Sounds, heard in total darkness, find form in the mind. At two AM last night, I was wakened by the distant cries of a hunting dog, high on the black mountains behind my house.
Hunters use dogs to stir up the deer. They use small, slow Beagle-hound crossbreeds because they want the deer to move around, but not be in full flight. Because they follow the deer, and the deer try to avoid being seen, while you will hear the dogs, you will rarely see them. Because he is small and slow, the dog will never catch the deer. A good deer dog will hunt, steadily, for as long as he can stand on his feet. If you do happen to see one, and you stand directly in the path he is tracking, he will either pause, looking sorrowful and apologetic, until you get out of the way, or he will simply go around you without any change in his slow, determined pace.
The voice of such crossbreeds is a strange mix between the short squall of a Beagle and the long, deep baying of a big hound. By the end of December, the end of hunting season, after hunting since November, after hunting all day on a Saturday and now, half the cold night, it’s a raw expression of both desire and despair, wailing, wailing across the invisible mountain after the invisible deer, now wailing inside my mind as I try to go back to sleep.
If this dog has had his collar removed, as is often the case at the very end of the hunting season, you will know that the hunter has abandoned the dog. It’s easier and cheaper to buy new ones next season than it is to feed and care for them from now until next November.
[shown below you can see the mountainous terrain where I live]
