THE OTTER AND HIS WAYS. 289 



With this object in view he appealed once more to his old 

 friend, who, from a journal he had carefully kept, noting not 

 only his own sport but that of several well-known packs, now 

 cordially gave him the result of his long experience embodied 

 in the following paper : 



That you are going to start a pack and hunt the wild otter 

 with your own hounds is a bit of news that interests me greatly, 

 and you are quite welcome to the benefit, as you are pleased 

 to term it, of any counsel I can give you on so engrossing a 

 subject. But pray bear in mind that this paper will simply be 

 a kind of didactic essay written to instruct rather than amuse 

 you ; and moreover, that you are by no means bound to adopt 

 your mentor's views when, as his judgment may often be in error, 

 to differ from it would be the wiser course. 



No man can hunt a wild animal with success if he is not 

 fairly acquainted with that animal's habits and mode of life ; 

 he must at least know where to look for him, how to find him, 

 and how to cope with him, when found, in the many artifices 

 he will adopt to elude pursuit. Now, the ways of an otter I 

 believe to be the least known and the most inscrutable of all 

 our wild animals ; so much so that its very existence is widely 

 doubted in districts where otter hounds are never seen ; and 

 yet every river in the land pays tribute in turn to this night- 

 wandering marauder. Many too, who ought to know better, 

 think the otter to be well nigh exterminated, and that its fate 

 will soon be that of the beaver and yellow-breasted marten, 

 now no longer seen amongst us. But there is no ground what- 

 ever for this belief ; otters, as I will presently show by testimony 

 of unquestionable authority, are still as plentiful on our waters 

 in the present day as they were fifty or sixty years ago. 



When I first took to keeping a pack of my own I hunted a 

 number of streams on which the note of an otter hound had 

 never been heard. They were a scratch lot, consisting of big 

 old-fashioned, blue-mottled harriers and a single foxhound, 

 called Midnight, by John Russell's famous Mercury out of his 



u 



