The Winter Hare

It’s 4 am and I am still awake. I went to bed early, at 12.30, but lay there reading, not tired enough to fall asleep. And now it has become 4am. I give up any attempt at sleeping and get out of bed, looking towards the window. Beyond the mostly open blinds covering the window frame, the world is filled with multiple dark shades of blue light. It’s still night and still winter dark but instead of just darkness this bluish glow lights up the view from my bedroom window. I go to it and pull up the blinds. Off to the right is the lonely streetlight shining on the path behind my building. In the glow of the lantern I can see snow falling gently within the circle of light. At such times it always brings to mind the street light in winter Narnia that the children come to after leaving their closet. It looks magical.

The path, the trees, the bushes and everything else within view is covered in a layer of sticky snow. Not deep but deep enough to cover the grass tips. There is no wind so each flake stays where it lands. Here in winter Stockholm, when snow covers the world, the darkness recedes – even without a moon, just the white snow-filled clouds covering the sky and the fallen snow covering the landscape – and turns into monochrome blue with everything visible to the eye as though it was day.

I notice a misshapen dark blob on the surface of the new, untouched white snow just to the left of the lamppost. I wonder what it is. Has someone dropped some sort of bundle along the path? If so it should be already covered in snow but it isn’t. And then it moves. I can’t see it clearly since it is still a distance away. Was it a bunch of sodden leaves blown by a sudden wind? But the snow still flurries down undisturbed by any wind. It moves again. And again. And I realize it is alive. I look more carefully and see long narrow forms sticking up, detached in a way from the main body of the shape. It hops. And hops again and I realize it is one of the large hares that live here on this island. You see them mostly in summer nibbling on the grass of the high meadow in the middle of the island. Do hares hibernate? Not this one I guess. He hops a few more times and he is on the path. Between hops he stops as if to check the air for danger, a small huddle, totally still, as if to blend into the background. But his dark fur stands out strongly against the white snow. I follow his movement along the path, sometimes moving so quickly that the individual hops blend into just one forward motion. He starts to move out of view of my bedroom window and I go to the other side of my apartment to follow his journey. He has moved on to the next street lamp and stops near that post. He is closer now and I can see his long ears twitch, still listening for danger. It’s in the middle of the night. No one is out walking their dogs or carrying a grocery bag back from the store. The snow on the path lies undisturbed and shadowless, except for the hunched shape of the hare and his footprints.

I guess he senses no danger nearby and continues on his bumping journey across the small open meadow below my window (can it still be called a meadow if it is only about 12 square meters is size?) In any case he scurries quickly across it to the row of leafless bushes running along the building across from mine. Each branch of the bushes is outlined with white from the snow. They are tightly grown and even in their leafless state I can’t see to the bottom of them. My hare, because I have now claimed him as my own, disappears under the bushes leaving a small path of prints in the snow. Will he stay there? I keep watching. After a minute or so he cautiously moves out from the protection of the bush and heads back to the path where he stops again. I imagine his nose twitching, searching for dangerous scents. Finding nothing he heads along the path like any other inhabitant would. I wait and watch to see if he turns to head up the hill on the right but no – he continues on the path and is soon out of sight of all my windows. I let the curtain fall, covering the window and hiding the snow-filled world and head back to bed, to finally sleep.