Ah

Dr Hypercube reminds me that Charles Stross is the master of the first sentence:

The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd.

Quiz!

While we're talking of engineering, does anyone know what this is?

Clue: I took the photo in Idaho....

Downey!

It's cool again, thank god; cool and rainy and green. I'm wandering about the house in a snuggly knee-length white scottish wool sweater and a pair of dark green tights: I feel like an extra in The Animals of Farthing Wood, coffee in one hand, parrot preening on my shoulder.

Let me tell you about Iron Man. The movie, not the other stuff. I was bewitched by this movie. Its political intuitions are of course daft, and its special effects, of course, glorious. And Robert Downey Jr is perfect, perfect, perfect. What made me most happy wasn't the screwball dialogue between him and Gwyneth Paltrow, nor the cut-out cartoon fundamentalists, nor even the dogfight between two F-22s and a man in a supersonic gold-titanium exoskeleton with a HUD. Though — dude! Both great.

What I loved most of all were the scenes where Downey, as Tony Stark, was working. Building. Soldering. Tinkering with metal and wires and irons and components and 3-D cadcam displays. You've all seen movies where actors have to paint? Like Kirk in the Van Gogh movie? And it always looks fake and forced? Downey manages to articulate with his fingers the concentrated addicted brilliance of the genius engineer, and I have to stifle a giggle thinking that perhaps part of his facility with this kind of thing might be due to his long experience with the paraphernalia involved in taking an absolute shed-load of drugs.

There's a sweet Suicide Girls interview with him and Paltrow here

First steps

The erstwhile Kodak falcons are now Rochester falcons, and there seems to have been a concomitant lessening in quality of their webcam: it's always horribly overexposed. But they're still a treat to watch. Five eyasses this year. This, this morning, made me come over all soppy. Cropped with increased contrast from the Rochester Falconcam

Content-free!

Tom puts it characteristically succinctly, in his peerless Skills-bills:

More dumb ignorant shit this week, from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.

Jenkins' conclusion? "Keep raptors in their place"

I literally have no idea what this means. Anyone?

Scribbles

The other day I came across a few pieces of folded paper. Bloody hell! Childhood drawings by yours truly. They are seriously troubling. So troubling, they're very funny. One is of a striped felt-tipped sea dragon with huge claws, rampaging across the page in a riot of frills and crests and teeth. Another is a hawk carrying a mouse, the tentativeness of baby Pluvialis' messy pencil attempt at childhood draughtsmanship quite outstripped by the bloodiness of the scene. There are even blood drips falling from the mouse's tail. Eww! And last, a picture of a battle. Thirty or so knights and archers, and appallingly-rendered Arthurian horses in black ink, with severed heads and arrows sprouting from eyes and shoulderblades, and big swords brandished high in an A4 sky.

I looked at them for a long while. I actually remember drawing them, and the memory of moving the pen is clear. What isn't clear is who the hell I was then. Now they seem to me to be the psychodramas of a very disturbed child. A child with tight lips, icy eyes and some kind of battle to settle. Anger problems? Hello?

I don't think I was this child, but it gives me pause. At this age, Viking longships and volcanos and dragons and dinosaurs and hawks and battles were my entire repertoire. But later there came pictures of girls with long dresses and animals on their shoulders—squirrels, perhaps — and birds sitting on their wonky heads, or hovering around them. That’s called growing up, right?

Drawing is magic, though. Really it is. I find myself skating bored over discussions of rock art's religio-mythical purposes. Drawing is magic. When it works, you bring all sorts of airy or chthonic things into the moving line without being in control of it, but still, being fierce with it. It's that half-in control, half-not-in-control delight where you and the subject of the drawing compete for existence. It's like hunting in all sorts of ways.

People who know me know that I draw birds all the time; while I'm on the phone, while I'm talking in cafés, sitting in seminars, on paper napkins in restaurants. Bits of paper, the edges of newspapers; receipt-backs. And it's true that most often, after completing these shorthand animals, I scribble them out so furiously that the paper tears.

I do all this quite unconsciously. When you draw an animal and it works, you conjure it into existence. Once you've finished the drawing, you have to let go of it once it's alive, and you don't want it to turn on you. You don't want the drawing to be your enemy. Sometimes it won't be -- sometimes the drawings remain decorative and never rise into life; they are merely the printed half-tone of a bird. These are safe and boring and discardable.

Sometimes the drawings are indubitably alive. I can’t explain this, bar to say that some birds become alive and some are never alive. The alive birds are the ones that make me happy, as if I’ve found them by accident; or they have found their own way into the world.

The ones I scribble out, furiously, are the ones in the uncanny valley. The ones that are monstrously not quite alive, but not quite dead, which makes them horrifying. I need to kill them before bad things happen.

My life is littered with pieces of paper with little birds on, and little scribbles where I've destroyed the ones that didn't quite make it.

This is why, if I do have a tattoo, it can't be by me. Also why it has to be a stylised depiction of a hawk, rather than anything attempting to be real. I don't know if this makes sense, but having a live animal on your back seems a very scary thing to have. Having a depiction, a design -- and from a different time and cultural milieu -- that seems safe.

I have probably just convinced everyone who's read this that I'm mad as the sea and wind. Not all of me; just my pen hand, right?

Ink?

So I was thinking this is the perfect basic design for my first foray into evil tattooery. Shall be working it up into a colour version. Ooo I am bad.

Before you ask: left shoulder.

Question: blue/indigo back and tail. Yellow or orange eyes and feet? Red leash? Oh, decisions, decisions. Help me out, fretmarketeers!

Hippies

The long-lost underrated sitcom.
Alex is of course my dream man...

The Professor and The Cameraman

Soft but thrilling weather at the end of last week, here. Afternoon sun and shadow trounced by fenland light and fog into furry baize. En route to Wicken, great folds of pigeon-feather clouds coming in, and as Xtin and I opened the car doors when we arrived, the smell of sedge and mud and warbler-song and rain filled the vehicle from footwell to roof. Heavy rain, getting heavier. So we went straight to the cafe.

Wicken cafe is expensive, but by god, I love it. It's a shed, near enough, with a counter and melanine surfaces and thickets of tables and chairs and odd shelves with National Trust cookery books; and on a cold winter's day it fills with steam and fug from walkers and their afternoon mugs of tea. A few years ago it was run by a smashing Turkish chap, but no longer. I think he's in charge of the hangar-like full-on restaurant at a different National Turst property: at least, I saw him there a while back, and he enquired, somewhat mournfully, how Wicken was these days. "You must miss it" I said. "This" he said, gesturing into the cavernous cedar cathedral of coach parties and cream teas, "this is amazing, I love it. But I miss Wicken"

I do too, if I'm away for long. Xtin and I go there whenever we can. It's a creepy, wonderful place. Britain's oldest nature reserve, bought by some nutty posh etymologists a century or so ago. I've written about it before, so won't harp on. But it's a sprawling mess of reeds and dykes and pools and paths, with acres of carr forest and new grasslands being returned to their wetland glory. It's not pretty. It's flat, muddy, and featureless, and packed with wildfowl in the winter, and warblers and woodcock and hobbies in the summer, and is bristling with dragonflies; it's a treasure of a place.

Every so often, at Wicken, I bump into parties of student biologists from the Department next to mine. And sometimes I bump into Professor D, because he also uses the fen for fieldwork. He is often carrying a stuffed stoat in a wire cage to freak out the reed warblers, and he always carries a pair of binoculars. Of course. He is a behavioural ecologist, a fellow of the Royal Society, an astoundingly big brain, a Very Important Scientist, and also an absolutely lovely, lovely man. A chance meeting with Professor D. always leaves one feeling inordinately well-disposed to the world. He's just that kind of chap.

So when Xtin and I walked in as the rain began to pattern the ponds outside, I was especially happy to see him sitting at the near table in the empty cafe. And there was someone else with him. A chap in a realtree fleece tucking into a nosh of baked potato and beans.

Ah! I knew this person! He is a now-eminent wildlife cameraman; I met him about ten years ago back in Wales when he came to film peregrines for a documentary. And Xtin and I joined the Professor and The Cameraman for a natter, which included several cups of tea, two icecreams, and on Xtin's part, a toasted tea cake. He was there to film cuckoos, which are, in fact, Professor D's species of expertise, and they'd been there since four in the morning doing just that.

This meeting has FREAKED ME OUT. Because as we sat there and talked about jobs The Cameraman has done, and how he's just back from exotic location A filming this species, and is about to go off to exotic location B, to film a different speices, and how much his life is sitting in hides or going out looking for things, planning things, arranging everything around weather and season and oh how goddamn happy he seemed to be about what he was doing, I remembered something.

It was back in Gloucestershire. The summer before I came back to University. I was working for Jemima Parry Jones. My boyfriend of nigh-on three years had left me for a swedish intern a month before — how clichéd is that?! — and was a mess. I was also getting bored. Isn't that awful? Every day I flew display birds—everything from burrowing owls to tiny African peregrines to bloody great eagles — which was fun; and I worked with a lovely bunch of people — Jemima is an absolute treasure, btw — but my brain had gone to sleep and I wasn't happy.

It was an idyllic spring. Every other day we'd take parties of people out into the May countryside of the Forest of Dean and hunt rabbits with Harris hawks. That afternoon I was sitting with three 'pupils' on a sunny bank under an craggy singleton oak. The pasture far below us was bright with tiny wild daffodils, and the hawks were slope-soaring in a warm breeze that held them up just above and before us, white-tipped tails spread, eagley heads prospecting for bunnies. It was the lusty month of May, and it was a glorious, treasurable day. if Elgar had been there, he'd have got out some manuscript pages and a pencil. If Auden had been there, he'd have started composing on the spot.

I was miserable. Ya de ya. It's hard to countenance this, now, but I was. I was bored. I watched the hawks, keeping an eye on what was going on. But I was stuck. I was counting time. I was coming back to Cambridge to start a Masters in four months, and I couldn't wait. Bah bah another day's display, another day's hunting.

I was brought up short. I'd turned to check on the punters and saw that the chap sitting next to me was in tears. They'd made slick trails down his cheeks, and his eyes were swimmy and bright.
"Are you all right?" I asked him cautiously.
"I am" he said, with a catch in his voice. I thought the moment had passed; he turned back to watch the hawks.
But then he started speaking again. In a low, urgent voice. "You have the best job in the world" he said. "I've worked in my job for thirty years, and I've never liked it. I always wanted to do something else. But it's too late now. You come out here, you fly these birds, and you're out in the sun and rain and you're doing something you really LOVE. You are so lucky. I wish I could have done something like this when I was your age. My life would have been very different"


"Excuse me" he said, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

Right then, I swore never to stop being mindful of the moment. I'd forgotten, though, it seems to me. I've spent the last seven years in libraries, in offices, in cafes, drinking coffee and trying to write a PhD. Talking with Professor D and The Cameraman made me realise how much time that has been.

Yes there have been good things; great things! Great friendships, rewarding research; books published; a home; of course. But I am not an academic, I know now, and happily.

What I hadn't fully realised is that I've been hanging on to a whole pile of assumptions about the way to conduct one's life that I've kind of passively soaked up from my university surroundings. I think an awful lot of them are wrong. I know they are.

Xtin and I had our walk, free of rain. We heard a bittern booming, found dredged freshwater mussels, watched marigold-eyed tufted duck drakes being monstered by coots on the mere. It was a good, long walk. I've spent a Bank Holiday weekend back at my mum's house being a grumpy bugger. Partly because I'm freaked the hell out by the vision of inertia my sorry recent life has been.

So: time to start grasping for the things that don't just make life good, but make the good life. Goshawk's one of 'em. Roll on the next.

Wild at Home

One of the pieces of work I give my students is an excerpt from The Stone Horse, an essay by Barry Lopez. It recounts the finding of an intaglio horse drawn in stone upon the Californian desert. It's as beautiful and glacial as his writing usually is, wresting the usual Lopez observations, bare-armed, into convincing moral curves and uprights. I'm not being snarky saying this; it's good to read sermons when they're written by a masterly hand.

It's a very good piece to give students. They generally meet it with bewilderment and some indignation. It's not a novel. It's not a poem. What is it? A piece of art criticism? Why does the speakers' voice slip from this ecstatic register so suddenly to science? How does the mixed lineage of the horse make it American? Or not American? What does American mean? How does this piece negotiate questions of identity...and so on. Bald questions. But the piece gets more interesting the more you pick away at it. Yes, identity, and a sly dig at myths of origin, and a parse at the point of art, and on what is looking. And more.

The Stone Horse is very, very good. Which is to say, it is beautiful, and convincing, and also slightly irritating. Sufficiently irritating that it gives you room, like two fingers under a cuff, to work out your own view of all these Lopezian dictats. No matter how beautifully they are couched, and no matter how magisterially, the pronouncements of the nature writer must give you enough room to turn on them. So you can think on the matter for yourself. I'm not good with authority, trust me.

Lopez ends his essay:

A few generations ago, cowboys, cavalry quartermasters, and draymen would have taken this horse before me under consideration and not let up their scrutiny until they had its heritage fixed to their satisfaction. Today, the distinction between draft and harness horses is arcane knowledge, and no image may come to mind for a blue roan or a claybank horse. The loss of such refinement in everyday conversation leaves me unsettled. People praise the Eskimo’s ability to distinguish among forty types of snow but forget the skills of others who routinely differentiate between overo and tobiano pintos. Such distinctions are made for the same reason. You have to do it to be able to talk about the world.

It's a killer last line, isn't it; and I've had all sorts of fantastically fun and sometimes excrutiating discussions with students about what is going on here. Some of the students kick back and tell me that this myth about forty types of snow is nonsense; others frown and get that intimation of importance, that just-about-to-sneeze gist of a truth-well-told.

What is interesting to me right now is what Lopez is saying here, because for the last few months, everywhere you look are books on The Wild. I'm not complaining about these books! One of the very finest was written by a very dear friend of mine, and I love it very much. And all the others, in their various ways, are honest and fine works. (Actually, one is unreadable, but hey ho). Wild is the watchword of nature-writing in the UK at the moment.

(Of course we never had the debate on wilderness: we don't have any according to the American model, and we're all-too-aware that our own wild landscapes — deer forest and crag and heather moor — were burned and cleared and painted into existence by Victorian lairds and courtly Scotsanistas)

And it would be too easy to say that this is just a publishers' bandwagon—that a best-seller on wildness brings more in its wake, pace the innumerable Da Vinci Code knock-offs that came and went after Dan Brown. And it would be too easy, I think, to say that there's something about today's climate and culture that has brought us back to the themes of the 1950s; of rurality, of lost ways, of stories of companion animals and of how we should revivify ourselves by identifying with nature, rather than some urban utopia.

I was looking at one particular book this morning, Simon Barnes' How to be Wild. Barnes is a sports writer, and naturalist, and has the capacity to irritate me so much I splutter. But I sat in a café and turned the pages and decided I liked this book. It does some interesting things. It's not afflicted by the manners of most nature writing — manners I share, of course. As soon as I think what I'm writing is "writing", I come over all high-priestess. It's ghastly. Like David Gessner's Sick of Nature, Barnes' book refuses the meditative. And it happily fronts the naturalists' pose; while making grand claims about wildness, it catches enough of the personality of the writer to make the claims human and personal. In this way it's an even-handed read. It's not a text on how to live, but a text on how one man thinks we should live, which is much easier to deal with than the moral certainties of an absent personality, however magisterial. And he cusses and swears and comes across as a slightly over-enthusiastic, occasionally bombastic soul; prey to arrogance but aren't we all.

I love that Barnes decides that wildness is like homosexuality; or at least, is amused that his argument works along those lines. There's a sweet story here about his attempted seduction by a gay musican, who explained to Barnes over long conversations that he was clearly gay, but just didn't realise it. And went on to explain that the world is divided into those who are gay and realise it, and those who are gay, but don't. "It is my belief" says Barnes, in response, "that we are all wild: but frequently we seek to express our wildness in strange ways. This is no doubt a result of repression; a result of an unwillingness to incur the censure of society and the strange looks of our neighbours. And this, thinks Barnes, is why we walk our dogs, feed the birds, go fishing, play golf, go swimming, go sunbathing."

Now this is hilarious—but I kind of love him for it. What comes across so much in these books, in all of them, is a strange and baffling need to present Wild as a monolithic concept; a single thing that's either repressed, or is motoring its way out or through you, and is found out there, somewhere.

It's not good enough. It's just not enough words.

I've written before on how hunting is like marriage. There are different kinds, and it does no good to try and write about hunting as if it is one thing. Hare coursing is not fox hunting is not fishing is not running down an antelope or shooting a snipe in an Irish Bog.

The wild is the same. The best books on wildness interrogate what the wild is, and find the concept wanting. Not complicated enough. But we need to go further. We need forty different words for forty different kinds of wildness, and we need to stop thinking of it as something transcendent or Other, as if it were God.

Let's pray for a little polytheism, as far as the wild goes. It's wilds, not wild. Lares, not Lare. Gods, not God.

My goshawk is a kind of wild. She is precisely the kind of wild that is my household god. There are other bits of wild are in my home; souvenirs of place and thing. Stones and stuffed animals and bits of driftwood. They're tokens of other places and other types of wild, and a little bit stolen.

But the goshawk is different. She is not really a god, of course—although something of the hieratic hangs about her. She's taught me that tameness and wildness aren't necessarily antagonistic. While the stones and taxidermy are frozen souvenirs, the goshawk is truly wildness at home. She makes my home wild while being tame herself, and it's the particular kind of wild I need.

An altar to the household gods, Pompeii

When I play with her in the evenings, even when she fluffs up like a happy kitten as she jumps around the room catching balls of paper, she's a particular kind of wild. And when I fly her out on the hill, it makes the hill home.

It makes the hill home not only because you get to know it so well, from crossing it so many times. And not only because she's flying across it — because, of course, when you're a falconer, you can't help but identify with your hawk, extend your consciousness out to imagine you are flying with it. But that's a large part of it. There's something about flying a hawk that makes you less than yourself, more than human. It's part of what lets this kind of wild be home.

What I am trying to say, and being confused in the attempt, is that for me, having wild at home is more important than travelling out there to find it. Yes, I want to be at home in the wild, but not the wild that everyone talks about. I need more words. Curses!

Which reminds me: I must go downstairs to offer a quail to my household god.

Two blogs

The preponderance of the small
The preponderance of the awesome

This month's theme is...corvids

The crow drawings are finished. And now, my friend Bill — you remember him — has just finished making an absolutely splendid new friend: a glove puppet made of felt and wire which is more crow-ish than any of my drawings. Genuflections to you, Bill: this crow rocks!

Vanity case

But I can't help it. The locks are gone! Shorn for spring...and my efforts to erase the messy bathroom mirror background shows even better exactly how Pluvialis now has.....sci-fi hair!

Agony Aunt

Oh yes! Today, in the Guardian's Agony Aunt page, a letter to which we, as readers, are invited to respond:

We have been married for six years and don't have children. My husband has a business that isn't doing well but he doesn't try to improve its performance, while I work extremely hard to support us. We've had many problems communicating about family and money — he resents that I call him lazy and irresponsible.

About a year ago, he changed the way he dresses, started to work out, and staying late at the office. I caught him watching internet pornography again — when this happened a couple of years ago, we almost divorced. Recently, I suspected that something was going on with a secretary at his workplace, but he denied it. One day, I planted a recording device in his office, and sure enough, she flirted with him shamelessly and he responded with enthusiasm. I demanded he fire her the next day, which he reluctantly did. He still denied having an affair and was resentful of my criticisms of her behaviour. Afterwards, I sent him articles on how hurtful an "emotional" affair can be, and he tried to justify his actions by attributing it to his need for attention. He said he is attracted to her because she is sweet, non-judgmental, and he needs somebody to talk to without worrying about being right.

My dilemma is whether to get divorced. I want to forgive him and start our life together again, but don't know if I can forgive him knowing that he was using me and willing to hurt me for the sake of his own happiness.

Agony aunt Pluvialis says: PLEASE, PLEASE divorce this poor, poor man, you complete and utter nightmare of a human being.

Number one in New York City! Number one in ... Memphis!

Ah, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Back in the day. And I'd forgotten how downright dirty and fabulous and funny JSBX were. Or are.

I'd completely forgotten about this video, too. Winona Ryder does a Jon Spencer impersonation that might just be her finest performance ever. Check out Giovanni Ribisi and John Reilly as Russell Simins and Judah Bauer.

I promise never to write about music again. But it made me so DANG happy finding this on youtube last night....

I've had a few

Regrets. Right now, I regret turning the heating off this morning, and drinking that cup of coffee at just before midnight. It's getting on for 2am; I have to do some examining tomorrow (no doctor jokes per-lease) and need my wits about me, thusly. And am wide awake, and very cold. Pah.

But it's all fine, because I'm FTP-ing up a storm. Off go the crow pics to the Big Publisher people. Luckily so; because I don't know if my poor CNS could manage another night of three hours sleep.

Being hugely tired is cheaper than getting drunk, though! Had to walk into town to get more art supplies today. Enjoyed the bottom-of-the-swimming pool feeling of disorientation. Not so keen on the headache and the grains-of-ash-in-the-blood feeling, though. Nor the half cup of coffee I spilt over myself in a sudden loss of motor ability shortly afterwards.

Lord, I am tired. Here's a broody rook.

Meeeep!

Seriously, who are these people?

Harry Hutton's perfect response to this ghastly, ghastly article.

I only go out with guys who read Mycenaean potsherds in the original Linear B. For me, Attic Greek's a real deal-breaker.

Dear Fretmarketeers

I read, with delight, a leaflet on magickal tours the other day. You know: Rosicrucian sites, Cathar sites, Knights bloody Templar. An all-roads-lead-to-Rosslyn Chapel kind of a thing, with a nice pentagram at the bottom. The kind of thing to which Dan Brown has given a bad name.

What I loved most about this leaflet was the small print. For purposes of anonymity, we'll call the tour guide John Smith. I read this:

Tour guide: John Smith, BA (Hons), (Reading for History) MA.

Aaah! I love this. Made me want to go on the tour.

Yours sincerely,
Pluvialis, BA (Hons) MA (cantab), MPhil, (didn’t finish) PhD

Lost, but catching up

I can’t hunt. Fate saw fit to make me allergic to horses, dogs, and foxes.

I discovered my dog allergy early: we had a dog. I discovered my horse allergy during riding lessons, and my fox allergy while skinning a fox to turn into a rug. Which, I realised, I couldn’t have in my house.

Allergies never fail to make life new. Three days ago I discovered I was allergic to reindeer. (Thankfully, these allergies are only to living, not cooked animals: reindeer venison is yum).

Indeed, the longer life goes on, the more I realise that most quadrupeds make me ill.

Though I can ride, I can’t ride for long. Twenty minutes on a horse, and my eyes are closed, my hands mottled with nettle rash and I’ve lost the ability to concentrate on anything other than fighting for breath.

So it’s not surprising that I’ve never ridden to hounds. And so, I guess, I’ve never really understood foxhunting. I’ve never been part of that rural crowd, and even though the Hampshire Hunt met often outside my parents’ house, by the grain drier at the top of the hill, ready to take in miles of good country, I never really got what it was all about. It wasn’t a kind of hunting I understood. Because I only ever saw the pink coats and the horses and the hounds clustering and the fence-menders and the police and the saboteurs. And that just didn’t seem very interesting to me.

Last Saturday I was back at the Hampshire house. It was a day of heavy rain and wind, and I was tired, and sad, and distracted. It’s a year Thursday since dad died. And while lots of times, talking to mum or my brother helps share the pain, sometimes the words won’t come, and the loneliness stoppers me up, and I can’t talk at all. So much pressure was building up inside me that by mid-afternoon I had to hide. I’d left the house to have a cigarette out on the porch. And standing in the murky light by the drive, I heard the music of hounds.

Even with my sporting ignorance, it seemed clear that the hunt was drawing the covert at Ham Farm, that thick copse of coppiced hazel, sweet chestnut and bluebells just across the road and away. I pulled up the collar of my coat and walked out into the near-sleet. Sure enough, a succession of muddied, battered 4x4s passed where I stood at the edge of the drive, windows steamed on the inside. They all turned left down the track to Wadgetts Copse.

After they’d gone, a long silence but for the hounds in the distance. A giddy, wet, rainy echo of a cry. My hair was wet and my cigarette damped to extinction. The asphalt at my toes was running with water, and shallow pools were slowly being born in the waterlogged paddock across the road.

And I heard a light pattering of footfalls, growing louder; a pattering of nails and pads through water to tarmac. Coming along the road towards me on his way to the covert, his head high, his body smeared all breast-deep in clay that stained the lower half of him copper-ochre, came a foxhound. A pale hound. He was alone, which was wrong. But being alone made him the type of all hounds that ever existed. He was running as if he’d been running all day, and he was running as if he would never stop, tongue out and eyes fixed. He was running to be with the rest of the hounds, and the sound was drawing him along the rainy roads as if he were underwater and swimming up to the light to breathe. I was transfixed. I’d never seen a hound be a hound before. He was doing exactly what he needed to be doing, and he was tired but joyful. He was late, but getting there. Lost, but catching up.