Chapter Nine

Thrill of the Chase

IT’S 8:00 A.M. on a Saturday in early September in Carroll County, Ohio. Birdsong rings out from tall poplars reflected in a still pond beside the trail. The headmaster sounds the horn, and brown, black, and white foxhounds spill out in a stream from a kennel truck and set off before us at a trot with their tails high. Riders follow—master of foxhounds, whippers-in, and field masters, followed by senior members and jumpers. Newer members and non-jumpers ride at the rear. The masters wear the bright scarlet coats, called “pink” by those in the sport, while the others wear black coats; all wear buff or white breeches, black boots, and white cravats.

I have been up for three hours getting my hunter Montana ready and trailering him over to the fixture, the farm where the hunt members gather. The morning is cool—about fifty degrees—and dry, so both horses and riders feel excited and eager to go. Sugar maple leaves blaze scarlet, and white oaks are beginning to turn yellow. The deciduous trees contrast with the dark green of hemlock and white pine, the slate blue of spruce, the bright green of hayfields, rusty brown of soybeans, and the gold of the oat straw left after harvesting. The horn sounds again followed by melodious clopping of hooves on gravel.

Those in the lead begin to trot, and we start down a grassy lane between a briar-encircled stone fence and a wooden one with trees alongside it. Horses left in the pasture whinny to our mounts and gallop up to the fence, but we leave them behind as we canter to a coop, a triangle-shaped wooden box about three feet at the apex. Riders space themselves three or four lengths behind the one in front and take the jump in their turn. Others go around. Montana loves jumping and takes this one eagerly. Horses usually enjoy a hunt because they feel safest in large groups, and all their instincts tell them to run with a herd.

Fog rises from a rocky gray stream. We stop to cross the water singly, and I hear the sound of iron horseshoes on stone. The sun has come from behind the enormous cumulus clouds, and it looks like fair weather all morning—which means a better ride but worse hunting because hounds can pick up the scent of a fox more easily during slight rain. We trot in single file along a dry path through woods, jumping over small downed tree trunks.

The cry “Low bridge!” means a low-hanging tree branch ahead.

We stop and regroup, then pick up the pace again and soon are out of the woods and cantering along the side of a cornfield, then over a small coop into a meadow.

“Ware holes,” someone yells, a contraction of “Beware of the holes,” which could be groundhog dens but more likely soft depressions in the turf. We gallop about a half mile around the edge of green fields, the hillside rising on one side and woods on the other. For the first time those of us in the middle can see all the horses in front—bays, chestnuts, and grays following hounds that have found a scent.

Hounds enter the woods again but lose the trail. Foxes are intelligent animals and know where they are pursued and where they are safe; hunters sometimes see them sitting complacently on top of wood piles or tool sheds in backyards where they know we are not allowed to follow.

Foxhunting as we know it began in England in the seventeenth century using hounds developed from French breeds that weighed sixty to seventy pounds and stood about two feet at the shoulder. The slightly smaller American foxhound was bred in the eighteenth century by Virginia settlers, the sport having come to America with English colonists. Almost all eastern states have foxhunting clubs; the oldest in the country is located in Geneseo, New York, while Virginia boasts the Museum of Hounds and Hunting in Leesburg as well as the largest number of organized clubs, including the prestigious Middleburg and Orange County Hunts, where Jacqueline Kennedy rode. The sport remains very small, with only about ten thousand people nationwide hunting regularly. For a short time in the early nineteenth century, foxhunting became so fast and dangerous that women were excluded, but this changed when the bold riding of Elizabeth of Austria dispelled prejudice against women equestrians. By 1930 women hunted in equal numbers with men, usually riding astride rather than sidesaddle.

The favorite horse for hunting is the Thoroughbred, although many riders prefer to cross the racing-type horse with stockier breeds like the Quarter Horse or Connemara. Some even cross the Thoroughbred with draft breeds like Percherons or Clydesdales. People with more money own German warm-blood varieties such as Hanoverians or Trakehners, which are both large and very athletic. Some ride Paints and Appaloosas. Any sound horse that will behave in a large group and wants to jump can be a foxhunter. In Colorado, California, and Washington, people on horseback hunt rabbits with beagles, or they hunt coyotes, and many prefer to ride Arabian horses, which can withstand long gallops in warmer temperatures.

Organized hunts usually have several locations called “fixtures” where the hunts begin, usually farms owned by club members, with permission obtained from surrounding landowners to ride over their property, since public rights-of-way do not exist in the United States as they do in Britain. One thousand to three thousand acres are required to have a fixture. In eastern Ohio, some of the land is absentee-owned, often by factories or mining companies that have ceased operations. Hunt club members put up and maintain the jumps and keep the wooded trails clear.

Strong opposition to hunting in England on humanitarian grounds took the form of disturbing the scent, sabotaging the jumps, and spooking horses. The efforts of the Blair government to end foxhunting brought out people of all classes both in favor of and against hunting. On September 11, 2002, over four hundred thousand people marched peacefully in London not only for hunting but also against what they saw as a threat to their way of life, calling the event “Liberty and Livelihood” and themselves the Countryside Alliance as opposed to the Urban Alliance that worked to eliminate hunting. Foxhunters continued to test and even defy the law that banned all hunting with dogs. Some used eagles instead of hounds, and some hunt as they always had, knowing that police are not inclined to follow groups of riders far into the countryside.

Animosity toward hunting, however, stems as much from class differences as from objection to cruelty: “It’s the whole class thing,” an Englishwoman explained to me several years ago. “I oppose all class distinctions.” The much less vocal opposition in the United States comes from those in groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who not only oppose hunting but also raising animals for food, using them for work, and even keeping them as pets; PETA’s philosophy has nothing to do with class differences. Most Americans are unaware of foxhunting except where people live in proximity to a fixture. Class distinctions are no more evident than in any other sport—such as skiing, tennis, golf, or mountain climbing—in which participants must have sufficient income. I have ridden with five organized hunts, and I never experienced class-consciousness; on the contrary, most clubs are eager for new members. Some devoted foxhunters finance their hobby by driving rust-bucket cars and living in modest houses so they can afford to board a horse. It’s true that most hunts require several wealthy members in order to provide land to ride over and the wherewithal to support the pack, but I have always found these people gracious and happy to share what they have. I am sure there is class-consciousness in the more prestigious Virginia hunts, but I am guessing no more so than in the other sports I mentioned. Like polo, foxhunting in the United States is for anyone who can ride and afford to own or rent a horse. Far more snobbish in my opinion are people I have been acquainted with who compete in the horse show circuit for points; compared to them, people who ride to hounds are tolerant, accepting, and noncompetitive. Still, foxhunters emulate, if not practice, a way of life of privilege and elegance built on the labor of servants and tenant farmers, so at least the image suggests class-consciousness.

One argument against hunting predators is that they have no power of reason and no choice but to kill their prey; people, supposedly possessing the ability to reason, should not treat animals like adversaries. Predators, moreover, are necessary to trim the populations of prey animals to a size the land will sustain. In one of his most famous essays, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Aldo Leopold warns that killing off predators—in his example, wolves—means disaster for the land as deer browse all edible vegetation until the land becomes a dustbowl. Similarly, foxes help to control the populations of rabbits and small rodents, but their impact on the land is not as dramatic as that of larger predators like mountain lions and wolves, which have helped to restore habitats for many species by controlling deer populations in national parks, most notably Yellowstone.

The irony of foxhunting, however, lies in the fact that it is a dangerous sport, often in cold or wet weather, pursuing something the hunter doesn’t really want to catch. Hounds have to be trained to bring the fox to bay in order to have a kill. In northern foxhunts—unlike some in the southern United States, Ireland, and Britain before the 2005 ban—hounds are not usually trained that way but rather pursue the fox in a line until it goes to ground (enters its den), where only a smaller dog like a Jack Russell terrier can bring it out. Once the fox has gone to ground, the hunt is over. Hunters are now protective not only of the prey but of their habitat, because without foxes there would be no chase and consequently no good riding. During hunts, I have seen several foxes but have never seen a kill—nor would I ride with a hunt in which foxes were killed.

In Great Britain, which has a large population of foxes, shooting them is legal if they become predators. Foxhunters, perhaps spuriously, justify what they do by claiming that being killed by a hound is less cruel than dying a slow, agonizing death in a leg-hold trap or from wounds inflicted by farmers, who are not always expert marksmen.

An argument against hunting for prey animals—such as deer, rabbits, grouse, or pheasants—is that people now have other ways of getting food and should abandon the barbarism of the hunt on humanitarian grounds. The argument in favor of hunting for prey is that the sport is less cruel than industrial feedlots. Calves pressing their noses to the air holes in the sides of livestock trucks cannot be happier than deer trying to escape from hunters. I suspect that killing one animal at a time for food damages the soul of the hunter far less than mass killing damages the spirit of the worker in the slaughterhouse. Were people closer to their food sources, they might have more respect than they now do for the environment, for those who grow and produce food, and for the entire process of survival, from which too many think they are far removed.

Hunters of many kinds of animals contribute to the environmental movement. Trappers spearheaded the effort to preserve beaver habitat near Lake Erie. Anglers support the Clean Water Act and other legislation that protects game fish. Deer hunters work to save forest, prairie, and wetland habitat. I have heard them voice their opposition to careless development as strongly as birders, hikers, and equestrians. Ted Williams, in his essay “Natural Allies,” lists several success stories that resulted from joint efforts of environmentalists and those who hunt and fish. Working on farmland preservation, I found myself the ally of the president of the local rifle association: while we disagree on gun-control legislation, we agree that ecosystems must be preserved and that wilderness has a right to exist for its own sake. The American authority on foxhunting, Alexander MacKay-Smith, writes that the sport “reawakens in us the primitive passion for the chase of wild game with running hounds, a passion which is as old as the human race.” He continues:

Foxhunting offers a liberal education in the mysteries of the scent as affected by temperature, clouds, sunlight, rain and snow; the direction and intensity of the wind; the character and surface of the terrain—woods, streams, grassland and underbrush; the haunts of the foxes and their lines of travel; the telltale warners of their presence—diving crows, fleeing sheep, pursuing cattle; the strategy and boldness of the fox—the line he runs and every irregular twist that will make pursuit difficult for the hounds.

Aldo Leopold himself was an avid bird and deer hunter who came from a family of hunters. Leopold’s field was forestry, but his work in New Mexico led him to the study of wildlife, and he wrote the original textbook on game management. In “Wildlife in American Culture” he calls foxhunting “one of the purest of sports; it has real split-rail flavor; it has man-earth drama of the first water.”

Henry David Thoreau, who became a vegetarian during his experience in the woods, writes in Walden that, because hunting is often a young boy’s introduction to the wilderness and often teaches him to love the woods, boys should be taught to hunt, but they should give up the activity when they are older. Not all who hunt as boys are willing to follow Thoreau’s advice, of course. Rick Bass maintains in “Why I Hunt” that people in hunter-gatherer cultures probably have richer imaginations than those in agricultural or post-agricultural societies because a hunter’s imagination must become engaged with the pursuit—the prey, not the predator, being in control:

The hunted shapes the hunter; the pursuit and evasion of predator and prey are but shadows of the same desire. The thrush wants to remain a thrush. The goshawk wants to consume the thrush and in doing so, partly become the thrush—to take its flesh into its flesh. They weave through the tangled branches of the forest, zigging and zagging, the goshawk right on the thrush’s tail, like a shadow. Or perhaps it is the thrush that is the shadow thrown by the light of the goshawk’s fiery desire.

Bass romanticizes the experience for thrush and goshawk, but it is certain that hunting can bring people closer to their natural condition of subsistence living and thereby bring them more into sympathy with the wild. He goes on to say that crops will not seek to elude the farmer, while a deer hunter enters the woods with nothing but imagination. Farmers must deal with weather and soil fertility, however, and so I maintain with Louis Bromfield and Wendell Berry that farmers must be imaginative and intelligent, no less than hunters. Keeping a garden for just one year may instill values of thrift and respect for farm work. Similarly, killing, cleaning, and preparing meat even once could teach consumers what is involved in the process of survival.

Sport is not the same as subsistence, however; a hunter today knows that the family will not starve if he or she returns without a deer or bison, and foxhunters do not even wish to catch what they pursue. The assertion that killing for sport represents base instincts carries some weight, especially when hunters use increasingly sophisticated weapons against prey that cannot develop new means of escape.

Still, foxhunters love the wild and will work to preserve the way of life that keeps farms from being broken up into subdivisions and forests from being logged. We leave woodpiles on our land for foxes and build brush coveys for pheasant and quail. We appreciate the sound of horseshoes on gravel or stone more than the drone of the internal combustion engine. Foxhunting is a fast-paced ride over fences through varied country, with new vistas constantly opening up. It is not competitive, as horse shows are, yet it is sport, a partnership with one’s horse and camaraderie with other riders. Natural-looking coops or logs invite a rider into the mystery of a forest path, field, or dell; stone walls wound with briars reveal the history of a place. Riding, like walking, takes us back to tradition and nature. Few sights are more beautiful than a grassy path weaving among autumn trees or an old rail fence marking the entrance to the woods. They are invitations to enter the spirit of the natural place inhabited for a long time by those who were close to the land.

The hunt is over and we are walking back along those lanes from which we first set forth. The bull thistle’s purple crown is in full bloom. At our approach, a great blue heron takes off from the pond and flies high over the trees. Mallards and Canada geese continue to glide along the water. Hounds fan out and trot back to their kennel. The horses walk toward the stable on long reins with lowered heads and swinging gait.