WILD SPORT IN BRITTANY. 



the upper hand of men, and absolutely hunted them into the very 

 towns. The belief in the Loup-garou or demon-wolf is still a 

 prevailing superstition among the Breton peasantry ; and many a 

 tale is told over their wood embers of the human suffering and 

 bloodshed caused by that ferocious brute. Times, however, have 

 changed for the better in that respect. Man, instead of being 

 hunted himself, now hunts the wolf in that country with consider- 

 able success. His grand, old-fashioned, wire-haired hounds, 

 trained to the scent, rouse him from his lair ; and the hunter, 

 well-mounted and armed with a carbine or smooth-bore at his 

 saddle-bow, heads him at down-wind points of the chase, and 

 drops him with a ball. 



It is only during a long-continued season of snow that the 

 wolf, pinched by hunger, hardens his heart, and becomes at once 

 both a daring and destructive brute. At such a time it has been 

 found necessary to light fires nightly at all the road entrances into 

 Carhaix, Callac, Gourin, Rostrenan, and other small towns in that 

 vicinity, in order to save the cattle and even the dogs from the 

 rapacity of the hungry wolves. Two or three wolves will tear and 

 eat up the latter, no matter of what size, as rapidly as a pack of 

 foxhounds will dispatch a wild fox. 



It was a wet, stormy morning in November, an hour at least 

 before daybreak, when the Count de St. Prix rung out a blast on 

 his horn in the streets of Carhaix that made the window-frames of 

 the old town rattle in their sockets ; and scarcely had the echoes 

 of its last-prolonged note died on the ear, when a wild response 

 from other horns in the distance repeated the glad summons, and 

 invited all, who were disposed to come, away to the chase. St. 

 Prix, on whom the rulers of France had long conferred the 

 honourable office of Louvetier or wolf-hunter for Lower Brittany 

 in this case the right man in the right place had arrived at 

 the Hotel La Tour d' Auvergne on the previous night ; and, as I 

 had been introduced to him by my old friend the Baron de 



