Tearing after rabbits

The local rat hound pack has been disbanded but Honey the terrier is no slouch when it comes to nosing out quarry

- Jack Ivester Lloyd

The Bagley Rat Hounds had been reduced in number. Young Carol had taken half the pack with her, leaving only 10-year-old terrier Honey. Here, if you can stand it, is her latest saga.

I was carefully crossing a deep and wide ditch, with its attendant barbed wire, and Honey was nosing in the dead reeds and other vegetation. Her vibrating tail told me something was about and I was hoping she would rouse one of those well-nourished rats that wander down from the abattoir. On the other hand, it might only be a moorhen.

My leg was across a strand of rusty barbed wire when out of a thick tussock ambled a big hare. ‘Ambled’ ALA is the word, for she appeared to be in no great hurry. “Seeho!” I yelled, giving the archaic hare hunters’ holloa. “Seeho, Sally!” Honey got the message but was not nearly as excited as I was, struggling to free my trousers from a vicious barb and ripping them badly in the attempt.

Witch hare

The hare lolloped for a couple of hundred yards and then sat down and looked around at us. Nor was Honey very interested in the chase, even when I snapped at her that she was slipping, losing her touch, grown beyond it and so on. Perhaps this was one of those scentless hares about which beagles have so much to say: or she may have been a witch hare and didn’t really exist at all.