The Hunter’s Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

hare was better baked in gravy in a crusted pie or roasted crisp on a spit. He had returned, more than ready for his breakfast, to find Sir William had arrived. His pair of scent hounds were in the foreyard, held on leash by Sir William’s steward, Master Selenger.
     
    Master Selenger was a man as lean and ready to the hunt as the hounds he held, and Hugh traded a few words with him before going in to tell what he had found and snatch some bread and cheese while his father and Sir William discussed which hounds they meant to use today. Sir William was not quite Sir Ralph’s age nor given
to
anything like Sir Ralph’s rages but their shared passion for hunting had made them “as near to friends as Sir Ralph is ever likely to come,” Miles once said. Friends enough that Sir Ralph had married Elyn, his eldest daughter, to him and lately begun to talk with him of marrying Tom to Sir William’s daughter, Philippa.
     
    For a wonder, given how readily Tom quarreled with Sir Ralph over anything and everything else, he had made no protest against that. Not that there was much to protest. Besides being Sir William’s only child and therefore his heir, Philippa was a pleasant-featured, pleasant-mannered girl, friends with Elyn and Lucy and so often at Woodrim that Lady Anneys, fond of her, said she was already more than halfway to belonging there. The only present complication was Sir William’s marriage to Elyn two years ago. Besides that it made him Tom and Hugh’s brother-in-law, it raised the likelihood he would father more children, lessening Philippa’s inheritance or, if there were a son, replacing Philippa altogether. Any marriage agreement made now would have to be most carefully made to ensure she stayed worth Tom’s marrying and as yet Sir Ralph and Sir William had not settled down to the task and Tom knew better than to push the matter. And since Elyn wasn’t bearing yet, everything was mayhap and maybe anyway and more important that morning was the hare-hunt.
     
    They had gone on foot to the far pasture, the hounds knowing what was coming and as eager to the business as the men. At the pasture’s edge Sir Ralph had blown three glad notes on his hunting horn, and Hugh, Degory, and Master Selenger had uncoupled the six lymers—the scent hounds—who had the first work. Set forward with Hugh’s cry of “Avaunt, sire, avaunt!,” they had surged away into the pasture with Hugh’s following call of, “So howe, so howe, so howe!” to urge them onward. Not that urging was needed. Hares were cunning. As if ever-aware they might be hunted, one hare never, for choice, traveled straightforwardly but rather went one way, then back on its trail for a ways before going another way, over and over again, ten times or more and crisscrossing its own trails while it did, with sometimes a sideways leap to start a different way all over again. The lymers’ challenge was to sort out the trails and thereby track a hare to its form—its resting place—and rout it out, and Somer, Sudden, Sendal, and young Skyre, along with Sir William’s lymers, set to it joyfully, questing rapidly back and forth through the long grass, heads down and tails madly wagging. As always for Hugh, their intensity became his as he watched them searching, spreading apart, sweeping this way and that across the pasture to untangle the scents, while beside him and Tom, Sir Ralph, Sir William, and Master Selenger, the coursing hounds waited their chance with quivering eagerness. Miles, as always, stood a little apart, there because he had to be, but even so he was watching, smiling, the hounds’ joy at their work impossible not to share.
     
    Hugh saw Sendal start to swing too far apart from the others and called out, “Howse, Sendal, howse!” to bring him back to the others, now closing in on a hare it seemed, to judge by how they were rushing forward, crowding together, then spreading apart and crowding forward again, all a-quiver and their tails