Sir Alfred E. Pease

“ It is hard for the eager and impetuous, with every desire to give room to hounds, to have his forbearance rewarded by seeing some less scrupulous rider take his place. It is hard sometimes on a tearing flyer to get him pulled in at a moment’s notice. But a follower of hounds knows when he has done wrong, and seldom does a man catch it without deserving it; and if he is a sportsman, whose zeal only has outrun its discretion, he may be sure of forgiveness.
This is not the time to debate whether fox-hunting has a long life before it in crowded little England. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ There are no lurking fears as to whether his mount is equal to the task before him; there is no waiting at the meet, and hounds are busy in the covert as soon as it is reached. The sound of the horn, the opening pack, the view-halloo from the whipper-in, the crack of the men’s whips, and the rattling and rustling in the gorse, are pleasanter because of the interval that has passed since last they woke the woodlands, and for the stillness of the outside world at this early hour. ”

“ 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 streaming ten couple always tearing and racing on as if for ever over valley and lonely moor. I felt my horse floundering through the bogs again; myself clambering up and down those gills under the stars—each wall and stream, gate and stile were jumped a dozen times. I could see again the straggling hounds, run out, sitting in the heather, and hear their dismal howling as they realised they were “done” and “lost.” ”

“ Much of the charm of hunting consists in the style, grace, and neatness in which it is done. Hunting must be a pleasure to the eye; it should be picturesque and in harmony with nature. The woodland or valley [Pg 85] should echo back wild music, and the huntsman’s horn and the whip’s halloo should delight the ear and warm the blood. A badly-assorted pack, of all shapes and sizes, some of which carry a head, and others with a strain of Southern blood, as line hunters, might give more sport and kill more foxes than a better and handsomer pack of hounds. ”

“ 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.
There are few ideal huntsmen. There is many a good kennel-huntsman, many a good rider to hounds who carries the horn ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 [Pg 161] 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. ”

“ But a more ambitious artist, wrestling with his difficult but popular subject, will make his red-coats leap over insignificant or impossible fences; he will have his hounds flying out of the picture to meet you as they dash [Pg 187] over a rail or thread a fence; and will create not only a remarkable study in foreshortening of hounds, but one that fills the onlooker with amazement at the courage of the artist who, in order to make his study, must have placed himself and his canvas betwixt fox and hound, and braved the rush and charge of the yelling pack. ”

“ Sometimes we have these objects arranged standing at a meet, as if to be photographed. As we gaze, we are sad to think that they will continue to stand till time rots the canvas, and how long time will be about it; that those wooden hounds will never be thrown into cover; that the pink-faced huntsman in the scarlet coat will never get the horn, which he clutches in his dog-skinned hand, to his mouth ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Little do these realise how every hound has its own distinct individuality, and how much careful attention, education, and training each of them has received before it was incorporated with the pack; and that the fox-hound—a wonder of beauty and endurance, with the qualities of nose, pace, and tongue exquisitely developed—has been produced by the labour and skill of Masters of Hounds and huntsmen through more than two centuries. Who can measure the work, the thought, and the anxiety, that have given us the modern fox-hound? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am certain of this, that he demanded a new hat all the way homewards. What opportunities [Pg 153] 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 [Pg 165] 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. ”

“ MEASURED by the human standard, the life of a fox-hound is a short one. It is not a butterfly existence; it cannot be summed up as short and sweet, or as a short and a merry one, for war, hunting, and love, as the proverb says, have a thousand troubles for their pleasure. The problem whether life is worth living is not one that either fox-hunter or fox-hound are likely to strain their intellects in solving. To many persons who follow hounds, as well as to the many who do not, a [Pg 80] fox-hound is little more than a spotted dog. ”

“ 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 [Pg 162] the little marauder of the night, it is usually after a well-matched struggle, and his end is swift as the lightning flash. ”

“ In our own island, the Scotch terrier is hard to beat. The right breed are wonders of pluck, endurance, perseverance, and intelligence; their voices are sharp and penetrating, and their long, lithe bodies are carried on short, active legs; they are, moreover, charming companions, and fasten on to their owner’s affections as firmly as to a badger’s neck. The Irish terrier, when small enough, is a good one, and so is the rarer old-fashioned English broken-haired black and tan. ”

“ In one hunt the very number who turn out, or a tactless Master, spoil the sport, while in another the field [Pg 173] 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. ”

“ I am little more than twenty years old, not a great age, counted by years, as the life of a horse goes; but it is the pace that kills, and I have been made to go the pace in my younger days, and have done my duty as far as in me lay, since I have withdrawn from the more active scenes of the world. ”

“ In most fields there is, however, [Pg 194] at least one individual whom all agree in desiring to avoid,—some cad, some snob,—to escape whom we hang back in covert, jump some appalling place, or, if in a crowd, endeavour to get our worst enemy or most unselfish friend between him and us. If one of these objectionable persons, or well-meaning bores, comes out cub-hunting, we are at his mercy; he can get at us, and the music of the hounds is mingled with his ceaseless jabber; our only escape is the road home to breakfast. ”

“ Sligo takes a line of barricaded gaps; Faraway goes slap-bang through the first gate, and then takes the timber decently and in order. Another bog, another stream, a few more fences, and then the open moor. How much longer can a horse go this pace? It is too serious a business to speak to each other as we pound down into Baysdale, the hounds getting the better [Pg 217] of us. As we cross the enclosures by Baysdale Abbey, the one solitary ploughman in the out-of-the-world valley stops in his work to look at the rare spectacle. ”

“ Some judges will condemn hounds for being too fat, others for being too light. It may appear as absurd to favour a fat hound as it would be to back a fat horse out of training against a properly trained one. Yet it must be admitted that there are good judges, who like to see hounds fat,—why, I will not venture to say, for, with all respect to superior authority, it has always appeared to me that fat is out of place where hard work is required. It is a pitiable sight, when cub-hunting on a hot morning in August or September, to see a lot of panting suet-puddings hanging about outside the covert ”

“ 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 [Pg 158] 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 143] run of the season ”

“ But the latter pulls off at a galloping pace
The Heavyweight Prize in the Senators’ Race.
A man who can follow the horn and the hounds,
And ride to the chase with its musical sounds,
Is made of the stuff that the country requires,
And always has points that the country admires.
With other great nations we’ll ride for a place,
Still led by the men of the Senators’ Race. ”

“ And I know, when I go hence, as I trust, to even happier hunting-grounds, that those with whom I have spent my life, and who have shared with me the pleasures of the chase, will feel that one has gone with whom are associated the happiest hours and pleasantest memories of the irrevocable past. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In conclusion, I would appeal to all lovers of nature, among the best of whom are numbered the true sportsmen, to use their influence in securing a reasonable protection for the badger. And if they will take the trouble of observing his habits and mode of life, I can predict with confidence they will come to the same conclusion as the writer, that he is an animal well worth preserving from extinction, both as a beast of chase and on account of his many interesting and useful qualities. ”