creek. Dalton makes a meditative study of a Buddha-like hare within a few acres of wild English countryside. Buried within her observations of the hare and its environment are subtle lessons: let go of any illusions of control; find the joy and serenity in the present moment; and understand that your place is within the natural world, not outside of it.
And Dalton can write. She uses words as an artist wields a brush. Her descriptions are so vivid, so immersive, that I felt throughout the book that I was standing beside her, seeing what she was seeing, amazed as she was at the wildness just beyond her doorstep. The language is both sensory and poetic. Consider:
The stoat scanned the ground and then poured out of the gap in a single, sinuous movement, like honey over the lip of a glass, its paws gripping the stone as it flowed down the wall. I felt a chill, as if the sight had awoken some deep ancestral memory of other, larger predators deadly to man.
And:
Wagtails bobbed around the hares as they foraged in the grass. Larks filled the skies with rippling, rising song. A red-legged partridge marched along the ridge stone of the barn in the evening: a rotund, plucky figure, puffing out its chest, gradually working itself up to its song—a deafening cacophony of clicks, screeches and honks, like the grind of broken machinery.
And:
The grass in the centre of the field reached my waist in places, and I startled hares that ran and leapt, cresting the tops of the grass with a smooth flowing motion, dolphins of the meadow.
By the end of the book, you realize just how far both Dalton and the hare have come in their shared journey. She has found herself. Saved herself. And, in the process, she has shown us how to do the same. This is the kind of book that has the potential to change your life in a small but meaningful way.
On an early evening walk after finishing this book, I unplugged my audiobook and simply observed. The walk took me along the desert wasteland near the base of the White Tank mountains. What could live out here? I mused. As if in reply, I glimpsed movement near the base of an ancient Saguaro cactus about thirty yards away. I stopped and waited. And watched. A black-tailed jackrabbit, also called the American desert hare, emerged from its cover and gave me a sidewise look before dashing off. My face erupted in a huge smile before I started walking again. And looking.
Related reading: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, The Elephant Whisperer by Anthony Lawrence, The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl