One brazen little coyote sat on a hill and hurled insults  every morning as I drove by with the dogs running loose beside the car on the dirt track. She would have been about halfway grown up by that fall. Not far from here, I once watched as  my borzoi Ruffian, a lone white and gold bitch, elegant and fine, gave chase to a lone coyote. She started far behind the coyote, which after about a straight half mile ran directly up a very steep, scooped out bowl on one side of a hill, probably a greened-over gravel pit chewed into the hillside in days gone by. That bowl became almost verticle as it's side rose to the top. I could see that at the top, out of her line of vision, were three more coyotes waiting, sitting and watching attentively, heads and ears bent toward the chase. They would have been able to see most of the course, while she could not see them. I have no idea whether the running coyote knew his pack was waiting there at the top, just behind the rim. But the pack knew he and she were comming, and  I knew they would very possibly kill her. This is the perspective given by coursing; things are happening out of your control, very fast and far away. Your  voice is blown away, and your puny human body leaves you helpless in this world. You are far too slow to be of any significance, at all. My heart was in my thoat when her heart got tired on that verticle face; the game went out of sight over the top; she stopped, exhausted, turned, slowly came back, down the long road back to me.
      It was dark when I started the roadworking, and I drove with the headlights on. I had to be finished and gone before the farmers came out to work so I wouldn't be in their way. This is a landscape of transparent layers of  tenancy, seperated by hours or seasons. The land extends everywhere in  wave forms, dune hills made of topsoil, all curving horizontals with not a straight line anywhere. Everything here is out in the open, with no place for a deer or a coyote to hide except in low spots between hills, or by cresting a hill to get out of sight.
    Thinking about lines of sight becomes second nature when you run sighthounds, or gazehounds as they are also called. For sight hunters, if  prey goes out of sight by going over a hill or disappearing  into a gully, the game is over. Sighthounds don't drop their heads to scent track, they seek game with their eyes, and their eyes are specially adapted to the task. Set in long lean heads, the hounds' eyes are placed slightly to the side, less frontally than those of other dogs, giving greater side vision. Even the cells in the eye itself are adapted to coursing; they form a long narrow visual streak across the retina, unlike the centered pattern in other dogs, creating a huge field of view. There is an Arab saying that the desert is large-eyed. Predator and prey, hawk and gazelle, saluki and hare, attentively watching in vast spaces.
    The Russians, who have a specific term for everything, have a term for the muscles a Russian borzoi should have; chornaya myasa, or "black flesh". This darkness of the muscles is due to the high level of vascularization necessary to bring in the blood supply required for running. Gazehound hearts are larger than those of other dogs; their blood has lower platelet counts and is higher in oxygen-bearing red blood cells; and those cells have thinner membranes than the red blood cells of other dogs, for faster oxygen exchange. The Russian term for the extreme muscular width required of the rear is zadnyi postav; gazehounds  have the highest muscle to body mass ratio of any dog. The Russian term brossok refers to a behavior we translate as the fling; when running with what seems to be all the effort any dog can give, the dog somehow  reaches inside himself  for more, accelerating when acceleration seems impossible and literally flinging himself through the air in a final effort to close on the prey. This is not hunting for survival, where a maximally efficient relationship between effort expended and calories gained is required; this is the intensification and distillation of desire, bred because it's terrible beauty moves men's souls. England's King Henry V exhorted his army to victory against overwhelming odds with a speech urging them to be "as greyhounds in slips."
    At first glance the gazehounds resemble other cursorial creatures, more like gazelle or deer than dogs, with their elongated limbs and their taut dry faces, veins running beneath silk-thin skin and scanner eyes looking out over the land for movement. Everything about them, inside and out, including  traits and mechanisms we remain unaware of, is honed and tuned and adapted for speed. Bred in the bone, close as blood and the heart that pumps it; heart, brain, eye, blood; all converge on the point of purpose.