European hare

The European hare is both a hunted animal and an independent presence in the fields Helen Macdonald traverses with Mabel. Its appearances are brief but consequential: it rises almost invisibly from dense crops, evades a goshawk with the help of its command of the ground, and finally runs away from an approaching human and hawk. These encounters make the hare more than a test of Mabel’s hunting skill. They reveal how animals move through a landscape shaped by cultivation and history, and how quickly an apparently empty field can become animated by life.

Appearance and concealment

In an oilseed rape field, the hare seems to materialize from a place where the observer had seen nothing. The crop is described as thickly packed bluish leaves, yet just a few inches of growth can conceal pheasants, partridges, hares, and other animals. When the hare leaps up from close to the observer’s feet, its sudden appearance gives the impression that the field has produced it from nowhere. The scene makes concealment a property not just of the animal but of the agricultural landscape: the field’s dense growth hides what is already there until movement makes it visible.

A second encounter gives the animal a more particular outline. In a chalk downland valley, a large brown hare crouches in its form about a hundred yards ahead, its black-tipped ears laid against its ginger back. It is visible against the pale, rain-darkened landscape, but remains still while the observer takes in the surrounding scene: a dry valley, a beech copse, and a herd of thirty fallow deer below. The hare’s appearance is one part of a larger field of attention, not an isolated portrait; Mabel has seen it before the observer does.

Flight and the contest with Mabel

The oilseed-field encounter shows the hare’s advantage in its own element. A strong north-easterly wind assists it as Mabel makes two attempts to seize it. Each time, the hare jinks across the wind and the goshawk misses. The passage contrasts the animal’s purchase on the earth with the hawk’s movement through air: the hare’s claws and padded feet can grip leaves and mud and push against the ground, while Mabel is pursuing it in flight. The failed attacks are not simply a measure of the hawk’s ability. They make the difference between the two animals’ ways of moving central to the encounter.

The outcome also matters to the observer, who is glad that Mabel does not catch the hare. That response leaves the pursuit unresolved as a hunt and keeps the hare’s escape in view. It has acted, repeatedly, rather than merely serving as quarry in a story about the hawk. The wind and the field contribute to the result, while the hare’s quick changes of direction frustrate Mabel’s attacks. The scene presents the hunt as an interaction among animal movement and local conditions, not as a simple exercise of control by either predator or human.

The chalk valley encounter

On the chalk downland, the observer cannot resist walking toward the hare and the deer, while holding Mabel. The approach sends individual deer moving along the valley and uphill toward the wood. The hare then runs in the opposite direction, toward the field margin at the top of the hill. The animals’ departures divide the view: deer one way, hare the other. Once both have vanished, the observer faces only wind, chalk, and wheat. The hare’s flight is thus part of a collective alteration of the landscape: its movement, alongside the deer’s, turns a populated scene into one that appears empty.

Mabel watches the deer and ignores the hare during this episode. The contrast helps distinguish the animals’ roles from a simple predator-and-prey arrangement. The hare is present in the same field as a hunting goshawk, but the passage does not make it the object of every action. It runs when the approaching human presses closer; Mabel’s attention remains with the deer. The hare’s escape is its own response within a scene involving several animals and a human, rather than an inevitable conclusion to the hawk’s pursuit.

A landscape made by human history

The book places the hare among animals whose presence in the countryside bears traces of human movement and use. It says that hares are thought to have been introduced by the Romans; fallow deer are identified as introductions, too, and the passage also names pheasants brought from Asia Minor, partridges originally from France, North American squirrels, and rabbits introduced in the Middle Ages. These histories complicate any picture of the chalk landscape as a timeless, untouched nature. The animals occupy the ground, but their presence is entangled with trade, invasion, farming, hunting, and settlement.

That historical frame does not reduce the hare to evidence of human influence. In the fields, it remains an animal that can be difficult to see, that moves on its own terms, and that escapes Mabel. The shift between an account of introductions and the concrete sight of the hare running away holds these dimensions together: the countryside is historically made, but its animals are not merely symbols or products of that history. The hare’s brief appearances give the landscape both a human past and an immediate, living unpredictability.