90 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
not so ; he was only winged in his right arm, and seizing in his 
left his terrible yataghan, he dealt his aggressor a huge wound in 
the side. Poor Bichebou ! I think I still see you stretched upon 
the red arena, extending to me in sign of last adieu, and without 
moving your head, your bloody paw, and with look and tail sa- 
luting me with a last caress ; then trying to rise once more at the 
well-known sound of my piece, and falling back exhausted with 
the effort. They say over there that I have avenged his death — 
it is not impossible, I looked to that. 
The chase with running dogs began one day when man was 
very much at a loss what to do with himself. It is a long time 
ago. It was some ages after the Edenic period, on the banks of 
the Indus or Ganges, the Tigris or the Euphrates, in full patri- 
archal. Man had gathered in his harvests ; he was no longer in 
love, and knew not what to turn his hand to. Then he took his 
dog aside — his dog of the herd — and said to him : It seems to me 
that we have been very good hitherto to suffer the hyenas, the 
wolves, and the jackals to come to carry off our sheep and our 
fowls from amid our dwellings. Might we not in turn push a lit- 
tle reconnoissance among these incorrigible enemies, and retaliate 
on them? The dog, who had laid his head upon his master’s 
knees, to read in his eyes and feel his words, made one bound 
from his place to the door of the tent — an eloquent manner of 
answering that this warlike proposition fulfilled his dearest wishes. 
And then he confided to his master, that hardly a day passed, 
but in conducting his sheep to pasture, or in reconnoitering near 
them, he meets some defenseless leveret, some timid pig, some in- 
nocent game or other, which he amused himself in hunting for 
diversion, and also to vary his nourishment a little. 
Up to that time he had said nothing to his master, but he did 
not less ardently sigh for the hour when it should be permitted him 
to lay aside his pastoral functions to give himself up to the full 
spring of his dominant passion. A treaty was immediately con- 
cluded between the man and the beast, whose conditions were 
that the dog should undertake the hardest aud thorniest part of 
the task, on account of whicli should be conceded to him as the 
price of his assistance, the entrails of the victims. Dating from 
