After Chloe Dalton rescued this orphaned hare, she found her life transformed by the most misunderstood of wild creatures

Picture the person you know who has the greatest affinity with animals: the one with a household full of pets who often rescues injured creatures. I am not that person. I never imagined my life would be upended by a wild creature. But that is what happened.

Until the pandemic I worked in London , as a foreign-policy adviser and speechwriter in Parliament and then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I loved my work, which took me to around 70 countries. Barely a week passed without me getting on a plane. I thought little about the natural world. Occasionally, I'd see the Foreign Office sniffer dogs or resident cat, Palmerston. I was too caught up in politics and world affairs to pay them any attention, and constant travel ruled out having a pet.

When the pandemic struck I moved to the countryside, near family, to a converted barn surrounded by fields and woods. I saw it as a temporary move and my work carried on. Feeling cut off from what gave my life velocity and excitement, all I could think about was returning to the city.

One grey morning in February 2021 I stumbled across a newborn hare – a leveret – in a field near my home. Chased out of its hiding place by a passing dog, it lay in the open, on a track used by vehicles. I worried that it would be killed by a car or predator but my instinct was to leave it there. Returning to the spot hours later and seeing that the little creature still hadn't moved, I decided to carry it home, wrapped up in a bundle of grass to avoid marking it with my scent.

I planned to return it to the field after nightfall, until a local conservationist told me that, even though I'd not directly touched the leveret, it wouldn't be accepted by its mother, if she were still alive. Hares usually die in human hands, he warned me. I'd taken a young animal from the wild to save it; now it might not survive. Feeling sickened with guilt, I made up my mind to do everything I could to prevent that from happening.

There was little information online about how to look after a baby hare. I consulted my sister. On her advice, I bought powdered kitten milk, mixing it in suitably tiny quantities for a leveret that weighed less than 100g. I wrapped it in a clean yellow dust cloth and found the tiny oval of its mouth on the underside of its head. To my relief, the leveret survived the night.

Within days it had found preferred spots in the house, such as a cushion on the windowsill, where it would lie and clean its paws, watching the landscape. I never caged the leveret. As soon as it grew big enough to climb the stairs, at roughly two weeks old, it chose to sleep on the carpet under my bed each day, or stretch out on the floor in my study. As it grew further, it became more active. It woke me in the mornings, drumming its paws on my duvet, leaping and spinning in the air before flying at breakneck speed back down the stairs and out into the garden. On hot days it basked in the sun outside. If I lay on the sofa to read a book, it would peer over my shoulder and nibble the edges of the pages. Sometimes it would press itself against my leg for an instant, but I seldom touched it, instead allowing it space.

Friends and family urged me to give the leveret a name, but it felt wrong to treat it as if it were a pet. It was a wild animal: one day it would return to the wild.

When it was four months old, the leveret learned to jump over the garden wall. In an instant it was gone. I thought the magical experience had come to an end. Instead, from then on, the hare arrived at my door every morning, waiting to be let in to rest in the house. Standing on its hind legs, it would shake the dew off its paws and flanks – spraying me and the walls with drops of rainwater in the process – then lie down in the house, chin resting on one long, elegant forepaw. When night fell, it would move outside and lie facing the sunset, its rump pressed against the slender trunk of a young plum tree in the garden. Then, with one supple bound, it would leap over the wall into the cornfields beyond. As the months that the hare lived with me turned to years, a carpenter fitted a small flap in my sitting-room door so it would always have access.

Despite spending so much time inside, the hare never once created a mess in the house. Its beautiful spray of cream whiskers, some well over ten centimetres in length, shaded to black at their tips, and every now and then I would find one on the carpet; other than that it left no trace. It was independent, finding sustenance in grass, twigs and hedgerows, supplemented by dry porridge oats it ate from a shallow bowl near the fireplace. It remained wild, bolting from the house the second an unfamiliar person entered.

I had no idea if it was male or female until, one day, it gave birth to three leverets in the garden. She hid them each in a separate place, where they would wait until nightfall. From a distance I watched the mother hare guard her leverets. A year later, she had two more behind the curtain in my office.

Hares have never been domesticated and, as far as I can tell, I didn't alter the nature of this one. But she changed me.

I learned to move quietly. I stopped mowing the garden as regularly. I planted trees and hedges to give shelter and food for hares and other creatures. I was calmed by the peace that the animal emanated. In the contrast between our lives, I found many reasons to reappraise my own. I realised I was profoundly burnt out. And so I based myself in the countryside, travelling to London only when necessary. And I was inspired to write my first book, Raising Hare.

In the process, I have come to think that hares are the most misunderstood creatures in our landscape. Culturally they are synonymous with both timidity and craziness: think the 'mad March hare', for instance. Legally they are unprotected – the only game species that can be shot at any time of the year in England, including the breeding season, orphaning many leverets.

In Parliament I walked each day past depictions of the lion and the unicorn, two heraldic emblems of the United Kingdom. If I were to add another, it would be the hare, a symbol of our countryside, of perseverance, dignity and strength: a creature worthy of greater protection.