238 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
Of course dogs cannot be too fast in a country where the fog 
leaves but two clear hours out of the twenty-four in the hunting 
season. 
The English dog is conscious of his mission and his duty; he 
does not bark, because he has learned precisely how much ground 
this noise may cause him to lose. These dogs cannot be followed 
on foot, as I know by many experiences. 
By this digression upon England I seek to gain time, no lon- 
ger hearing the hunt. The air is calm, however, and it is scarcely 
five minutes since they were in sight. 
The echoes of the forest should bring us some noise, for we are 
hardly a mile from the field of battle. Do you hear down below 
there that fox bai’king in the forest toward the castle of Bear- 
field ? On my soul, it is the great voice of the furious pack. 
Hear the bugles ; the solitaire turns at bay so soon, it is a bad sign. 
The red-coats throng toward the presumed place of the com- 
bat. But the moment is not yet come. Patience I the beast has 
not considered his first position sufficiently impregnable ; after a 
moment’s hesitation, he concludes he can do better. He departs 
as rapid as the wind. 
The wild boar is not a quadruped that runs — it is a black ball 
that rolls like a bomb-shell. To the gorge, hunters and whippers- 
in — it is there that the great blows will fall. 
The Gorge, as its name indicates, is a frightful spot, which no 
paths pierce, but closed in by a formidable wall of holm and black 
thorn — a pleasant preamble to a briar-patch of over two hundred 
acres. I know no animals of our climates, except the wild boar 
and the beech marten, that can penetrate these places. Even the fox 
never thinks of seeking refuge in them except in his extreme peril. 
The chase was in the thick of it in less time than I have taken 
to define this name. The solitaire has already brushed ten pre- 
cincts ; the long wall, the felled woods of Bearfield and Sempig- 
ny, the white cuts, the grove of Parvillet and St. Eloi ; I could 
hardly distinguish the beast from the pack across the road amid 
the dust, that he raised like a hurricane in his track. He stops at 
last : a run like that is enough . . . My watch stands at thirty- 
five minutes past one. 
