RAISING HARE: A Memoir, by Chloe Dalton

During the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, the internet was the lifeline to work, school, entertainment and social activity for many white-collar workers. Yet, when her router cable was severed, Chloe Dalton felt not panic, but “a rare moment of exasperation” with the toothy perpetrator — the brown hare with whom she’d been sharing her home in the English countryside. “I sighed,” she writes. “She had snipped through the TV cable as well.”

Dalton, a writer and political adviser with foreign policy expertise, might seem like the type to have had an absolute meltdown over the chomping of her electronic tether. But her priorities had shifted, as she recounts in “Raising Hare,” her meditative memoir about rescuing a seemingly abandoned leveret (a diminutive of lièvre, the French word for hare). Now, she worried that the animal might have injured her mouth gnawing through the sharp copper wiring.

It’s a telling anecdote about how much Dalton’s life had changed since a cold morning in early 2021, when she stepped outside the house to investigate a barking dog. There she discovered a newborn leveret on the ground, unguarded by the cover of a nest or its mother. At first she left it, not wanting to disturb nature’s way. But when she returned hours later to find the leveret still there, exposed to the harsh weather and potential predators, she nervously took it home, without much of a plan or any knowledge of hare care.

Despite less-than-encouraging words from a local conservationist about the leveret’s chances of survival, Dalton committed. For anyone who has hand-fed an unweaned animal in the hopes of saving its life, her anecdote about desperately eye-droppering lamb formula into the leveret’s mouth on their first night together will spark an instant flashback.

As she found out, the internet is full of information about rabbits (the hare’s smaller domesticated cousin), but there’s not much on hares themselves. She dug deep into the research, even consulting the 18th-century poetry of William Cowper for clues on which solids to feed the leveret, and reports, “Porridge oats were the final revelation. When I sprinkled a few oats in a bowl, it swallowed them with every appearance of satisfaction.”

Dalton did not name, tame or cage the animal, turning her house into a free-range hare bed-and-breakfast. Its behavior began to change her own: “I was moved by the leveret’s dignity, the sense of well-being and calm it spread, and the simplicity of its life.”

Adapting her own work-driven existence to the daily rhythms and environmental awareness introduced by her furry new housemate, she had an epiphany: “I’d been waiting for life to go back to normal, but if I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple, what else might be waiting to be discovered?” The irony of learning to slow down from an animal known for its speed is not lost here.

Plenty of hare lore and history are woven into the narrative, which Dalton delivers with meticulous descriptions and pragmatic sensibility. While the informational asides can sometimes feel like padding, the passages give historical context on the human-hare relationship and illustrate how horribly the animals have often been treated. (According to the U.K.-based Hare Preservation Trust, the brown hare population in Britain has declined 80 percent in the past century as hunting and agriculture have taken a toll.)

Animal encounter books are plentiful, and the good ones serve as pastoral retreats, especially as the natural world becomes increasingly drilled out, built up and paved over. We know the general contours of the transformative plot already, even without opening the recent stack of similarly themed memoirs — Catherine Raven’s “Fox & I,” Carl Safina’s “Alfie & Me,” Helen Macdonald’s “H Is for Hawk.” But Dalton’s vulnerable charge is way farther down the food chain, giving “Raising Hare” an extra layer of dramatic tension: Will the little thing make it to the end of the story?

To divulge much more of the book’s arc would rob the reader of its most revealing moments, especially as the hare matures and her priorities shift. But Dalton’s clear, measured prose and Denise Nestor’s delicate drawings provide a gentle cottagecore vibe and a bit of solace in a world that has now returned to an even more frenetic state. In “Raising Hare,” nature, indeed, takes its course.

RAISING HARE: A Memoir | By Chloe Dalton | Pantheon | 294 pp. | $27