Read Online Full Cry by Rita Mae Brown - Free Book Online Page A

tempered his aggressiveness. Now he, too, felt his nostrils fill with the faint but intensifying scent of gray dog fox.
    Diana trotted up, swinging the pack with her as she intently watched Cora. She could bank on Cora, her mentor.
    The hounds, excited but still mute, moved faster, their sterns moving faster as well.
    Sister checked her girth.
    â€œAh, ha, I knew it!”
Cora triumphantly said.
“A suitor.”
    She and the others usually recognized the scent of the fox they chased, but this was a stranger, a gray fox courting a little early, but then foxes display their own logic. The common wisdom is that grays begin mating in mid-January, reds at the end of January. But Cora remembered a time when grays mated in mid-December. Just why, she didn’t know. No great storms followed, which could have boxed them up, nor a drought, which would have affected the food supply then and later. All these events could affect mating.
    Perhaps this gray simply fell in love.
    Whatever, the scent warmed up.
    â€œShowtime!”
Cora spoke.
    Dragon spoke, then Asa and Delia. Diana steadied the T’s when she, too, sang out and told them to just stick with the pack, stick together.
    The whole pack opened. A chill ran down Sister’s spine; Lafayette’s too, his beautiful gray head turned as he watched the hounds.
    Those members with a hangover knew they’d need to hang on: when the pack opened like that, they were about to fly.
    A thin strip of woods separated the eastern meadow from a plowed cornfield, the stubble visible through the windblown patches. A slight slope rested on the far side of the cornfield. The hounds had gotten away so fast they were already there.
    Sister and Lafayette sped to catch them. She tried to stay about twenty yards behind Shaker, depending on the territory. She didn’t want to crowd the pack, but she wanted members to see the hounds work. To Sister, that was the whole reason to hunt: hound work!
    The footing in the cornfield kept horses lurching as the furrows had frozen, buried under the snow.
    All were glad once that was behind them. A simple three-foot coop rested in the fence line between the cornfield and the hayfield. The bottom half of the coop, where snow piled up, was white.
    â€œWhoopee.”
Lafayette pricked his ears forward as he leapt over.
    Lafayette so loved jumping and hunting that Sister rarely had to squeeze her legs.
    Everyone cleared the coop.
    Hounds could hear their claws crack the thin crust of ice on the snow. In a few places they’d sink in to their elbows, throw snow around, and keep going, paying no heed.
    Within minutes, the pack clambered over another coop, rushing into a pine stand, part of Edward’s timber operation. The scent grew stronger.
    The silence, noticeable in the pines, only accentuated the music of the hounds. As the field moved in, a few boughs, shaken by the thunder of hooves, dusted the riders underneath with snow.
    Sam Lorillard felt a handful slide down his neck.
    Crawford tried to push up front, but Czpaka wasn’t that fast a horse. Crawford hated being in the middle of the pack, and he
really
hated seeing Walter Lungrun shoot past him on Rocketman.
    Jennifer Franklin and Sari Rasmussen giggled as the dustings from the trees covered their faces. Both girls loved hunting, their only complaint being that not enough boys their own age foxhunted.
    On and on the hounds roared, turning sharply left, negotiating a fallen tree, then charging through the pines northward, emerging onto the sunken farm road, three feet down, the road used to service an old stone barn in the eighteenth century. The building’s crumbling walls remained. The field abruptly pulled up as hounds tumbled pell-mell over one another to get inside the ruins.
    â€œHe’s gone to ground!”
Dragon shouted.
“Let’s dig him
out.”
    â€œDream on, you nitwit.”
A high-pitched voice called out from inside.
    â€œUncle Yancy, what