Irish wolfhounds

Irish wolfhounds are coursing dogs whose passage through the Columbia River breaks transforms Ben Givens’s hunt into a struggle to protect his own dogs. First glimpsed as a fast-moving pack in the night, they carry the menace of a memory Ben has held for decades; when they catch up with Tristan and Rex, that remembered capacity for pursuit becomes immediate danger. Their role joins the novel’s images of hunting and killing to a consequential choice: Ben uses his shotgun against one of the dogs to stop its attack on Rex.

Identity and Background

The pack is identified as Irish wolfhounds, a breed Ben recognizes from his youth as coyote hunters. Their local association is with Dale Saunders, Jr., a potato farmer who lived up the river road and kept hounds for ranchers troubled by disappearing lambs or calves. Saunders was also known as a trapper, hunter, prospector, and government bounty worker. At the county fair, he sold equipment and demonstrated coyote calls, presenting the pursuit of coyotes as both practical work and a spectacle.

Saunders treated the hounds as the most dramatic part of that work. He displayed them in a chicken-wire cage on the back of his pickup truck and promoted their size, speed, and ability to pursue coyotes. His account made the animals at once working dogs and performers: their value lay not only in catching quarry but also in the visible excitement of the chase. The scene does not present that enthusiasm as Ben’s. He remembers the dogs as powerful and disturbing, and regards their readiness to kill as a reason for distrust rather than admiration.

Appearance and Behavior

On the night of Ben’s hunt, the hounds emerge over a ridgeline and run south across broken ground. In the moonlight, their movement first registers as a rushing mass; as they draw near, Ben can count at least six. Two appear as large as wild yearling colts. Their speed and springing gait make them seem almost more like wild horses than ordinary dogs, an impression that connects the present pack to the animals Ben remembers seeing roughly fifty years earlier.

The passage emphasizes how difficult it is for Ben to read the pack at first. He cannot identify the dogs at a distance, and his uncertainty is compounded by the overlapping sounds of the hounds and his own dogs. As the pack passes close by, he raises his side-by-side in alarm, then lowers it and checks the safety when the hounds race past without turning toward him. The encounter establishes both their physical force and the limits of his control: he can see and hear them, but cannot yet tell where they are headed or what they will do.

The Coursing Hunt and Attack

Ben later comes upon the pursuit in a brush-filled draw. He understands that a coyote has sought cover and that the hounds are trying to drive it out. When the coyote breaks from the thicket, the pack follows; Rex is among the dogs. The hounds close on the coyote, and Rex joins the confrontation. Ben is still struggling downhill when the pack turns its attention from the coyote to Rex, leaving little time for him to consider how to intervene.

Ben first tries to interrupt the attack with a warning shot. The hounds stop, but one continues to hold Rex. Ben strikes and kicks the dog without making it release him. Faced with Rex’s peril, Ben then shoots the attacking wolfhound with his Winchester. This is a decisive use of the gun against an animal, not for sport or to bring down game, but in an attempt to protect his own dog. Tristan does not survive the encounter with the coursing pack, while Rex is left seriously hurt and in need of care.

Identification and Aftermath

The dogs’ identity is confirmed later, when Ben explains to Ilse Peterson that his dogs ran off with coursing hounds while he was hunting chukars on the breaks. Peterson recognizes Irish wolfhounds as the likely attackers and identifies William Harden as the only person in the area who keeps them. She has seen them at dog shows and points Ben toward the Hardens’ orchard near Malaga, known as Wolfhound Orchard. Her clinical recognition connects the name of the breed to what happened to Ben’s dogs, while the orchard’s name supplies a local landmark for the pack’s association.

Peterson’s assessment also clarifies why the encounter had such severe consequences for Ben’s dogs. She says that the damage to Rex is consistent with a confrontation with Irish wolfhounds, and Ben adds that his other dog was too old to fight back. Her response—that being old is better than being dead—does not undo the loss, but makes the contrast between survival and death explicit. The pack is therefore not merely a remembered danger or a local curiosity: its pursuit leaves Ben grieving one dog and reckoning with the precarious survival of the other.

Narrative Significance

The hounds recur through two different frames of Ben’s experience: an old memory of Saunders displaying and praising his coursing dogs, and the present-tense encounter in which a pack crosses Ben’s path and attacks his animals. That recurrence turns the earlier description into more than background. What had once been a frightening image of speed and killing becomes a real threat, and Ben’s judgment of the hounds is borne out by the harm that follows.

Their portrayal also complicates the language of sport and useful work surrounding the chase. Saunders’s demonstrations make the hounds’ pursuit sound impressive, but Ben sees the same speed as inseparable from their appetite for killing. When the pack attacks Rex, the difference between a hunt and a threat to Ben’s companions becomes immediate. Ben’s response preserves that moral distinction: the gun he has carried as a hunter becomes an instrument of protection, used at the moment when he believes there is no time for another choice.