jackhare

plural jackhares

1. rareSynonym of jackrabbit.

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

   1999, A[nthony] R[ichard] Dismorr, chapter 16, in The Misadventures of a Reluctant Counterspy, large print edition, Anstey, Leicestershire: Ulverscroft, published 2001, →ISBN, page 238

   5 more examples

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

   1911, Mary Leedy Flanigan, chapter I, in A Summer Idyl, New York, N.Y.: The Cosmopolitan Press, →OCLC, page 15

   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; […]

   1979 July, Janet Frame, “Part Four: Avoiding, Bound by the Present Historic”, in Living in the Maniototo, New York, N.Y.: George Braziller, published August 1979 (2nd printing), →ISBN, pages 177, 185, and 186

   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!”

   [1981, Chris Orr Unruh, “Old Timers in the West: Jackrabbits”, in Our Desert Backyard, Tucson, Ariz.: Kivona Corporation, →OCLC, part 1 (From Bats to Bears—Desert Mammals), page 20

   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.

   1985, Cormac McCarthy, chapter XIV, in Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, 25th anniversary edition, New York, N.Y.: Vintage International, published May 1992, →ISBN, page 194

   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.

   1992, Judith Dell Panny, “Living in the Maniototo”, in I Have What I Gave: The Fiction of Janet Frame, 1st U.S. edition, New York, N.Y.: George Braziller, published 1993, →ISBN, pages 152–153

   Synonyms: jackrabbit