“My dogs! my dogs!” cried the king in the midst of the crowd. “Let loose my dogs! The deer makes for the ponds. Let them hasten to tell the ladies, that they may be in at the death.”
He disappeared like a flash of lightning, of which we obtain but a glimpse ere it is gone. The shrill notes of the hunter’s horn resounded from afar, awaking countless echoes through the forest.
“Let us go,” exclaimed the two young men simultaneously. “We will then get rid of these accursed hounds.”
“To the ponds! To the ponds!” they cried. “The ladies, to the ponds! The ladies, to the ponds!” And they started on, laughing and shouting.
“What is that you are shouting down there?” cried a huntsman from a distance, whose horse had just made him roll in the dust.
“To the ponds! My lord, to the ponds!” they cried.
The retinue surrounding the Duke of Suffolk put whip to their horses and followed in a sweeping gallop. From every side of the hills surrounding these ponds there appeared, at the same moment, troops of eager hunters, panting and covered with dust. The different roads traversing the forest in every direction converged and met on the banks of the ponds that slept in the basin thus formed.
The ladies had already assembled, and nothing could have been more entertaining than the rapid and eager movements of the remainder of the hunters as they came galloping up. The king arrived before any of the others. He excelled in exercises of this kind, and took great delight in ending the chase in a brilliant manner by shooting the deer himself. On this occasion he had decided that, contrary to the usual custom, it should be taken alive; consequently, they hastened to spread in every direction the nets and fillets.
In this case the skill of the hunters consisted in driving the game into the snare.
Very soon the deer made his appearance, followed by a multitude of hounds, who pursued him so furiously, and crowded so closely one against the other, that, to use a familiar expression of the hunters, they could have been covered with a table-cloth.