A paper chase (also known as a chalk chase or as hare and hounds) is an outdoor racing game with any number of players.
At the start of the game, one or two players are designated the 'hares' and are given a bag of small paper clippings known as the 'scent'. Other members of the group are the 'hounds' who will pursue them. [1]
The 'hare' is given a head start of five to fifteen minutes, and runs ahead periodically throwing out a handful of paper shreds, which represent the scent of the hare. [1] Just as scent is carried on the wind, so too are the bits of paper, sometimes making for a difficult game. After some designated time, the hounds must chase after the hare and attempt to catch them before they reach the ending point of the race.
The game is generally played over distance of several miles, but shorter courses can be set, or the game played according to a time limit. [1] If the hare makes it to the finish line, they get to choose the next hare, or to be the hare themselves. Similarly, the person who catches the hare gets to choose the next hare.
The game may also be played with a piece of chalk instead of paper, where the hares leave marks on walls, stones, fence posts or similar surfaces. [1]
A game called "Hunt the Fox" or "Hunt the Hare" was played in English schools from at least the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. [2] Shakespeare appears to evoke it in Hamlet: When the young prince eludes the guards at Elsinore, he cries "Hide, fox, and all after". [3] Around 1800, the game was organised at Shrewsbury School into an outdoor game called "the Hunt" or "the Hounds", to prepare the young gentlemen for their future pastime of fox hunting. [2] The two runners making the trail with paper were called "foxes", those chasing them were called "hounds".
Hare coursing rather than fox hunting was used as an analogy when the game spread to Bath School, so the trail-makers were called "hares". This term was made popular by the paper chase scene in Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and is still used in modern hashing and in club names such as Thames Hare and Hounds. Shrewsbury continued to use fox hunting terms, as evidenced in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903). In this case the hare was a couple of boys who were called foxes".
The Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt is the oldest cross-country club in the world, with written records going back to 1831 and evidence that it was established by 1819. [2] The club officers are the Huntsman, and Senior and Junior Whips. The runners are Hounds, who start most races paired into "couples"; the winner of a race is said to "kill". [4] The main inter-house cross-country races are still called the Junior and Senior Paperchase, although no paper is dropped, and urban development means the historical course can no longer be followed.
In 1938, British immigrants founded the Hash House Harriers in Kuala Lumpur based on this game.
Thomas Hughes' 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days depicts a meet by the Big-Side Hare and Hounds. Students busily tear old newspapers, copybooks and magazines into small pieces to fill four large bags with the paper ‘scent’. Forty or fifty boys gather, and two good runners are chosen as hares. Carrying the bags, they start across the fields laying the trail. When a member of the pack finds the paper scent they call "Forward!" (hashers now call “ON! ON!”). In the story, members of the pack work together finding scent, and they strain to keep up with the hare.
In chapter 39 of his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903, Samuel Butler describes a school based on his alma mater, Shrewsbury. The protagonist's favourite recreation is running with "the Hounds", so "a run of six or seven miles across country was no more than he was used to". [5]
In the book The Railway Children, written by Edith Nesbit in 1906, the children observe a game of paper chase. The book was made into a television series four times and into a movie twice, the most recent adaptation was in 2000.
In the novel Daddy Long Legs, written in 1912 by Jean Webster, the girls play a game of paper chase where the hares cheat: They leave a paper trail indicating that they entered a locked barn through a high window, while in fact they went around the building.
In H.P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness , first published in 1936, the narrator refers to the game when using paper to blaze a trail through an unexplored city: "Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a spare specimen bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare and hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to penetrate."
In the 1946 Orson Welles movie, The Stranger, Rankin's students are in the midst of a paper chase through the woods when Rankin kills his former colleague. Rankin misdirects the "hounds" to keep them from finding the body by moving the shreds of paper.
In the 1954 memoir by Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, he describes playing paper chase at Neuenheim College in Heidelberg, Germany in 1896. "[W]hen the river was frozen and the snow lay thick upon the ground, so that it was impossible either to row or to play football, paper chases were organised by the master in charge of games. No form of exercise is quite so utterly pointless and boring as a paper chase, and we used to try to slink off and get lost and find our way home by ourselves; though this, if discovered, was apt to lead to a painful interview with the games master."
In the 1975 Disney movie One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, the nannies notice a trail of paper scraps on the ground while trying to hide a dinosaur skeleton in a wood. They remark that it must be a paper chase, at which point a group of schoolboys crash through the wood following the trail.
A 1986 episode of the animated television series The Wind in the Willows is called "Paperchase", and the focus is of that game.
A hound is a type of hunting dog used by hunters to track or chase prey.
Fox hunting is a traditional activity involving the tracking, chase and, if caught, the killing of a fox, normally a red fox, by trained foxhounds or other scent hounds. A group of unarmed followers, led by a "master of foxhounds", follow the hounds on foot or on horseback.
The Hash House Harriers is an international group of non-competitive running social clubs. An event organized by a club is known as a Hash or Run, or a Hash Run. A common denominal verb for this activity is Hashing, with participants calling themselves Hashers. Male members are referred to as Harriers and females are known as Harriettes.
Beagling is mainly the hunting of hares and rabbits by beagles using their strong sense of smell. A beagle pack is usually followed on foot, but in a few cases mounted. Beagling is often enjoyed by 'retired' fox hunters who have either sustained too many injuries or lost the agility to ride horseback, or who enjoy the outdoors and the camaraderie of the hunt. It is also traditionally a way for young men and women to learn how to handle hounds on a smaller scale before they go on to hunt with foxhounds.
The Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) is a United Kingdom organisation that uses hunt sabotage as a means of direct action to stop fox hunting. It was founded in 1963, with its first sabotage event occurring at the South Devon Foxhounds on 26 December 1963.
Drag hunting or draghunting is a form of equestrian sport, where mounted riders hunt the trail of an artificially laid scent with hounds.
A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies, or may be used in argumentation inadvertently.
A field trial is a competitive event for gun dogs. Field trials are conducted for pointing dogs and setters, retrievers and spaniels, with each assessing the different types various working traits. In the United States, field trials are also conducted for basset hounds, beagles, and dachshunds.
The Segugio Italiano is either of two Italian breeds of dog of scent hound type, the wire-haired Segugio Italiano a Pelo Forte or the short-haired Segugio Italiano a Pelo Raso. Apart from the coat type, they are closely similar, and in some sources may be treated as a single breed; the Fédération Cynologique Internationale and the Ente Nazionale della Cinofilia Italiana treat them as separate. They are also genetically close to the other two Italian scent hound breeds, the Segugio Maremmano and the Segugio dell'Appennino. They are traditionally used for hunting hare, but may also be used in boar hunts.
Thames Hare and Hounds is the oldest adult cross-country running club in the world, based on the Roehampton end of Wimbledon Common, adjacent to Richmond Park, and draws runners from across south-west London. Both the men's and women's teams compete in the Surrey Cross Country League, division one; the club also fields teams in road races and relays. Thames host races in Richmond Park and on Wimbledon Common, in particular the cross-country Oxford–Cambridge Varsity Match, held each year since 1880 on Wimbledon Common after the end of Michaelmas term.
The Bruno Jura Hound is a breed of scenthound from the Jura Mountains on the French-Swiss border.
The Taigan, and also known as Kyrgyz Taighany, Mongolian Taiga dog is a breed of sighthound from Kyrgyzstan. The Taigan is found in the alpine Tian Shan region of Kyrgyzstan on the border with China, it is closely related to the Tazy and the Saluki.
The Sabueso Español or Spanish Hound is a scenthound breed with its origin in the far north of Iberian Peninsula. This breed has been used in this mountainous region since hundreds of years ago for all kind of game: wild boar, hare, brown bear, wolf, red deer, fox, roe deer and chamois. It is an exclusive working breed, employed in hunting with firearms.
The bloodhound is a large scent hound, originally bred for hunting deer, wild boar, rabbits, and since the Middle Ages, for tracking people. Believed to be descended from hounds once kept at the Abbey of Saint-Hubert, Belgium, in French it is called, le chien de Saint-Hubert.
Rache, also spelled racch, rach, and ratch, from Old English ræcc, linked to Old Norse rakkí, is an obsolete name for a type of hunting dog used in Great Britain in the Middle Ages. It was a scenthound used in a pack to run down and kill game, or bring it to bay. The word appears before the Norman Conquest. It was sometimes confused with 'brache', which is a French derived word for a female scenthound.
A limer, or lymer, was a kind of dog, a scenthound, used on a leash in medieval times to find large game before it was hunted down by the pack. It was sometimes known as a lyam hound/dog or lime-hound, from the Middle English word lyam, meaning 'leash'. The French cognate limier has sometimes been used for the dogs in English as well. The type is not to be confused with the bandog, which was also a dog controlled by a leash, typically a chain, but was a watchdog or guard dog.
Trail hunting is a legal, although controversial, alternative to hunting animals with hounds in Great Britain. A trail of animal urine is laid in advance of the 'hunt', and then tracked by the hound pack and a group of followers; on foot, horseback, or both.
The Buckhound was a breed of now extinct scent hound from England; they were used to hunt fallow deer in packs.
The West Country Harrier, sometimes called Somerset Harrier, is a breed of scent hound from the south west of England that is used to hunt hare in packs. The West Country Harrier is often considered to be a variety of the more common Harrier breed, which is sometimes referred to as the Studbook Harrier.
Bassets are a sub-type of scenthound deliberately bred with short legs, that are used for hunting where the hunters accompany the hunting hounds on foot.