“There’s something extraordinary about hares that worked on my sense of myself and of the world in a very unexpected way.”

With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, political advisor and foreign policy expert Chloe Dalton left London and returned to the rural northern location of her childhood summers, where she had recently converted a rundown stone barn into a home. One day while out walking she found a newborn baby hare – a leveret. It was no bigger than her palm, abandoned and alone. Though knowing next to nothing about hares, she felt compelled to give it a chance at survival.

The story of how she succeeded in nurturing this tiny creature to maturity is the subject of Dalton’s spellbinding debut, “Raising Hare”. For wild though the animal remained, an improbable but wondrous bond of trust was forged between hare and human, through patience and stillness, porridge oats and the occasional raspberry. The writing in this incredibly special book has a pure and simple clarity that chimes perfectly with the sanctity of Dalton’s hare encounters and her book – which has exquisite integrated pencil drawings and endpapers by Denise Nestor – has the hallmarks of a future nature writing classic.

When we meet in a London café, Dalton tells me how unlikely a person she was to settle down and raise a hare. Whilst she loved reading nature writers like Jack London as a child, her chosen career took her to London, and involved frequent global travel. So much so that she was barely conscious of the seasons. “My father was a diplomat and I grew up largely in the Middle East. So from an early age my world view was shaped by the people and the issues around me: conflict, human rights and especially the rights of women. I developed a huge interest in foreign policy, but I didn’t want to follow my father into the diplomatic service. So I applied to work in parliament as a researcher.” Dalton later worked for William Hague during his time as Foreign Secretary and helped design what became the foreign policy of the coalition government of 2010-2015. She has also worked closely with actor Angelina Jolie on human rights and foreign policy in Jolie’s capacity as a United Nations Special Envoy. Dalton pays tribute to both Hague and Jolie in the acknowledgements to her book, crediting the latter with “seeing a writer in me at first sight”.

Then came the 2020 lockdown, which confined Dalton’s work to the study room of her north country house. A house which, she was soon to discover, lies in countryside that abounds in brown hares which range far and wide across the surrounding arable land. And then came the abandoned leveret and the privilege of meeting the gaze of a growing hare; and of observing at close quarters the shades of its fur, its habits, its serenity and immaculateness, its energy and power but also its vulnerability. In time, the hare – a female –returned to roam the countryside and I won’t reveal what happens thereafter, for fear of spoiling the magic of this story. Except to say that remarkably, the hare continued to frequent Dalton’s house and garden, resting there during daylight hours. “In the morning she would leap over the garden wall, slip into the house, and stretch herself out to the fullest extent, either across my study door while I was working, or on the bench in the sitting room,” Dalton tells me. “And go to sleep and be there, without moving sometimes for 12 hours.”

Though inspired to jot down her impressions and discoveries in notebooks, Dalton initially had no thought of turning her hare encounters into a book. “It wasn’t until much later that I began to think about how unusual my experience was.” A work meeting with her now agent Caroline Michel proved the catalyst. “If it wasn’t for Caroline I wouldn’t have written the book. I had a full-time job and was preoccupied by pressing issues including the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But then I did something that I would normally consider completely unprofessional. I finished a meeting with Caroline on behalf of someone else and then as I was heading out of the door I said: ‘one day I must tell you about a book I’d like to write’. And she said – ‘sit down and tell me about it now’. And based on her encouragement I went off and researched how to write a book proposal and then sort of got on with it.”

The contrast between the times Dalton still spends in hare country and her high-flying career could not be greater. She isn’t about to give up the demanding work on which she clearly thrives. But she has been forever changed by her hare-raising experience, undergoing an epiphany about what it means to be still and attentive, “seeing beauty and value in the ordinary” as she puts it. “We are now so alienated from nature that we have forgotten that we are animals ourselves. We all benefit from access to nature – and I know how fortunate I am in that regard. The hare has enriched my understanding of what gives us peace.” With much of her human rights focus on issues around freedom, Dalton’s experiences have, she says, caused her to think a great deal about the importance of freedom for all living things.

Both in the book and in conversation, Dalton carefully conceals the location of her hare-frequented home. Horribly this is partly because hare coursing – a banned blood sport in which dogs such as lurchers or greyhounds compete against each other in pursuit of a hare – still thrives in secret. And despite the fact that this bewitching animal is deeply embedded in our culture and folklore, Britain has lost over 80% of its hare population over the past century, through hunting, mechanised farming and the destruction of hare habitats.

From Kit Williams’ “Masquerade” to Sam McBratney & Anita Jeram’s “Guess How Much I Love You”, imagined hares are a recurring presence in books. And yet the lives of real hares are still mysterious to most of us. What’s unique about “Raising Hare” is how close it brings us to the reality of these marvellous creatures. Says Dalton, “I was so fortunate that I happened to set up home on a hares’ pathway. It was a gift.”

Interview by Caroline Sanderson. This piece first appeared in The Bookseller magazine.