Jackhare

Forth with the jackhare stalk the dews / And trick from nature the morning news.

He saw only a jackhare (he recognized it from the photographs he had seen of the “real” desert). […] In the moment of closeness with the jackhare, Roger came to believe that not only was his life a gift to himself and to others, but his share of light from the sun, and the shadow the sun created from his shape were also at once his property and his gift to others. […] No animals, not even the jackhare, which having made its alarming mistake of seeking the shade of a man, as if men were trees, had disappeared forever; […]

Nature writers are fond of pointing out the fallacy of calling a hare a jackrabbit, but they seldom get around to renaming it in their writings. They probably don’t have the nerve. Changing a generally accepted name is touchy business. Jackhare? That’s sure to bring a heated response, “I’ve never heard it called that in all my life!”

Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.

At the mercy of the heat, Roger and a jackhare share a shadow. […] Payment is made by the person who will “pay attention” (p 45) to the natural world, its jackhares and its people.

Anyway, I bounded down those stairs like a jackhare with the beagles after him.

You are a jackhare with the whole hunt pack of terriers at your heels: I feel sorry for you.

In the rising light he watched a lone and terrified jackhare flee its violated den in the Ruins of Bormula. […] Then hard on the jackhare’s dust and scarcely less swift, a bedlamite horde roared out from the purpled badlands, weapons and banners aloft, and baying like dogs in praise of their false god and his degenerate prophet.