I stood on a high hill or ridge one autumn day and saw a hound run
a fox through the fields far beneath me. What odors that fox must
have shaken out of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily,
and how great their specific gravity not to have been blown away
like smoke by the breeze! The fox ran a long distance down the
hill, keeping within a few feet of a stone wall; then turned a
right angle and led off for the mountain, across a plowed field and
a succession of pasture lands. In about fifteen minutes the hound
came in full blast with her nose in the air, and never once did she
put it to the ground while in my sight. When she came to the stone
wall, she took the other side from that taken by the fox, and kept
about the same distance from it, being thus separated several yards
from his track, with the fence between her and it. At the point
where the fox turned sharply to the left, the hound overshot a few
yards, then wheeled, and, feeling the air a moment with her nose,
took up the scent again and was off on his trail as unerringly as
Fate. It seemed as if the fox must have sowed himself broadcast as
he went along, and that his scent was so rank and heavy that it
settled in the hollows and clung tenaciously to the bushes and
crevices in the fence. I thought I ought to have caught a remnant
of it as I passed that way some minutes later, but I did not. But
I suppose it was not that the light-footed fox so impressed himself
upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense of the hound was so
keen. To her sensitive nose these tracks steamed like hot cakes,
and they would not have cooled off so as to be undistinguishable
for several hours. For the time being, she had but one sense: her
whole soul was concentrated in her nose.
It is amusing, when the hunter starts out of a winter morning, to
see his hound probe the old tracks to determine how recent they
are. He sinks his nose down deep in the snow so as to exclude the
air from above, then draws a long full breath, giving sometimes an
audible snort. If there remains the least effluvium of the fox,
the hound will detect it. If it be very slight, it only sets his
tail wagging; if it be strong, it unloosens his tongue.
Such things remind one of the waste, the friction, that is going on
all about us, even when the wheels of life run the most smoothly.
A fox cannot trip along the top of 'a stone wall so lightly but
that he will leave enough of himself to betray his course to the
hound for hours afterward. When the boys play "hare and hounds,"
the hare scatters bits of paper to give a clew to the pursuers, but
he scatters himself much more freely if only our sight and scent
were sharp enough to detect the fragments. Even the fish leave a
trail in the water, and it is said the otter will pursue them by
it. The birds make a track in the air, only their enemies hunt by
sight rather than by scent. The fox baffles the hound most upon a
hard crust of frozen snow; the scent will not hold to the smooth,
bead-like granules.
Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest and most buoyant
creature that runs. His soft wrapping of fur conceals the muscular
play and effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues him,
and he comes bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind.
His massive tail is carried as if it floated upon the air by its
own lightness.
The hound is not remarkable for his fleetness, but how he will
hang!--often running late into the night, and sometimes till
morning, from ridge to ridge, from peak to peak; now on the
mountain, now crossing the valley, now playing about a large slope
of uplying pasture fields. At times the fox has a pretty well-
defined orbit, and the hunter knows where to intercept him. Again,
he leads off like a comet, quite beyond the system of hills and
ridges upon which he was started, and his return is entirely a
matter of conjecture; but if the day be not more than half spent,
the chances are that the fox will be back before night, though the
sportsman's patience seldom holds out that long.
The hound is a most interesting dog. How solemn and long-visaged
he is,--how peaceful and well-disposed! He is the Quaker among
dogs. All the viciousness and currishness seem to have been weeded
out of him; he seldom quarrels, or fights, or plays, like other
dogs. Two strange hounds, meeting for the first time, behave as
civilly toward each other as two men. I know a hound that has an
ancient, wrinkled, human, far-away look that reminds one of the
bust of Homer among the Elgin marbles. He looks like the mountains
toward which his heart yearns so much.
The hound is a great puzzle to the farm dog; the latter, attracted
by his baying, comes barking and snarling up through the fields,
bent on picking a quarrel; he intercepts the hound, snubs and
insults and annoys him in every way possible, but the hound heeds
him not: if the dog attacks him, he gets away as best he can, and
goes on with the trail; the cur bristles and barks and struts about
for a while, then goes back to the house, evidently thinking the
hound a lunatic, which he is for the time being,--a monomaniac, the
slave and victim of one idea. I saw the master of a hound one day
arrest him in full course, to give one of the hunters time to get
to a certain runway; the dog cried and struggled to free himself,
and would listen to neither threats nor caresses. Knowing he must
be hungry, I offered him my lunch, but he would not touch it. I
put it in his mouth, but he threw it contemptuously from him. We
coaxed and petted and reassured him, but he was under a spell; he
was bereft of all thought or desire but the one passion to pursue
that trail.