Dawn Leaper

In the old language they are always female, well feminine at least. This morning she crept from the sun burnished early nettles and picked her way across blue frost-spangled grass to graze away from Jack’s gaze. A throb of nervous energy, the hare leapt on an unseen impulse and shadow-boxed the ghost of night before flexing her legs in a dash to the distant hawthorn hedge.

Four marked the lie of the land at Brockholes nature reserve, taking in the liquid morning light, wearing it as a golden cloak, damp and dewy on earthy fur. Watching from the edges she emerged again, a firecracker of limbs and ear-twitch she rounded gracefully past the Jacks who sought to court her loveliness in the hoary meadows.

From ‘Common Ground‘ by Rob Cowen:

The hare, the hare-kin,
Old big-bum, Old Bouchart,
The hare-ling, the frisky one,
The way-beater, the white-spotted one,
The lurker in the ditches, the long eared,
The link away, the nibbler,
The scutter, the fellow in the dew
The animal in the bracken, the springer,
The swift-as-wind, the skulker
The shagger…