Our visit to the Bodios, chronicled in part below, couldn't possibly have been complete without taking their vast and ever-increasing pack of hounds for a good airing, outings which have the added potential of resulting in fresh hare for dinner. Mobilizing seven dogs, six of whom are primitive sighthounds, is not a simple task. Mrs. Peculiar and I took the two older and better-behaved tazi girls and the ever-intrepid wiener dog in our car, while the Bodios and a friend walked the male tazi, the lurcher and the two girl tazi pups on foot. We met at the fairgrounds and let slip the dogs. (My photos were taken with a manual-exposure, manual-focus dinosaur of a camera. Photographing tazis in action is comparable to photographing cheetahs. Please be charitable.)

  Das wüthende Heer: right to left, Plummer (lurcher), Ataika, Larissa (pretty sure), Lashyn (forequarters).

  Kiran, the male tazi. Tazi bitches like to be fea, fuerte y formal; Kiran not so much.

  

I really should come on one of these outings with more than half a roll of film. It's no problem at all to burn through frmaes tracking lightning-swift dogs through the New Mexico savannah. I took my last shots as we looped back around towards the car. Very shortly after, I was walking ahead of eveyone else, and bumped a jackrabbit. I yell, "Hai! Hai! Hai," the dogs are conveniently near, the pack wheels and pursues. Tazis seem fast at a lope, remarkably fast at an excercise pace; but these speeds are nothing compared to their pursuit. Already rocketing, the dogs suddenly engage a whole 'nother gear, flying ahead towards the rabbit, who suddenly realizes that these are not like other dogs and that he's actually in a good deal of trouble. A cottontail would be doomed, but jacks can fly along themselves, and twist and turn. The hare carves a serpentine path across the fields, a whiplash of sighthounds following and gaining. At one moment, the jack is running straight at me, the line of dogs behind, closing the gap on the straightaway; my camera, of course, remains empty. More twists, more pursuit. Lashyn is a noselength behind when she slips on a patch of mud. The hare escapes by the skin of its teeth.

******************************

  Ataika, a wind in the grass, a wind with fangs.