224 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
the dogs. some greenish traces, mixed with bits of fresh 
mud, hung here and there to the logs on which the stag had leap- 
ed ; and by this simple index, seen from some distance, and quite 
insignificant to a less practiced eye, behold the most difficult fault 
suddenly redeemed. Once well convinced of so important a fact, 
the rest was soon guessed ; he understood that after following this 
long pile of wood from end to end, the deer had hid himself 
among those reeds on the other side the water, where some fresh- 
broken rushes betrayed his late passage ; and I had not got down 
from my tree to approach the theatre where the final act was about 
to take place, before all the dogs, called back by the voice of the 
two griffons, those keys of the pack, boldly swam toward the full 
head stag, who stiff from his fatal rest, tried in vain to get ashore 
and run for it, and w^as drowned without a fight, after having kept 
the pack at fault nearly an hour and two hours’ chase before. 
I know of no finer sight than a ten prong stag, in all the pleni- 
tude of his vigor, carrying after him, through the heath, ditches, 
and every obstacle, the furious hurricane of the pack, bellowing, 
bounding, panting, cheered with the echo of its own clamor, and 
sweeping you along in its mad course. Nothing so pretty, so ma- 
jestic, so elegant as the noble animal that rises with confidence, its 
chest in advance, its head gracefully inclined backward — who can 
stop him in his rapid flight, the beast with hamstrings of steel, that 
grazes the tops of the bushes like the flying swallow ? 
What can stop him ? His anxiety, alas ! that hurly-burly of 
instruments, the sight of all that crowd, and the echoes of the 
mountain, that bear to him every half hour the howls of new ene- 
mies ; for fresh relays of dogs have been disposed on his route 
from distance to distance, and his mind is troubled as the blood- 
thirsty voices of the pack double and approach him. Ah 1 if the 
idea would occur to him to borrow the wolf’s tactics, to run 
straight ahead — right straight, and still straight on across fields 
and rivers. . . . How soon he would leave behind him, unac- 
quainted with the country, dispersed and lost, the mass of the hos- 
tile squadrons. 
Thus did a stag of the forest of Chantilly, who drew a bee line 
for the forest of Ardennes at the first voice of the dogs, never 
