WILD SPORT IN BRITTANY. n 



describes them,* they must have quivered to their heart's core. 

 Then the fanfare of horns might have been heard in High 

 Olympus, and must have struck mortal terror into every wolf 

 within a league's distance. A pair of ravens made themselves 

 scarce at once ; while the green wood-peckers, the magpies, and 

 the jays positively screeched with fear. It was the din of war 

 a sylvan war, to be sure, but a bloody one for the wolves, as the 

 sequel will soon show. 



For one hour the hounds ran as if glued to their game ; and 

 ever and anon a roebuck, on the wings of terror, bounded into 

 the open, less dreading the face of man than the storm in its rear ; 

 but as yet not a wolf had appeared beyond the cover's edge. 

 Talk of a fox's craftiness, I believe a wolf to be infinitely more 

 wary, more wily, and more ingenious than the other in the 

 presence of danger. Here were sixteen couple of high-couraged 

 hounds tearing the earth up in pursuit of a wolf, and failing to 

 force him beyond the precincts of his cover, the first line of his 

 defence. 



At length away breaks the old one she could stand it no 

 longer and happily at a point where Keryfan was posted ; so he 

 dropped his rifle, took off his hunting cap, and gave the old jade 

 a rattling view holloa as she lopped speedily forward into the 

 open plain. St. Prix, had he the power, would have knighted 

 him on the spot. Then the hounds were turned, and, almost in 

 their first swing, they hit on the line of another wolf that had 

 evidently accompanied its dam to the very edge of the cover, but 

 dared not break away. Again, they were hard at him ; and soon 

 it became my turn to catch a view of the gaunt beast. I had 

 ridden about a hundred yards into the cover, and, posting myself 

 in an open space under a huge beech-tree, I listened with breath- 

 less delight to the cry, which I knew, from the hounds' tongues 

 being turned towards me, was getting nearer and nearer every 



* " Auritas quercus ;" elegantly translated by Conington as "the listening oaks." 



