The Morning Hare
Lepus matutinus
Natural history
Lepus matutinus retains nothing across sleep. It wakes each dawn in full possession of everything a hare can do - the zigzag run, the shape of a fox against a hedge, which clover is worth the open ground - and in possession of nothing a hare has done. Yesterday is not forgotten so much as returned, unopened. Researchers describe the condition as a clean separation of the skills from the episodes, and then, more quietly, as the only animal in the meadow that has never once woken up dreading the day.
It is also among the most frequently eaten, which the literature records in the same paragraph and declines to connect. The fox that nearly had it on Tuesday is, on Wednesday, a fox like any other. The hare is not reckless; it is simply undiscouraged, which to a fox looks identical.
The species compensates with the scrape: a small arrangement of scratched turf at the burrow mouth, made each evening by a hare that will not remember making it, read each morning by a hare who does not know who left it. The scrapes are not language. The nearest description is a mood set out for someone you trust and will never meet. Hares that keep scrapes live longer, hold territory longer, and are - in a word the papers keep trying to avoid and keep needing - the same hare for longer. A Morning Hare whose scrape has been trampled in the night is not confused, exactly. It is a hare, fully, from the ground up. It is only a hare with no particular reason to prefer this field.
A fable
A Morning Hare had a neighbour, an ordinary hare with an ordinary memory, who had taken on the job of mornings. Every day at first light the neighbour sat at the scrape and said the same things in the same order. Your name is this. You will not go near the north hedge; you have never said why. The fox comes from the east at dusk, lame in one foot, so wait for the second footfall. Yesterday you were kind to me. And the Morning Hare would listen, and nod, and go about its day, and be, by every measure the neighbour could apply, exactly who the neighbour had described.
This was the trouble. “I have been thinking,” said the neighbour one morning, instead of the list. “I tell you who you are, and then you are it. So which of us is doing it? Are you her, or are you a stranger who does a very good impression of her from my notes?”
The Morning Hare considered this with the untroubled attention of an animal that has never had to defend a past. “Was she kind to you?” it asked. “Yes.” “Would I be?” The neighbour looked at it for a long moment. “Yes,” she said. “Then that is what she was made of,” said the Morning Hare, “and I am made of it too, and I did not get it from the list. You keep the days. I keep the hare. I had thought that was the arrangement.”
The winter the neighbour grew old came on hard, and one morning it was she who sat at the burrow mouth not knowing what the field was for, nor the scrape, nor the hare beside her. And the Morning Hare, who had never remembered a morning in its life, sat down facing her and began. Your name is this. You will not go near the north hedge. The fox comes from the east, so wait for the second footfall. Yesterday you were kind to me.
“How do you know all that?” the neighbour asked. “You taught me,” said the Morning Hare. “I don’t remember you doing it. I know it anyway. That is the part they never put in the papers.”
You do not have to remember being yourself in order to go on being it; the days are for whoever keeps them.
The moral of it