When Julian could repeat all those things by heart, his father made up a pack of hounds for him.
First were to be seen four and twenty Barbary greyhounds, faster than gazelles, but apt to get out of hand; then seventeen couples of Breton dogs, spotted with white on a red ground, unfaltering in their obedience to command, strong-chested and deep-throated. For the attack of the wild boar and perilous lairs, there were forty griffons, hairy as bears. Mastiffs from Tartary, almost as tall as asses, flame-coloured, broad-backed and straight-legged, were meant to pursue the aurochs. The black coat of the spaniels gleamed like satin; the yelping of the talbots rivalled the music of the beagles. In a separate yard, rattling their chains and rolling their eyes, growled eight Alan bulldogs, formidable brutes, which would spring at a horseman’s belly and were not afraid of lions.
They all were fed on wheaten bread, drank from stone troughs, and bore sonorous names.
The falconry, perhaps, even excelled the kennel. The good lord, by dint of money, had procured tercels from the Caucasus, sakers from Babylon, gerfalcons from Germany, and peregrine falcons captured on the cliffs by the shores of frozen seas in distant lands. They were lodged in a shed covered with thatch, and, fastened in order of their size on the perch, had a sod of turf before them, on which they were set from time to time to keep them limber.
Purse-nets, hooks, spring-traps, all sorts of gins, were constructed.
Often they took out to the fields spaniels, which very soon stood. Then the huntsmen, advancing step by step, cautiously spread an immense net over their motionless bodies. A word made them bark; quails started up; and the ladies of the neighbourhood, who had been invited with their husbands, the children and the waiting-women, all threw themselves upon them and caught them easily.
At other times, a drum was beaten to start the hares; foxes fell into trenches, or else a spring opened and caught a wolf by the foot.
But Julian despised those easy artifices; he preferred to hunt far away from other people, with his horse and his hawk. It was almost always a great tartaret from Scythia, white as snow. Its leather hood was surmounted by a plume, golden bells trembled on its blue feet; and it sat fast on its master’s wrist while his horse galloped and the plains unrolled beneath them. Julian, unfastening its leashes, loosed it all at once; the brave bird mounted straight into the air like an arrow; and two unequal specks could be seen twisting, meeting, then disappearing in the heights of the azure. The falcon was not long in descending, tearing some bird in pieces, and came to resume its place on its master’s gauntlet, its two wings trembling.
In this fashion Julian flew the heron, the kite, the crow, and the vulture.
He loved, sounding his horn, to follow his dogs as they ran along the hill-sides, leapt the brooks, climbed up to the woods; and when the stag began to sigh under their bites he struck it down swiftly, then took pleasure in the fury of the mastiffs as they devoured it, cut in pieces upon its reeking hide.