The Hare in the Flooded Burrow

The water had been rising since before dawn, until by midmorning the field edge was no longer a field at all but a brown, creeping lake. We were walking the raised path with a local farmer, checking the low burrows and dens along the bank, when he stopped and pointed at a place where the grass bent around a dark opening. Something, he said, had been scratching there an hour ago. Nothing was scratching now.

I knelt on the wet path and leaned as close as I dared. The burrow mouth was half under water, a low earthen arch at the foot of the bank, and inside it, pressed into the last dry corner above the waterline, was a wild hare. She was soaked to the skin, her long ears flattened back and dark with mud, her grey-brown coat plastered flat so that she looked half the size a hare should be. Her eyes were half-closed. Only her nose still worked, quick and desperate, testing air that was running out.

A hare survives by running, and by hiding, and rising water takes both away at once. The rain had filled the ditches first, then the low field, then crept up the bank and found the one place she trusted. The burrow that had sheltered her through winter had become a cup that filled from below. She had retreated as the water rose, corner by corner, until there was one corner left, a shelf of packed earth no wider than my hand, and she was crouched on it with her back to the wall and her feet in the water.

She had clearly fought to get out the ordinary way. The entrance was scored with frantic marks where she had tried the main run again and again, only to find it already drowned, a tunnel full of brown water with no air in it. Hares are not swimmers, not for distance and cold and current. So she had gone back to her shelf and waited, trembling in long waves that shook water off her coat in small sprays, growing quieter each time we watched.

We worked from the top, because the front of that burrow was a trap we would only have made worse. My partner lay flat on the bank above and drove a spade into the wet earth, cutting a new opening down behind her corner, a rescue shaft sloped so that loose soil would fall away from her and not onto her. I stayed at the drowned entrance with one hand in the water, not reaching for her, just there in case she lunged for the old way out. I talked the whole time, low and steady, the boring voice that tells a wild animal nothing sudden is coming.

The digging was slow because wet earth is heavy and dishonest. Twice my partner stopped and cleared the shaft by hand, lifting the soil out in armfuls. She did not bolt. That was how far gone she was. She only pressed herself flatter into her corner, eyes closing further, and trusted the earth above her not to fall.

The complication came when the shaft finally broke through. A clod of soaked earth, bigger than we expected, gave way and dropped into the burrow beside her with a soft, terrible splash, and the water in that small space surged up over her shelf all at once. She lunged then, at last, straight toward the drowned entrance and my waiting hand, and I caught her against my forearm in the brown water and held her, not tight, just certain, while she kicked twice with what strength she had left and then went limp against me. My partner reached down through the new opening and took her weight from above, and between us we lifted her up through the shaft and out into the grey daylight, dripping, shaking, alive.

She lay on the dry sacks on the path completely flat, too weak to sit in the tucked shape hares take, her ears drooping, her breathing quick and shallow. We wrapped a dry towel loosely around her as a windbreak and let the easing rain stop finding her. Slowly her breathing deepened. One ear lifted a fraction and turned toward a sound down the path.

At the wildlife post the vet checked her over on a warmed pad. No broken bones, no wounds, only cold and exhaustion. They dried her by degrees, gave her warmth and quiet and a dark box lined with hay, and by evening she had eaten a few green leaves and thumped once, hard, at a noise outside the door.

We kept her two nights, until the water on the fields began, finally, to fall, and on the third morning we took her back to high ground above that same field edge. I opened the box and stepped away. She came out slowly, ears up now and turning, tested the air, and then she was gone in three long, effortless bounds into the wet grass, exactly as a hare should go.

We named her Hang — the Vietnamese word for burrow. It seemed honest: the rising water tried to keep her, and lost.

I think about that field edge sometimes, whenever rain runs long and the ditches brim and the low ground gives up its shape to brown water. A burrow is a promise an animal makes to itself, and water does not care about promises. And someone happened to be walking that raised path in time, and happened to stop at a dark opening where the scratching had already stopped, and to kneel down anyway.