Away they all sweep like the careering wind. On follow the field in glorious excitement. A flock of black-faced sheep next foil the ground—sheep as wild, if not wilder, than the animal the hounds are pursuing. We often think, when we see these strong-scented animals scouring the country, that a good beast of chase has been overlooked for the stag. Why shouldn’t an old wiry black-faced tup, with his wild sparkling eyes and spiral horns, afford as good a run as a home-fed deer? Start the tup in his own rough region, and we will be bound to say he will give the hounds and their followers a scramble. The Major now denounces the flying flock—“Oh, those nasty muttons!” exclaims he, “bags of bone rather, for they won’t be meat these five years. Wonder how any sane people can cultivate such animals.”
The hounds hunt well through the difficulty, or the Major would have been more savage still. On they go, yapping and towling, and howling as before, the Major’s confidence in a kill increasing at every stride.
The terror-striking shouts that greeted poor puss’s exit from the bush, have had the effect as well of driving her out of her country as of pressing her beyond her strength; and she has no sooner succeeded in placing what she hopes is a comfortable distance between herself and her pursuers, than she again has recourse to those tricks with which nature has so plentifully endowed her. Sinking the hill she makes for the little enclosed allotments below, and electing a bare fallow—bare, except in the matter of whicken grass—she steals quietly in, and commences her performances on the least verdant part of it.
First she described a small circle, then she sprung into the middle of it and squatted. Next she jumped up and bounded out in a different direction to the one by which she had entered. She then ran about twenty yards up a furrow, retracing her steps backwards, and giving a roll near where she started from. Then she took three bounding springs to the left, which landed her on the hard headland, and creeping along the side of the wall she finally popped through the water-hole, and squeezed into an incredibly small space between the kerbstone and the gate-post. There she lay with her head to the air, panting and heaving, and listening for her dread pursuers coming. O what agony was hers!
Presently the gallant band came howling and towling over the hill, in all the gay delirium of a hunt without leaps—the Major with difficulty restraining their ardour as he pointed out the brilliance of the performance to Billy—“Most splendid running! most capital hunting! most superb pack!” with a sly “pish” and “shaw” at foxhounds in general, and Sir Mosey’s in particular. The Major hadn’t got over the Bo-peep business, and never would.
The pack now reached the scene of Puss’s frolics, and the music very soon descended from a towering tenour to an insignificant whimper, which at length died out altogether. Soloman and Bulldog were again fixtures, Solomon as usual with his hand up beckoning silence. He knew how weak the scent must be, and how important it was to keep quiet at such a critical period; and let the hounds hit her off if they could.
Puss had certainly given them a Gordian knot to unravel, and not all the hallooing and encouragement in the world could drive them much beyond the magic circle she had described. Whenever the hunt seemed likely to be re-established, it invariably resulted in a return to the place from whence they started. They couldn’t get forward with it at all, and poked about, and tested the same ground over and over again.
It was a regular period or full stop.
“Very rum,” observed Caleb Rennison, looking first at his three-year-old, then at his watch, thinking that it was about pudding-time.
“She’s surely a witch,” said Mr. Wotherspoon, taking a prolonged pinch of snuff.