The Old Man kept the small variety of beagles, presuming it’s all beagles that they were. Maybe they were entirely beagles, but various of his hunting companions were not loathe to accuse this dog or that one of “having a little Feist in him” or suchlike from time to time. I assume they meant the dog and not the man, though either could have been the case.
The Old Man traded for his beagles at flea markets, no pun intended, where the dogs’ provenance was considerably in doubt if you wished to prove much more about their bloodline than that they were, in fact, a dog. I never understood the value of “having papers” on such a creature, as I could not see how that proved anything. If you’d fake a dog, you could certainly fake a paper. These dogs weren’t meant for anything fancy, anyway. What he was looking for in a dog was heart, and he consistently found a lot of little beagles with a lot of notable heart. These were hunting dogs of the sort where the hunting came first, well before any features of the dog.
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