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My favorite chapter of this beautifully and sensitively written book is number three: “One Month Old: Little Hare�� in which Chloe Dalton describes the difficulties she had finding any information on raising a hare. She searched especially for information on feeding and finally came upon poems William Cowper had written 250 years ago about raising a hare the neighbor’s children had gifted to him while recovering from a bad breakup! She began to experiment with the items included in the poems and found that her hare had particular tastes.

I loved the descriptions of how the hare would eat a raspberry or dandelion stalk, and my favorite of all was the description of the sounds the hare made after eating. The hare “would often produce a strange musical call as it ran away from me after feeding. Louder than a puff, sharper than a sigh, softer than a grunt and more musical than a snort […] like the faintest note the gentlest breath on a harmonica.��

As the hare grew and changed through adolescence and entered adulthood Dalton writes, “Its coat was a many-hued wonder: a tapestry of tawny red, ginger, coffee and caramel tones �� all shifting in the light.

I noted and appreciated that Dalton never names the hare as she determines not to tame, domesticate or anthropomorphize it in anyway. Rather, she accommodates and adapts her care to support it as a wild creature that should remain wild.

She loved accommodating the hare and “having a reason to change [her] habits.�� Dalton goes on to describe how the hare influenced her, “as its gaze travelled further, so did mine, drawing my mind, and increasingly my feet, outdoors.��

The hare changed Dalton’s life in other ways also. She writes, “I had rediscovered the pleasure of attachment to a place and the contentment that can be derived from exploring it fully, rather than constantly seeking ways to leave it and believing that satisfaction can only lie in novel experiences.��

I appreciated her observations of the differences on the nature of the deep bond humans create with animals versus with fellow humans. Dalton explains, “I had come to appreciate that affection for an animal is of a different kind entirely: untinged by the regret, complexities and compromises of human relationships. It has an innocence and purity all of its own.��

Then, she goes on to explain that “In the absence of verbal communication, we extend ourselves to comprehend and meet their needs and, in return, derive companionship and interest from their presence, while also steeling ourselves for inevitable pain, since their lives are for the most part shorter than ours.��

I have truly loved reading this book in the quiet of each morning as an antidote after first catching up on the world news. I loved how the hare never becomes tame but coexists with Dalton and comes and goes at will.

Finally, Dalton ends with sharing her awe as she writes of cherishing “the days she has given me of her own free will, when she lowered her species�� instinctive guard against humans, and shared the beauty and mystery of her presence in silent and graceful companionship. I will remember her leaving, but will know that before she did, she always, first, look backed.��