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A Memoir
by Chloe Dalton
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Part 1
CHAPTER ONE
A WINTER LEVERET
'Siberians name hares by the time of their birth: nastovik (born in March, when snow is covered with crust), letnik (born in summer), listopadnik (born in the fall, when leaves fall from trees)'
–A.A Cherkassov Notes of an East Siberian Hunter, 1865
Standing by the back door, I heard a dog barking, followed by the sound of a man shouting. I jammed my feet into my boots and walked across the gravel to the wooden gate to look for the cause of the disturbance. There was no reason for a dog to be nearby. The barn where I lived stood alone in a broad expanse of arable farmland, quartered with streams and hedgerows and interspersed with stands of silent woodland. I had grown up with stories of poachers cutting through locks and forcing open gates to drive onto the farmers' fields and into the woods, hunting deer and rabbits or setting their dogs to chase hares. More benignly, dogs had been known to bolt from their owners walking down the lane, in pursuit of a rabbit or simply drawn by the open spaces, scattering sheep and disturbing nesting birds in the process. A zealous dog, panting from the chase, had jumped over the wall into my garden once the previous year, lunging at nothing and sawing the air with its tail in a playful manner before bounding up and off and away. But such incidents were rare, and I was curious to know what was happening.
I leant on the gate and scanned the field which rose in a gentle incline towards the horizon and then dropped out of sight. The sky was gun–metal grey. I ran my gaze along the hedgerows, over the expanses of bare stubble and lingering patches of slowly dissolving snow, and towards the dark silhouette of the wood closest to the barn. Whatever dog had been on the loose was no longer visible. The wind cut at my cheeks with an icy edge. The white fog of my breath was whipped away. I fumbled in my pocket for my gloves, pulled my coat closer around me and set off for a walk.
The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard packed earth separated by a band of grass, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I had crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and begun to walk down the slight slope towards the 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 baby 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 and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the winter earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. 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 forepaws were pressed tightly together in front of its body, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapped as if for comfort. Its jet–black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct mark which stood out like a minute dribble of white paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.
The gaping mouths of rabbit burrows beneath trees and banks, and white bobbing tails in flight, were a familiar sight from my childhood. But hares were rare and secretive, glimpsed only at a distance, 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, and had ended up lost on the track.
Excerpted from Raising Hare by Trent Dalton. Copyright © 2025 by Trent Dalton. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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