jackhare

Alteration of jackrabbit with hare.

jackhare (plural jackhares)

1. (rare) Synonym of jackrabbit.
   • 1911, Mary Leedy Flanigan, chapter I, in A Summer Idyl, New York, N.Y.: The Cosmopolitan Press, →OCLC, page 15:

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

   • 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:

     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; […]

   • [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:

     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!”]

   • 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:

     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.

   • 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:

     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.

   • 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:

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

   • 2000 August, Sean McMullen, “11 May 3960: Condelor”, in The Miocene Arrow (Greatwinter; 2), New York, N.Y.: Tor, →ISBN, part 1 (Coronation), page 65:

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

   • 2006, Tim Willocks, “Sunday, July 15, 1565”, in The Religion (Tannhauser; 1), London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, part III (The Winnowing Winds), page 352:

     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.