Page:The Hare.djvu/158

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
130
COURSING THE HARE

certainly have been postponed. On this occasion some who had brought dogs went home again without running; but others would have a trial at any price, and so we took the field. Hares were wild, as they generally are in such weather, and I daresay some of the slips were much too long; but the fact remains that when we were stopped by a blinding snowstorm at two o'clock we had coursed twelve hares, all of whom had made good their escape.

During the following week we had a continuance of the changeable weather—snow one day, thaw the next, and then a frost before the snow had altogether disappeared. It was a miserable week for country folk, and things were little better on Saturday; but the coursers had mostly come from lower-lying districts, and again many of them were willing to take their chance of laming their dogs on the frozen places. At the end of the afternoon out came the squire's little pocket-book—in which he made a memorandum after every course—and in high delight he exclaimed, 'We've had eighteen slips, seventeen courses, one no go, and not a hare killed!' which, coming on the top of the previous Saturday's doings, made a total of twenty-seven courses without a kill.

Mention of Broomshields reminds me that it is never advisable to send greyhounds away to a