I remember how disappointed my children were when I brought Dart home, they were hoping for a cute cuddly puppy, instead they got this skinny, leggy, awkward creature. However he grew to be a great dog. Red Merle in colour and grey hound size, he was superb to work with a lamp.
Where I lived at the time I had access to a very large area of improved hill, on which an abundance of brown hares lived. The brown hare is the perfect quarry for a large lurcher; the lurcher has the strength and endurance the Hare knows the ground and is able to out turn the lurcher.
I see people with rescue grey hounds and though I am sure this is a worthy thing to do, the grey hounds always look bored. A lurcher at full stretch after a hare is a totally different story; he has an almost desperate sense of urgency as he seeks to close the gap between himself and the hare, but once the hare turns and fools the lurcher, they settle into a chess like game in which the lurcher seeks to close using his speed but reduces to keep pace trying to anticipate which way the hare will jink so he could get to grips, or if the hare turns the other way to quickly turn and force the hare to jink again., but the more the hare jinks the more tired the lurcher gets.
Dart would wait at my side until the lamp picked up a hare, them would only go when told, to see him running flat out on the wide open spaces of mid Wales was something else, and too watch as a hare would go under a gate and Dart fly over was amazing, my heart was in my mouth.
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