Frost settling on a hare's fur makes a sound, and it is the first thing you learn to listen for in the forest above Geleira: a faint dry sprinkle, like fine salt falling on paper. It is a quiet, glittering sound, and the hares seem to enjoy it as much as you do. My notes begin on the third of December, at dusk, in the clearing beyond the last farm, where the first hare came out onto the snow. She was white, as big as a hound, with a pale blue-gray belly, enormous hind feet and every guard hair beaded with frost. Her eyes were bright pale gold and merry. She wore a small knitted scarf, red and green, and a sprig of holly tucked behind one ear.
By the twelfth the snow was deep and the clearing had been dressed. The villagers hang strings of lights and glass ornaments on the spruce at its edge each year, with red bows and golden stars, and a heap of ribboned parcels under the biggest tree. Foxes and owls had joined the hares, and the clearing at dusk looked like a party. The scarves are the work of Ulla Ferraz, who knits sixty-two of them every autumn in red and green, a trade that exists only because of the hares, since she has never sold one to a person. "The foxes always arrive second," she told me, "and they always pretend they didn't."
Twenty days of snow brought out the boldness. By the twentieth the hares were coming to doorsteps for apples and cabbage stalks, sitting in the lamplight with their ears up. I measured a hind print at eleven inches, a bound at nineteen feet by pacing it, and a hare's height on her haunches at twenty-six inches by holding a yardstick beside a very patient animal. She allowed it and then ate the yardstick's neighbor, a carrot.
On Christmas Eve, the lights in the clearing were lit at dusk by the schoolchildren, and the animals came out in the order they always do: hares, foxes, owls, one badger. The badger wore no scarf and appeared to disapprove of the whole business, but he came every year. A crowd of villagers stood at the fence with cocoa. No one spoke above a murmur. On the twenty-fifth, in daylight, I counted the scarves on the clearing's animals. There were sixty-one, one short of Ulla's sixty-two, and the missing one was on the biggest hare, who was wearing two.
- Classification
- Frost-coated woodland mammals
- Habitat
- Spruce forest, hedgerows, snowy fields
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- hound-sized, 2 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Northern spruce valleys
- Binomial
- Pruinolepus hiemalis
- Diet
- Bark, cabbage stalks, apples, juniper berries
- Temperament
- Bright, bold, friendly at doorsteps