Chapter I: OWE too many pleasant hours to hunting hares to damn the sport with (1)

faint praise, but, kind reader, if you notice a want of enthusiasm in the following chapter, pray do not ascribe it so much to my sympathy with the quotation that heads this article, as to my desire to pose as an impartial critic. Silence, care, and science are the qualities that a hare-hunter should pride himself on; youth and high spirits, eagerness and impetuosity are the life and soul of fox-hunting--dangerous qualities in the chase of the timid little hare. I have had many a day with beagles and harriers--many a happy one; and yet in fairness I must make the confession that the days I enjoyed best were those when they got on to a fox. Ah! I fear if I made a clean breast of it, I should have to tell of days when my brother (who had a fine little cry of beagles) and I used to get up before daybreak, mount our horses, and hie off to the moors by ourselves, out of the ear of the sleeping world, to give a belated marauder a jolly good dusting before he made his distant and unstopped earth; and, more rarely perhaps, the eternal craving for “a run” was so great that a man with a bag shook “something” out of it in a lonely spot. Dear me! I could tell some tales. I have in my mind’s eye a day when my brother, with another more famous master of harriers (now, like some others, an M.F.H.), and myself were beaten by the little hounds as they raced away over the moors after an extraordinarily fine-smelling fox; but I must check myself, or my style will degenerate into that of a fox-hunter’s.

After all, I have a conviction that many a green-coated gentleman has a sneaking sympathy with my sins and want of orthodoxy. If these lines meet the eye of any hare-hunter, whose indignation and contempt is becoming too strong for words at the levity with which I speak of his sport, let him keep cool and take comfort, for have not I, as prescribed by the ancient rules of the Cleveland Hunt Club, laid my right hand on the hunting-horn and solemnly declared myself to be “no enemy to fox-hunting and harriers.” Let me answer such an one that I, like him, regard the man who is so innocent of sport that he declares the triumph over the timid hare to be poor, as an ignorant simpleton; and if any one with superior airs were to hazard such a statement to me, my reply would be “All right, my boy! you try your hand on an old buck hare on a cold scenting day in February, on horseback, if you like; or, if that is too easy, get off and hunt them on foot, be up to them, see them from start to finish, and tell me how you got on and what you think of it.”

Personally, were I to criticise hare-hunting, I should say that too much of the chief diversion is the monopoly of the huntsmen--certainly the days I have thoroughly enjoyed have been those when I carried the horn myself. Again, with fast harriers or 20-inch fox-hounds, you must ride, but then you would do better with fox-hounds. If you went on foot, nature must have been lavish in her gifts if you have the physical power, courage, and endurance to enable you to keep near enough to see the beautiful detail of harrier work; and, finally, when you have killed your hare, it is rather a miserable-looking trophy that is yours. You may ornament your smoking-room with your hares’ heads, but you alone will feel that they are appropriate mural decorations; for your friends a few lop-eared rabbits would be more interesting.

I notice that all authorities on this subject dwell on the fact that hare-hunting is an ancient sport; that old writers describe with great ingenuity and veracity all the qualities and ways of this clever little beast. Some of these descriptions are most quaint, for example, the following:--“There are four kind of Hares: some live in the Mountains, some in the Fields, some in the Marshes, some everywhere, without any place of abode. They of the Mountains are most swift, they of the Fields less nimble, they of the Marshes most slow, and the wandering Hares are most dangerous to follow.” The habits noted by the naturalist-sportsmen of this period are as wonderful, and bespeak as much observation, with almost as excellent results, as those given by certain writers on natural history of our own day; for instance, we are told of the hare: “Her ears lead her the way in her chase, for with one of them she hearkeneth to the cry of the dogs, and the other she stretches forth like a sail to hasten her course.”... “Tho’ their sight be dim, yet have they _visum indefessum_.”... “When they watch they shut their Eyes, when they sleep they open them.”... In these good old times they used the correct terms for all the proceedings of the chase, and for every habit and description of each and several kind of beast they had the appropriate language. The hare was a beast of “venery,” and her meat “venison”; whilst, for dislodging a hart, you used the word “unharbour,” for a buck “rouse”; you “start” a hare, “rear” the boar, and “unkennel” the fox. When once the hare is on foot, if she takes the open field, she “soreth”; when she winds about, she “doubleth”; she “pricketh” on the road, and you “trace” her in the snow. Hounds “hunt change,” “hunt counter,” “draw amiss,” “hunt the foil”; when first they find, they “challenge.” If they are assisted by a relay of hounds, it is called a “vaunt-lay”; if the hare tries a place and gives it up, it is called a “blemish.” When hounds kill, and the hare or any part is given to them, it is the “reward.” The hare was always reckoned among the beasts of chase, and sometimes as the “king of beasts”; her order amongst beasts of venery came third or first, according to the fancy of the period, but always far ahead of the fox, which was vermin. Here is one list of the “Beasts of venery.” “Hart, hinde, hare, wild boar, wolf. Beasts for hunting: ye hare, hart, wolf, wild boar. Beasts for the chase: ye buck, ye doe, fox, marten, roe. Beasts which afford greate dysporte: badger, wild cat, otter.”

It is interesting, I mean for a fox-hunter, to try and discover why the hare was so much preferred to the fox by the sportsmen of two hundred years ago. One of them gives this reason: “The Fox never flies far before the Hounds, trusting not on his Legs, Strength or Champion ground [champaign = open country] but strongest Coverts,” and “when he can no longer stand up before the Hounds, he then taketh Earth, and then must he be digged out.” From these two sentences it is obvious that harriers, accustomed as they were to find their game in the open country, had not developed the habit of drawing thick coverts, and were probably poor hands at bustling a fox in a whin cover and at forcing him out. Indeed, we find that they were not always good at finding a hare in the open, for it was a custom to employ “hare-finders,” and Peter Beckford, though he admits paying two guineas in a single day to the men who were thus employed, laments the demoralisation of hounds, consequent on the custom making them bad finders. But there were other reasons. Hares were “game”; they were protected under the Game Laws and by special statutes, such as that of 15 Henry VIII. cap. 18, which made it a penal offence to destroy hares in the snow. The hare was, moreover, ubiquitous, whilst foxes were vermin, and regarded as noxious animals with a price on their heads, fixed by law or local custom--they were scarce and held in contempt when packs of hounds first came in vogue.

From a painting by Mr. Heywood Hardy.]

Since penning this sentence I have turned over my Beckford. He says: “The hounds most likely to show you sport are between the large, slow-hunting harrier and the little fox-beagle. The former are too dull, too heavy, and too slow; the latter too lively, too light, and too fleet.” He thinks that if the day is long enough you might kill with the first species, and if the country was deep and wet, the others might be drowned. Beckford bred for many years an “infinity of hounds” before he got what he wanted, but at last he had the pleasure to see them “very handsome,” “small yet bony,” after which, he cynically remarks, “when they were thus perfect, I did as many others do, I parted with them.”

Again, the hounds of those earlier days were not, in point of pace and quality, equal to hunting such wild foxes as there were. It was only as the small harriers were improved into the type of what we call fox-hounds, that hunting-men realised that fox-hunting was a high-class sport. Harriers were first turned into regular fox-hounds about the year 1740. From this date, then, we can begin to class hounds into two divisions: the harriers, kept small, active, but slow, and, above all, sure with their noses; and those improved in size, gradually acquiring the dash and pace necessary for pursuing the fox. Success in hare-hunting depends more on perseverance; that in fox-hunting, on pace. It is curious to note that the old harrier type is being destroyed. The slow, deep-mouthed southern hound, the beagle, and the light, active, snipey-nosed harrier are going out before the modern craze to have harriers dwarf fox-hounds. My own idea is that no sport can be obtained equal to that which was afforded by harriers of the stamp that distinguished the pack until lately hunted by Mr. Robert Fellowes, of Shotesman,--little beauties, all quality and activity, not too fast and flighty to hunt a cold line or a doubling hare, and yet able to drive along when the opportunity arrived, and requiring a good hunter under one when they meant going. It may be replied that in adopting the dwarf fox-hound type, present Masters are reverting to a still older standard. I readily admit it. Indeed, I was recently looking at a print of Mr. Astley’s harriers in 1810, in which they are something like “dwarf fox-hounds,” but they _are_ “dwarf,” and, behold, a terrier accompanies the pack, telling the tale that they hunted the fox as well as the hare. If the old type of hound had answered its purpose, those generations which were hare-hunters rather than fox-hunters would not have abandoned the dwarf fox-hound type for that which was properly regarded as pure harrier. It is more than doubtful if harriers ought to be more than eighteen inches high; and beagles, for following on foot, should not exceed fourteen inches.

Certainly hare-hunting affords the greatest scope for the huntsman’s craft and the finest exhibition of hound work. The hare is really a much more _rusé_ animal than the fox; she can steal away better, and, once started, there is no end to her wiles and dodges. She runs craftily and cunningly, doubling back on her own foil, pricking her way down watery furrows, or lobbing along the high road. She will “squat” or “clap” just as hounds are carrying a head, or turn out a fresh hare; if her pursuers overshoot her, she will sneak back in the least expected direction. Hare-hunters are fond of talking about straight-necked hares. My experience has been unfortunate. I have not seen many good points made by hares, and it is not in the straight run that the art of the huntsman and the virtues of the harrier are tested and brought into play. To enjoy the regular sport with a pack, you must have a keen appreciation of all the niceties of the game, and be able to watch with pleasure all the ins and outs, the windings and twistings so neatly unravelled with such a pretty hubbub of bass and treble music from the busy little hounds. There is a joy quite of its own in the cry of harriers and beagles (I am not speaking of dwarf fox-hounds). A minute’s silence at the fault, the competition of all the little beauties casting round--a sight delightful to the eye;--then a full note of the pure truth, the rush up to the speaking hound, the chorus of consent from a score of throats, swelling to the full cry of the whole pack as they go driving away as if possessed by one soul--a sound delightful to the ears, and not exactly described to me by a farmer as “joost like a flock o’ craws gettin’ out ov a tater field.”

Every man has a right to his own opinion, and mine is that the perfection of hare-hunting is with beagles. The average hare is overmatched by the modern harrier. The beagle is not too fast, his nose is finer, he far excels the harrier in vigilance, energy, and persistency, whilst the music of a pack of beagles is unequalled. But we live in fast times; we have not the leisure even to enjoy the time it takes for a pack of 10 or 11-inch beagles to trace and puzzle out the course of a hare with beautiful exactness till their perseverance is at length rewarded. We must find a hare at once, and kill her in a few minutes, and, if she is lost, find another without waste of time. This, however, is not the spirit of hare-hunting, but the fever of our day. As a spectacle, as a wonder, and an exhibition of the marvellous senses and powers with which nature has endowed both hare and hound, give me a pack of beagles at work. The present generation of followers of harriers are scarcely aware of the perfection to which beagles can be brought, and how undefeated even a 10-inch pack can prove itself to be with the best of hares. I do not suppose there exists to-day a pack like that of Mr. Honeywood’s, fifty or sixty years ago, not a hound above 10 inches, all level, and every one pure white, a perfect little lot. One contemporary writer said: “It is quite beyond credence the number of hares they kill in the course of a season. When running with a good scent, they might belong to the Fairy Queen, so small, fast, and handsome are they.”

Hare-hunting ought to preserve an honoured place amongst our national sports. For the young on foot it is a manly and healthy pursuit; for those who have to ride, a pleasant and pretty pastime. It gives those whose stud is too limited for fox-hunting an opportunity of sharing the incomparable pleasures of the chase. The man on foot, if wind and limb will not allow him to be with them, can see much of the game from the hill-top, if not from the gate-post; while the man on his only mount may see every detail of the hunt and have his three days a week; he has, too, one advantage over the fox-hunter, that he is more sure of his entertainment. His disappointments are fewer, for he does not expect a 9-mile point or forty minutes racing across country. It is a sport for rich and poor, for tender youth and old age, and for all those who enjoy the niceties of the huntsman’s craft tested at its highest.

V

FOX-HUNTING

V

“Hunting is the sport of kings, the image of war without its
guilt, with only five-and-twenty per cent. of the danger.”

SO John Jorrocks felt and said; but in his oratorical effort to glorify hunting he both over- and under-did his figures of rhetoric--for though stag-hunting, so long as we have the buck-hounds, may yet be a royal sport in Old England, the whole line of crowned heads that have done us the honour of sitting on our throne would repudiate fox-hunting as the sport of kings, while the people would claim it for their own. It is the privilege of no class; its constitution is republican, founded and living on liberty, equality, and fraternity. Fox-hunting has grown out of ill-repute during the last two centuries, and has long been placed first in popular affection. Good Queen Bess,[1] by a statute (8 Eliz. cap. 15) “for killing of verming as foxes and such like,” gave expression to her people’s wishes, and provided a machinery of rewards for the head of every “fox” or “gray” (badger); whilst St. John, in his speech on the trial of Strafford, makes the blood of the modern sportsman run cold as he cries out: “It is true we give law to hares and deer because they be beasts of chase. It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play to knock foxes and wolves on the head as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey.” Mr. R. B. Turton, the editor of _The North Riding Quarter Sessions Records_ (from whom I quote), truly remarks that, however shocking to our feelings, fox-hunting seems to have occupied somewhat the same position in this period that rat-catching does now. The statute of Elizabeth just referred to remained on the Statute-Book till 1863, and was actually in operation in Cleveland at least as late as 1847. There are in the Register and Churchwarden accounts for Lythe many entries of the rewards paid by the parish for “werment,” from 1705 to 1847. A few extracts will suffice for my object, which is to find some excuse for the illegitimate proceedings that have been continued even to my own day in certain outlying districts of the Cleveland Hunt.

1706.--Ugthorpe quarter--for 14 fullmor[2] heads 0 04 8
Newton--for 11 fullmor and 3 fox heads 0 12 8
Barnby--6 fullmor heads 0 02 0
Lythe--3 fox heads and 6 fullmor heads 0 11 0
1787.--To 10 fox heads, 2 at Kettleness, 1 at
Mickleby, 1 at Ugthorpe, 3 at Goldsbro’,
and 3 catched in a trap at Mulgrave Castle 2 0 0

(We still know of the trap in which these foxes were “catched”!)

1846.--1 jackal head 0 8 0
5 fox heads 1 0 0
1847.--(Last entry) 1 fox head 0 4 0

From a study of the many entries similar to the above, it appears that the price set on a fox’s head in Cleveland was, in the earlier period, 3s., and in the present century 4s. The “jackal head” is a mystery that I cannot pretend to solve; the only jackal I ever heard of in Cleveland being a tame one that I imported from Africa, which is living and thriving to-day, after several years of domestic life in anything but an African climate. When I was a boy, I was told by a very old sporting yeoman farmer, that it was the custom in other days, after a kill with the “Roxby and Cleveland” hounds, to go to the parson with the head, get the head money, and then to adjourn to the nearest public-house and expend the price of blood over a bowl of punch, the flavour of which was heightened by the addition of a pad, the brush, or the whole head to the mixture. This, I have no doubt, might correctly be described as strong drink.

But to hark back on the line for a moment. I feel I must qualify my opening paragraph, for I have suddenly remembered a passage I lately read in one of the Reports of the Historical MSS. Commission, which both shows that royalty in the seventeenth century countenanced fox-hunting, and that it is of greater antiquity than some modern authors generally suppose. Here is the extract taken from a Newsletter, November 17, 1674: “11th, on Saturday or Sunday (!) next His Royal Highness and the Duke of Monmouth and divers persons of quality go to Chichester, where they are to lodge in the Bishop’s (!) Palace, and expect all the gentry of the neighbourhood to repair with their dogs for seven or eight days’ fox-hunting.” It must have been a curious sight on that Sunday morning to see His Royal Highness, the Duke, the Bishop, the divers persons of quality, with their dogs, at the palace--and one can picture the appearance of the “dogs,” collected from all parts of the country, of all shapes and sizes.

But I am hanging on the line, if not dwelling in covert, and all this was meant to be by way of saying that these old-fashioned ideas of fox-hunting seem to have penetrated, to some extent at least, to the days when I first hunted with the Cleveland hounds. I can testify that to many of the sportsmen on foot, even to many of the farmers on horseback, the fox was certainly in the class of “verming and such like,” and that they considered it a most magnanimous proceeding, instead of “to knock” foxes on the head as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey, “to shake him out of a bag and collect all the dogs,” and have a “hoont.”

The reader must not be too hard on them; they were hard-working farmers, with small means, who could not afford the serious depredations that they suffered from foxes amongst their moor sheep, and especially amongst their lambs in the spring. There was no M.F.H., in the modern sense. They kept a few hounds, one here and one there, which were collected or “blown up” on hunting days, and they managed their sport in a very homely and simple fashion, many of them never having a horse to ride, and following on foot. For the man on foot with fox-hounds I have the most profound respect and admiration. I mean, of course, the genuine article,--not the loafer with a club and a hare-pocket in the inside of his coat, nor the determined and ignorant sightseer, who stands in the middle of the field next the whin covert, displaying British independence when asked to “come in,” or who obstinately sits on a gate hallooing every time a fox attempts to break; but the dauntless man whose love of the sport and hound work is such that he counts as nothing aching limbs and blowing bellows, nor the weary tramp home, if he can only get a look in.

It is not the footman who alone sins through carelessness and ignorance--in some riding-men the latter quality seems invincible. I knew one, a regular follower of hounds, who went out with Lord Zetland’s and finished with the Hurworth, without ever discovering that he had changed packs. Such good fellows as the followers of hounds on foot ought to receive the fraternal welcome of their mounted colleagues in the field--whilst a kind word, instead of choice Billingsgate, will do more than restrain the ignorant sinner, and tend to his better understanding of what is required of him. Every man, as long as he respects the rules of the game, has a right to be there. It occurs to me, as I turn over the leaves of my hunting diary, that I was not always so patient with the footmen, as, for instance, on December 26, 1881, when I record: “Monday, Hounds at Paradise Farm. A most inappropriate name for a most unfortunate day--the country flooded with foot people. The sky-line black with them--a most horrible sight! We had soon a fox on foot, but, headed in every direction, he fell a victim to the mob’s thirst for blood. A like horrible fate awaited the second fox on Guisborough Moor, above Bethel Slack; the spectacle of the hundreds round the corpse of the poor murdered brute, clamouring for fox-skin, was heartrending. What added to the mortification was the fact of the day being an ideal one, soft, cloudy, scenting. Some of the remarks I overheard tended to relieve the dark melancholy of the day. One delightful ruffian, with an awful club, turned to another with a bludgeon in his hand. ‘The dogs never gav oos a chance, they moordered him, not killed him.’ Mr. ---- nearly rode over one of the crowd, and on the nearly overridden one remonstrating in forcible language, soothed him with the remark, ‘There’ll be plenty more left when you’re done for,’ which, however unfeeling, was the naked truth. Another scene of this unhappy day that gave a momentary joy was that of two men on bare-backed, hairy-heeled farm horses with blinkers on. One said to the other, ‘Blame it all! I wish we could get away from these foot people!’”

Years ago, when I was a boy, it was not a rare thing with the farmer’s trencher-fed pack with which I hunted to turn a fox down in the moorland district where grouse-preserving or sheep-farming made a find always uncertain and often impossible. Thirteen minutes was the law allowed, and when time was called, hounds were laid on. There is no denying that if pace and distance are the only desiderata, a stout old moor- or cliff-fox, turned down some distance from home, will give a better run than any you are likely to get by legitimate methods in a season. The blot on such a performance is not so much unfairness to the fox, for with thirteen minutes’ law a good fox was more than often a match for the hounds, even when aniseed or turpentine had been applied to his pads. He had at least as good a chance of saving his bacon as if he had been found in the whin covert, where many a good fox has been chopped before making his try for the open. No, it is not the pace of a run, the distance from point to point, or the perfection of the country, that make up the whole sport of hunting. The sport consists in the meeting of the hound and the animal hunted on nature’s own terms in a free field with no favour, and in being there to see the struggle. And to the man with real hunting instinct, no steeplechase after aniseed or a bagman can give the satisfaction and delight of the success in accounting for a wild-bred fox, whether the day be bright or dull, the scent hot or cold. And while no one could derive greater enjoyment from the fast good thing over the pick of the country, more than half his pleasure is due to the feeling that the reward of a red-letter day has been worked for honestly and is due to no resort to artifice.

Contrast the pleasure that the man with no idea beyond his boots, coat, tie, galloping and jumping, extracts from a day’s hunting, with that which the man who is a genuine “hunter” obtains. Putting aside the social pleasures of the chase, the meeting of friends by the covert side, and the incidents of interest and amusement in the field, the pleasure of the one is dependent on being well mounted in a good country after a straight-necked fox; and he is an exacting and hypercritical follower of hounds. The other feels the longest day too short, and can enjoy hounds puzzling out a line, bustling a fox through woodlands, or driving him over a moor, with one idea uppermost --to be there to see every detail of their work as if he were a hound himself. Weather, indifferent scent, bad countries, ugly fences, and even an imperfect mount, are but to him difficulties he can delight in fighting with. He rides to hunt; but he who hunts to ride will, as years pass by, find the bad days are too many, the good days too few, the country too familiar to ever taste the rapture and expectation that charmed his younger days: either he abandons the chase or comes out for air, exercise, and gossip. But from youth to age the other’s interest never flags. When a boy the hounds are a wonder; the country is an immense and mysterious paradise; the hard man is his model; the huntsman his hero; and in every fox he sees the possibility of the run of the season; truly the life with horse and hound is his ideal of earthly bliss. For him, as for us all, time brushes away the mysteries, and the scene loses its fresh enchantment. Hope is the richest treasure of warm-blooded youth, gilding each day with glorious possibilities, but the old enemy is gentler with him than with the other. He may no longer spring lightly on to the hunter with the wild eye and winging quarters, feeling equal to sending him along, no matter where, no matter how far--his eye kens each corner of the once unknown land, he has tasted all the joys and triumphs that the chase can give. The red-letter days, he knows, are few and far between, and when they come they but jog his memory of a better. But if his heart no longer beats with the hot anticipation of the long ago, his experience gives him a conscious power, and an ability to appreciate niceties unnoticed by the crowd; his memory is a storehouse in which he delights to rummage. The melancholy that must accompany age, he, like others, may not escape from--the moments when he re-peoples his country with those who have gone, and remembers the voices that are heard no more. But the landscape from the covert side is all the dearer to him for the echo of voices long since stilled, and the cry of those hounds whose blood still flows in the streaming black and white and tan with whom he still holds a place.

Well, then, if it was almost like a habit in some districts, where foxes were systematically kept down, for a past generation to save the day’s sport by resorting to a bagman, the reader must not be shocked if I confess to being a living witness to what in charity we may ascribe to an hereditary tendency. After all, there was more excuse for them than for some noblemen. They at least dug out the wild fox from the sea-cliffs, while the fashionable game-preserver, or the titled vulpicide, purchased his fox in Leadenhall.

I have just turned up an old ballad which I have never seen in print, and as it touches on the subject, I may as well give it a place here, premising, however, that I cannot but think it is libellous, looking to the way in which subsequent bearers of the title of Lonsdale have associated themselves with the best interests of real sport.

LORD LONSDALE’S HOUNDS:

1849-1850.

It was an Earl of ancient name
Who hunted the fox, but preferred him tame,
Though his sire had been a hunter free,
As bold as e’er rode o’er a grass countree.

The sire would mount his high-bred horse,
And view the wild fox from the hillside gorse;
The son goes down by a second-class train,
Worries a bagman, and home again.

’Tis half-past twelve by the railway clocks,
And the Earl has called for his horse and his fox;
And behind the Earl there rides the Earl’s groom,
And then comes a man with a long birch broom,
Clad in the Earl’s discarded breeches,
Who will tickle the fox when he comes to the ditches.

The Earl’s admirers are ranged in Brown’s yard,
They all wear top-boots and intend to ride hard;
Whether “wily fox” or timid hare
Be the game to-day, none of them care.
Well was it the Earl had called for his fox,
And brought it from Tring in a little deal box,
For three hours and more they drew for a hare,
But drew in vain! All was blank despair.
Then said the Earl to the elder Brown,
“Open your box and turn him down.”

So they turned him down in Aylesbury vale,
In front of a fence called a post and a rail,
To suit the views of a certain gent,
Who rather liked “Rails,”[3] and thought he went.
Over the rails the first to fly
Was the gent of course, but the fox was shy,
And would have declined, but the Earl and his groom,
The huntsman and whip, and his man with the broom,
Two boys in a cart, and the Browns, Sam and John,
Wouldn’t hear of his shirking, and drove him along.

A pleasant line the captive took,
Wouldn’t have doubles, avoided the brook;
As you may imagine, he ran by rule,
Only taking the leaps he had learned at school.

Two hounds of Baron Rothschild’s breed,
Unmatched for courage, breath, and speed,
Close on his flying traces came,
And nearly won the desperate game.
But just as the Earl was preparing to sound
The dreaded “whoo-whoop”--why, he ran to ground;
So they dug him out; and the Earl and his groom,
And the Browns and the gent and the man with the broom,
And the fox and the hounds are at Tring again,
And the Earl has gone back by the five o’clock train.

How well I remember some of those illegitimate days, and at this distance of time I can do no harm in telling tales of those with whom I was a _post facto_ accomplice. Not only I, but the very hounds knew what was “up” when we met at Liverton. Hounds’ heads all one way; ears cocked and sterns waving, and every now and again a dash of the wilder members of the pack, followed by cracking whips and hunt servants galloping round the paddock. Such days remain clear in my memory. The fox generally had been procured overnight from the great sea-cliffs of Boulby, where it was dangerous for hounds to draw, and where many a leading hound has met his end with a last fearful fall of 600 feet into the North Sea. I recollect a particularly long and trying run, when, after a fast twenty minutes over the stiff enclosures between Moorsholm and Grinkle, and after crossing two of the deep gills that run up inland from the sea, our fox took the open moor, with some seven or eight survivors of the field in hot pursuit. His first point was Danby Beacon, and, keeping the high ridge of the moor for awhile, he turned south into the valley of the Esk. A very excellent specimen of the Cleveland hunting farmer, George Codling, senior, who will after this lapse of time forgive me for naming him, had now the best of it, and beat me to Castleton Park, being clearly first up when hounds pulled down their fox on the very edge of the Esk River. I was there a moment after Codling, and struggled with him to reach the fox, now in deep water, in the midst of the swimming pack, for these were the days when men turned their horses adrift, and almost fought for the honour of the brush, which fell to him who took the fox from the hounds. In our scuffle at the water’s edge, while we were using our hunting-crops as boat-hooks, I unintentionally knocked Codling’s hat into the river, thinking little of such a trivial accident at such a moment; but not so Mr. Codling, who was hot with excitement, and annoyed by my efforts, which so far had only resulted in boat-hooking the fox into deeper waters. To lose the brush and his hat was too much, and though it was sleeting and bitterly cold, we both of us had difficulty in keeping our language at a decent temperature. I was too intent on my fishing, being up to the waist and having a tug of war with the hounds over the disputed trophy, to much heed the noise of my companion. When, at last, after a successful dive for the remains, I regained the bank with the head, backbone, and brush, I thought that he would be appeased when I handed him the brush, for by this time I was cool enough, dripping and shaking all over; but not a bit of it: the brush, of course, was his before, so there was nothing generous in my handing it to him. It was only adding insult to injury, to hand him a brush as if I was presenting a testimonial. Well, anything for peace and quietness, so in I went again for his hat, but still all efforts to make myself agreeable were in vain. What was the use to him of a hat full of mud and water on a coarse day like that? As we were wet through, and covered with bog mud, I thought a wet and muddy tile was all that any reasonable man had a right to expect, but I think I promised him a new hat; if I have never given him one (and my memory fails me on this point), I shall be most happy to do so now. I am certain of this, that he demanded a new hat all the way homewards. What opportunities artists miss! I can imagine no more comical scene for a looker-on. Codling, in hatless wrath, with the draggled brush so hardly earned and rescued, pouring curses on me, whilst I stood open-mouthed, blue, and shaking, with the dripping head in my hands, the hounds crouching and shivering and wretched around us, and the backbone of the fox lying between us--our horses disappearing on the horizon! I think what has stamped this day on my memory was the awful journey home in a blizzard with a tired horse. I hardly knew what I did, but in those days the head at my saddle, and the thought of the run, were ample compensation for all I had endured from the water, the weather, and the wrath of my successful competitor. I think that the disrespect I showed to Mr. Codling’s hat rather increased in the end the friendly relationship between him and myself. It formed a fresh link in our hunting association, and he was far too keen a sportsman himself not to forgive an excess of zeal on the part of another, even when it had gone the length of nearly putting him in after his hat.

[Footnote 1: _Vide_ Turton’s “The Honor and Forest of Pickering,”
_North Riding Records_.]

[Footnote 2: Foumart, foulmart, or polecat.]

[Footnote 3: The “gent” named in verse six was a great speculator
in railway shares.]

VI

FOX-HUNTING

--_continued_

VI

Stags in the forest lie, hares in the valley--O!
Web-footed otters are speared in the lochs!
Beasts of the chase that are not worth a tally-ho!
All are surpassed by the gorse-cover fox.
Fishing, though pleasant,
I sing not at present,
Nor shooting the pheasant,
Nor fighting of cocks;
Song shall declare a way
How to drive care away,
Hunting the fox!

THE fox-hunter loves the morning with a cloudy sky and a touch of east in the wind, and, luckily for him, he lives in a land where he can get it. From November till April he is happy to live without the sun, and it is the little red rover that makes him more than content to stay at home, while his unlucky compatriots are chasing the sun to Monte Carlo or the banks of the Nile. There is a charm about English country life that is a full compensation for all the discomforts of a fickle climate. The inconstancy of the sun, and the variableness of our weather, prevent life in England from ever being monotonous. A hunting-man cannot go to bed with any certainty of being free from an exciting anxiety about the weather, any more than he can go to cover with any confidence that scent will be good or that a fox will run straight. He can get between the sheets, and let his fancy picture an ideal day’s sport on the morrow, and himself being well carried over the cream of the country; and yet, when he wakes, he hurries downstairs and on to the lawn with a stick, to poke about to see whether it will be possible to hunt at all.

If we could hook a salmon every time we made a good cast; if we could curl up the rocketing pheasant every time we pressed the trigger; if we could kill our stag every time we beaded him, there would be no pleasure and no satisfaction in such pursuits. No sport can give a greater variety of incident than fox-hunting, or such wondrous transformation scenes. Chance is the magic attraction of such pursuits; the element of the unknown the soul of all adventure.

All the surroundings of the chase minister to man’s passion for novelty, change, excitement, and to his love of movement, of display of colour, or of the picturesque. The scene in which each act takes place varies not only with the formation of the ground, the alternation of hill and vale, of woodland and field, but alters its dress with every month, or with the infinite changes wrought by sun and skies. The line of a fox may be guessed, but never counted on; the pace of a run may be fast or slow; the end may be near or far distant. Scent, as incomprehensible as woman, may be good, bad, or indifferent; and when you trust it, it may suddenly jilt you; when cold, may turn as suddenly hot. The ill fortune of a day may be turned by a happy hit of hound or huntsman, or a run lost by a careless halloo or an unlucky cast. Your place with the pack will often depend on a decision taken quick as lightning at a critical moment, or your discomfiture arise from half a pound too much pull on your rein as you come up to a fence. All these, and a thousand other elements of chance, keep the fox-hunters’ passion evergreen. The fisherman may weary of flogging the unresponding waters; the best shot, no matter how satisfactory his own performance, may feel sated with killing, grow disgusted at the shriek of dying hares, and have moments when he asks in vain for a logical defence of pleasure derived at the expense of wholesale slaughter and mutilation. There is no sport without blood, but there is no field sport with so little bloodshed about it as hunting. When the common fate overtakes the little marauder of the night, it is usually after a well-matched struggle, and his end is swift as the lightning flash.

Every act in the drama on nature’s stage is full of interest and life, from the moment that hounds burst like a flood through the kennel door, the huntsman astride his knowing horse shoves his horn into the case, and “whips” scramble into their saddles--until, when the Master has sounded “home,” the last good-night has been answered as heads are turned in different directions, and the patter of the pack on the muddy road, and the echo of the horses’ feet, fades on the ear as at kennel fadge they trot home in the dusk. And in the interval between the dawn and close of a hunting-day no man can tell what he may do or what he may see; a wild racing ten minutes’ burst, twenty-five minutes’ glorious galloping and jumping, or fifty minutes over the broad vale. However many good things a man in a long life may see with hounds, he will never see two alike; each will make a different call on his valour or discretion, and yield some new experience of the wonderful power of a good horse.

There is a fine array of arguments made use of by those who think it necessary to defend hunting or to recommend it. The farmer may be told it is good for him to see his seeds ridden over and his fences gapped, and that barbed wire is the unpardonable sin referred to in Holy Writ; that it is good for him, because hunting will enable him to sell hay, oats, and straw, and provide horses for his landlord’s stud; and that his tolerance of damage will gain him the generous consideration of the proprietor of his fields; the statistician may marshal his figures and demonstrate the economic value of hunting to the provincial communities and the nation; the man with a liver may be recommended the exercise for his health; and the evolutionist may point out the progressive and physical development of man and horse that has resulted from this pastime of a country life. But hunting will never be pursued for utilitarian ends, or live because of the benefits it undoubtedly bestows on either the individual or the community. These apologies or commendations are the result of that solicitude that accompanies true love. The chase is so dear to the hunter that he has always the dread upon him of losing it, as a lover’s hopes are mixed with the fears of losing what in his eyes only makes life worth living. Love of hunting is a passion, and, like other passions, is unreasoning and illogical.

A man may marry, but does he love a woman because she brings him a fortune, because it is his duty to the community, or because he feels he is a better man in doing so? While his passion lasts he is indifferent to the superior beauty, accomplishments, or wealth of any other.

A man loves the air of a hunting morning, the horse he is astride of, the cry of the hounds, the sound of the horn, and the cheer of the chase without knowing why or wherefore; and though there be no reason for it, the instinct is buried in the breasts of thousands of non-hunting people, and the undefined sympathy of public opinion causes it to countenance visible damage that it would never tolerate for any arguments, however convincing, of duty to country or indirect benefit to the individual. It is to any thinking being touching to see the patience and kindliness shown, by a class that cannot afford loss, to those who ride over their holdings in pursuit of pleasure, which is often done with too little consideration for those without whose passive support their sport must come to an end.

The question of wire has in many districts become a serious one, but let the hunting-man ask himself how he would regard the subject if his own livelihood and home depended entirely on what he could make of one or two hundred acres of land, and he were asked to forego, for the pleasure of others, the substantial saving and economy that a particular kind of fencing would enable him to make. No man hates the sight of wire, or laments the invention of the hideous barbed variety, more than the writer; but it appears to him worse than unjust to abuse and upbraid the farmer who puts it up. In the first place, the landlord, who is more often a worse friend to hunting than the tenant, is the man to whom representation should be made. A farmer may say, My ability to pay my rent depends on my carrying out this, with other economies; and if an occupier does not hunt, the only proper way to prevent his putting up wire is to compensate him for the loss which he incurs by foregoing his right to do so. The men who can afford thousands for the maintenance of their studs may be expected to respond to an appeal to find a few pounds to secure the existence of hunting. On the other hand, the farmer who places wire so as to be a trap, without notice, deserves the censure of all who dislike a mean or cruel deed. In the north of England there are few counties where wire is a serious inconvenience, and I know of none where it is a danger that is likely to entrap a man, save on the rarest occasions.

Not only does the non-hunting farmer deserve all the assistance that lies in the power of master and field to show to him, but the shooting tenant should equally be the object of thoughtful and kindly consideration. Half the sins of hunting-men, and nearly every complaint on their part of being ill-used, are the result of their own thoughtlessness and carelessness. As life yields its experience, the similarity of the average human nature, whether a man be peer, commoner, or peasant, becomes more and more apparent, as does the magic power of charity, that best cure and preventive of bad blood. A little attention, a little effort towards acquaintance, a few minutes given up now and again to a friendly chat, a word or two indicating an interest in their sport, or even a courteous salutation whenever occasion offers from the Master and his friends, will turn opposition into genial welcome in nine cases out of ten. It should be remembered that these men are brother-sportsmen; circumstances or the ties of business may have placed hunting out of their reach. Love of field sports has led many men to make pecuniary sacrifices to obtain shooting for themselves and their friends. There is many a hard-worked man of business whose sole recreation consists in a day snatched from the cares of his office, or earned by working overtime. He may have one covert, affording one or two days’ sport out of the year, and he naturally looks forward to these rare occasions; but to have his little preserve rummaged by hounds, and himself abused for not having a fox always within it, will never teach him to love the fox-hunter. Great care should be used by an M.F.H. not to disturb and draw such places without a courteous consideration of the shooting-tenant’s convenience, and when this is done it will generally be found that the shooting-man generously responds to the desire not to spoil his sport. Little harm is done to game by running through a covert, and unless the Master knew that such a place was just about to be shot, he could not be expected in a good run to stop hounds. Necessity knows no law, and in a good thing, and in the heat of action, fox-hunters would be false to their calling to abandon the pursuit without a very strong reason. Where there is any danger of an annoyance to a covert owner, a polite letter, or, still better, a call to explain, will probably cause the aggrieved one to discount heavily his previous estimate of damage done. There is little danger of misunderstanding between game-preservers and hunting-men so long as they cultivate a neighbourly feeling and are kind to each other’s little weaknesses. Some of the best fox-preservers are game-preservers, and the best among these are not always those with the most extensive shooting. But where is the sum of all these generalities when the circumstances of each county differ? In some counties the game-preserver is a difficulty; in others, as in Norfolk, he has, with his armies in velveteen, kept fox-hunting almost off the land; in others there is little shooting and much hunting; in others again a good deal of both. In one hunt the very number who turn out, or a tactless Master, spoil the sport, while in another the field consists, in the main, of farmers who take a neighbourly delight in riding over each other’s holdings. Whenever you see a hunt where wheat and seeds are ridden over more ruthlessly than usual, you may be sure it is a farmer’s country.

There are as many ways of hunting a country as there are styles of riding a horse. The object of one huntsman is to kill foxes, of another to give his field a run, of another to see hounds work. The character of the country itself decides in some degree whether hounds are to be left to themselves or handled. The great points and fine runs are for the open countries where coverts are few and foxes sufficient, but not too plentiful. In wild or rough countries, or in high-banked counties like Devonshire and Cornwall, hounds must to a great extent be made self-reliant and left to hunt themselves. But fox-hunting, to be the real thing, must have dash and go. To spend half your life standing by a gorse watching a huntsman sauntering about, evidently equally pleased if he can catch a fox within its precincts as in the open; to march leisurely from one draw to the next; to see hounds kept to the skulking fox when old Cæsar has taken the open; to follow a pottering hunt through hand-gates and across fences, when the huntsman’s course is pioneered by timber-felling and gap-making servants, is not hunting.