[8] The balks are the banks dividing the fields of
different owners or crops. Hedges are not used for this purpose
in Russia.


Something white would appear ahead. We stared hard at it,
gathered up the reins, examined the leash, scarcely believing the
good luck of having come on a hare at last. Then riding up
closer and closer, with our eyes on the white thing, it would
turn out to be not a hare at all, but a horse's skull. How
annoying!

We would look at papa and Seryozha, thinking, "I
wonder if they saw that I took that skull for a hare." But papa
would be sitting keen and alert on his English saddle, with the
wooden stirrups, smoking a cigarette, while Seryozha would
perhaps have got his leash entangled and could not get it
straight.

"Thank heaven!" we would exclaim, "nobody saw me! What a
fool I should have felt!" So we would ride on.

The horse's even pace would begin to rock us to sleep,
feeling rather bored at nothing getting up; when all of a sudden,
just at the moment we least expected it, right in front of us,
twenty paces away, would jump up a gray hare as if from the
bowels of the earth.

The dogs had seen it before we had, and had started forward
already in full pursuit. We began to bawl, "Tally-ho! tally-ho!"