Stone-Stepper Hound

A powerful breed, the muscular build and powerful legs, lungs and flexible joints within its ankles and legs matching well with its honed senses of smell and hearing, making it an excellent hunting companion in mountains and craggy terrain. Able to discern direction and distance even through the natural distortion of sound within such rocky highlands, picking through the echoing and honing in on the source, this sense only equaled by the breed's acute sense of smell. Whilst not perfectly on par with a Roharan Hound, it is nearly the equal and just about as adept a climber as the Valewyrian Mastiff, with a sense of hearing to match. They are the perfect highland hunting dogs, and are a breed favored all across Valerick now for that very task. About the size of a large herding dog, but with a more sleek structure built for stamina and speed on the chase.

A hybrid of two dog breeds that are valuable companions and much beloved in their own right, the Stone-Stepper Hound is a breed all its own, genetically chosen, a fine example of the sapient races selectively cross breeding domesticated animals to encourage certain traits. With the robust leg and joint structure of the Valewyrian Mastiff, a beloved working dog from the cloud forest and mountainous regions of Valewyr known for its strength and comfort in such rough terrain. Mixed with the Roharan Hound, a sharp sensed hunting and tracking hound with excellent stamina and capable of chase speeds in excess of 25 km/hour, and able to sustain paces of 20km/hour for many hours on little water, tracking all manner of prey with pinpoint precision and focus. These two species were bred and mixed for many generations and the resulting kin were selected and bred within that population until a recognizably unique species came out of the union. Capable of maintaining speeds in the nearly 20km/hour range even in mountainous and craggy terrain, with the ability to leap nearly a dozen feet vertically when required, and with the strength and bite force nearly comparable to a cloud leopard, these dogs make excellent hunting companions within highland and mountainous regions of the world and have seen their popularity spread across Valerick.