Hoagland on Nature: Essays - Softcover

Excerpt from pg. 21:
On the first hunt, we went to the Duck Pond Road in the township of Glover. It's a defunct jigsaw road, scarcely navigable, that twists past abandoned farmsteads and log houses for a dozen miles, with the acres of overgrown red clover and alfalfa fields and orchards everywhere that attract bears, mile after mile of new-fledged wilderness that has not been bulldozed because a strip through the middle of it is slated to become a superhighway. Tuffy, Doyle's strike dog, trotted ahead, urinating repeatedly as he warmed to the occasion. He was butter-footed in the beginning, as stiff as if he were walking on ice, having hunted in Holland, Vt., the day before and treed a yearling, which the hosts and landowners there shot. He has grasshopper legs, a long gazelle waist and a broad face for a dog, providing plenty of space for his teeth and for his smelling-chambers. He's even blacker than a bear, and doesn't lope or pace the way a wolf does, for instance; his gait is gimpier, pointier, pumpier, dancier; his legs seem to dangle--long girlish legs--and there's a trotting-horse quality to him--he has a thin tail and shaky, mile-jigging legs. His ears flop incongruously, like a cartoon puppy's, and yet he sniffed like a jackhammer as he started hunting more smoothy, after relieving his bowels and getting the excess of high spirits out of his system. The start, gaunt persona of a working dog, whether a sled, hound or attack dog, emerged--the scarred face flattening likea janissary's, the eyes going gaily daft. His tail swung with the degree of interest the smells he encountered aroused.