Part 15 (1/2)

”DONE”

For a minute he ran and heard no sound, Then a whimper came from a questing hound, Then a ”This way, beauties,” and then ”Leu Leu,”

The floating laugh of the horn that blew.

Then the cry again and the crash and rattle Of the shrubs burst back as they ran to battle.

Till the wood behind seemed risen from root, Crying and cras.h.i.+ng to give pursuit, Till the trees seemed hounds and the air seemed cry, And the earth so far that he needs but die, Die where he reeled in the woodland dim With a hound's white grips in the spine of him; For one more burst he could spurt, and then Wait for the teeth, and the wrench, and men.

He made his spurt for the Mourne End rocks, The air blew rank with the taint of fox; The yews gave way to a greener s.p.a.ce Of great stones strewn in a gra.s.sy place.

And there was his earth at the great grey shoulder, Sunk in the ground, of a granite boulder A dry deep burrow with rocky roof, Proof against crowbars, terrier-proof, Life to the dying, rest for bones.

The earth was stopped; it was filled with stones.

Then, for a moment, his courage failed, His eyes looked up as his body quailed, Then the coming of death, which all things dread, Made him run for the wood ahead.

[Ill.u.s.tration: There were foxes there]

The taint of fox was rank on the air, He knew, as he ran, there were foxes there.

His strength was broken, his heart was bursting, His bones were rotten, his throat was thirsting, His feet were reeling, his brush was thick From dragging the mud, and his brain was sick.

He thought as he ran of his old delight In the wood in the moon in an April night, His happy hunting, his winter loving, The smells of things in the midnight roving; The look of his dainty-nosing, red Clean-felled dam with her footpad's tread, Of his sire, so swift, so game, so cunning With craft in his brain and power of running, Their fights of old when his teeth drew blood.

Now he was sick, with his coat all mud.

He crossed the covert, he crawled the bank, To a meuse in the thorns and there he sank, With his ears flexed back and his teeth shown white, In a rat's resolve for a dying bite.

PRIZE

And there, as he lay, he saw the vale, That a struggling sunlight silvered pale, The Deerlip Brook like a strip of steel, The Nun's Wood Yews where the rabbits squeal, The great gra.s.s square of the Roman Fort, And the smoke in the elms at Crendon Court.

And above the smoke in the elm-tree tops, Was the beech-clump's blue, Blown Hilcote Copse, Where he and his mates had long made merry In the b.l.o.o.d.y joys of the rabbit-herry.

And there as he lay and looked, the cry Of the hounds at head came rousing by; He bent his bones in the blackthorn dim.

But the cry of the hounds was not for him, Over the fence with a crash they went, Belly to gra.s.s, with a burning scent, Then came Dansey, yelling to Bob, ”They've changed, O d.a.m.n it, now here's a job.”

And Bob yelled back, ”Well, we cannot turn 'em, It's Jumper and Antic, Tom; we'll learn 'em.

We must just go on, and I hope we kill.”

They followed hounds down the Mourne End Hill.

The fox lay still in the rabbit-meuse, On the dry brown dust of the plumes of yews.

In the bottom below a brook went by, Blue, in a patch, like a streak of sky.

There, one by one, with a clink of stone, Came a red or dark coat on a horse half blown.