two we brought to bay boar and wolf under the
forest trees or along the river banks, until I was fairly glad when
it was all ended. There was hardly a chance for the quarry, and it
was good when one either leaped the nets or swam the stream and was
away. Maybe it is as well to have seen such a drive, but I do not
care to take part in another. Better the horn calling one in the
early morning, and the music of the hounds whose names one knows,
and the long drawing of the cover while they work together well and
keenly, and the breaking of the stag or boar from his holt, and so
the air on one's face, and the swing of the gallop over the open,
with friends to right and left, before or behind.

Maybe, then, one will end the day with the death of a valiant stag
in some bend of the trout stream, or with the last of a warrior
boar at the foot of an ancient oak; or maybe there will be naught
to show for the long day's questing. But always there will have
been the working of hounds and the paces of the good horse to dwell
on afterward, with, over all, the sight of bird and beast under the
sky with friends and freedom. Today I had not so much as breathed
my horse, and had nigh met my end in a sort of foolish chance which
came, as I had only reason to think, of the crush and hustle of men
at the end of the drive. There was, in truth, a sort of wild
excitement in the air at that time, and it brings heedlessness.

Presently they gathered the game to a wide clearing on the river
banks, and such an array of lordly deer and grim boars, row on row
of fallow buck, and heaps of gray wolves, I have never seen. Roe
and even hares were there also, hardly accounted for in the
numbering. Hunting would be fairly spoiled on the Lugg side for a
season or two, maybe; but many a farmstead would be the better off
for lack of the nightly harriers of field and fold.

But, most of all, men looked at the one mighty wild bull which
Ethelbert himself had slain. He was the only one which had been
seen, though it was said that another had escaped at the first, and
the kine of the herd had been suffered to go free. Snow white he
was, with black muzzle and ears and hoofs, and his short horns
shone like polished ebony above the curling mane of his forehead
and neck. He was a splendid beast, the like of whom my forefathers
had slain in fair hunt among the Mendips long ago, until none were
left for us today. The wild Welsh hills held them for Offa, as did
his