Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and its Chase with Horse, Hound, and RifleRoosevelt, Theodore
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Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle
Roosevelt, Theodore
Hunting -- United States
The proper way to course, however, is to take the dogs out in a wagon
and drive them thus until the game is seen. This prevents their being
tired out. In my own hunting, most of the antelope aroused got away,
the dogs being jaded when the chase began. But really fine greyhounds,
accustomed to work together and to hunt this species of game, will
usually render a good account of a prong-buck if two or three are
slipped at once, fresh, and within a moderate distance.
Although most Westerners take more kindly to the rifle, now and then
one is found who is a devotee of the hound. Such a one was an old
Missourian, who may be called Mr. Cowley, whom I knew when he was living
on a ranch in North Dakota, west of the Missouri. Mr. Cowley was a
primitive person, of much nerve, which he showed not only in the hunting
field but in the startling political conventions of the place and
period. He was quite well off, but he was above the niceties of personal
vanity. His hunting garb was that in which he also paid his rare formal
calls--calls throughout which he always preserved the gravity of an
Indian, though having a disconcerting way of suddenly tip-toeing across
the room to some unfamiliar object, such as a peacock screen or a vase,
feeling it gently with one forefinger, and returning with noiseless gait
to his chair, unmoved, and making no comment. On the morning of a hunt
he would always appear on a stout horse, clad in a long linen duster, a
huge club in his hand, and his trousers working half-way up his legs.
He hunted everything on all possible occasions; and he never under any
circumstances shot an animal that the dogs could kill. Once when a skunk
got into his house, with the direful stupidity of its perverse kind, he
turned the hounds on it; a manifestation of sporting spirit which roused
the ire of even his long-suffering wife. As for his dogs, provided they
could run and fight, he cared no more for their looks than for his own;
he preferred the animal to be half greyhound, but the other half could
be fox-hound, colley, or setter, it mattered nothing to him. They were
a wicked, hardbiting crew for all that, and Mr. Cowley, in his flapping
linen duster, was a first-class hunter and a good rider. He went almost
mad with excitement in every chase. His pack usually hunted coyote, fox,
jack-rabbit, and deer; and I have had more than one good run with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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