The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy

Author:Michael McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

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Part of the allure of the first brimstone, and of the first snow-drops (and of the winter solstice, for that matter), has been that their coming is annually awaited, and the response is accordingly intensified; but there have been one or two isolated or unexpected events, equally marking the year’s rebirth, which have also been exceptional experiences and have produced in me an elation I would readily call joy.

One was to witness mad March hares. For at least five hundred years, ‘mad as a March hare’ has been a commonly used simile in English, referring to the excited behaviour of the brown hare in the fields as the breeding season arrives, which – legend has it – is so energised as to seem unhinged. Lewis Carroll reinforced the notion by giving the March hare literary identity in Alice in Wonderland, and now it is a character and a concept everyone is familiar with without ever glimpsing the creature in real life. Or hardly ever. The March version of it, I mean.

I had seen many hares and had always been greatly taken with them (and glad of them in a country hardly over-endowed with characterful wild mammals). I think it’s partly because we have something to compare them to instantly in our minds, which is the rabbit; we encounter rabbits, and become familiar with them, as young children, long before we ever meet up with their hare cousins, and when we do, the differences are apparent at once: hares are much bigger, and we have to readjust the rabbit template squatting in our brains. Hares’ towering ears and expandable hind legs seem enormous by comparison, as do their bulging amber eyes, and the body is leaner and rangier than the rabbit’s: they’re all muscle. Built to run. They seem wilder, too, like adventurers compared to rabbits, which seem like stay-at-homes; yes, I read Watership Down just like you did, and briefly thought there might be drama in rabbit society, but ultimately, I know you shouldn’t really say this, but don’t you think that rabbits are just a teeny bit boring? When did any rabbit ever do anything interesting?

Nothing boring about your hare. Not only a dashing wild rover of an animal, but also a hint of the supernatural, with any number of magic legends clustering about the beast, not least that hares were actually witches in disguise – something I first came across when I began to read Walter de la Mare and his children’s poems, in my late teens:

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