It was a neighbour’s dog that brought the hare into our lives. We used to take the bouncy labrador for walks around our village in Cambridgeshire. On one such occasion, the dog darted forward, picked up something small and returned with it held softly in her jaws. It was a leveret, now covered with the scent of canine saliva. We were told that this would scare off the mother when she was doing the rounds of offspring she had left at various spots in the fields. No longer the hare of the dog, the leveret became our responsibility.
We called her Flossy, after a great-aunt. We fed her on greenery, brushed her fur, held her on our knees and tickled between her ears. She licked our hands. We were known as “the family with the hare”. She was pretty nervous, but if we waved our fingers under her nose, she would happily attack them with her front paws, like a boxer.
She was a wild creature pining after the great outdoors, to judge by the way she jumped on to windowsills and pressed her nose against the panes. One dark afternoon, she made my father’s university students jump, too, when she emerged suddenly from behind the curtain in his study as they discussed supernatural animals in poetry.
One night, she slipped, caught her front paw in the window catch and hung there by the fractured limb until my horrified mother discovered her and rushed to the vet, where a supportive plaster was applied. The way my mother told the story, on the bus home, Flossy’s poor paw still fell off. My mother stuck it back on as best she could and reapplied the plaster. The paw reattached successfully – but at an angle. She could still lope around, but it would have been cruel to release this disabled creature into the wild.
During the day, we left her in her cage in the garden. This was what killed her. Startled by a sudden noise, she gave a great leap – hares can do 45mph from a standing start – and broke her neck on the wooden structure. “Hares … know that humans mean bad news,” wrote Marianne Taylor in The Way of the Hare. We buried Flossy in the garden.
Decades later, my partner and I were in another field, walking another dog, when it raced away and, to our horror, caught a fully grown hare. We rapidly hauled the Tibetan terrier off the unfortunate animal, which was stretched out, immobile. It must have been playing dead, though; when we passed the spot an hour later – dog firmly on the lead – there was not even the ghost of a sign of anything grey and long-eared.
