La Vénerie Française

Apprehension. And not the simple white-knuckled variety but another sort of another degree: super-taut purple knuckles. The Leningrad airport was in the middle of a blizzard and the Aeroflot jet—I was sitting far in the rear, ideally the safest place—seemed to swerve and veer on a runway which looked much like a mile-long skating rink. Vodka my soul cried out, while my hand reached for a vest flask.

Then six hours later, after floating through the blue snowless air, I landed in Paris and found that the temperature was in the low seventies and my adrenalin glands had shrunk from their all-too-frequent volleyball size back to the manageable configuration of Ping-Pong balls. I wandered around Paris for five days in the rare late October warmth, the sun creating a beautiful golden haze out of the auto exhaust, which seemed to exceed that of New York. I walked at least a dozen miles a day but only for the exercise necessary to create appetite. After a month of travel I was fatigued with all monuments excepting restaurants and those chichi girls who were strutting like cheetahs between and around the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Concorde. I spent two minutes watching the Soviet leader Brezhnev's motorcade pass and my thoughts were drawn to Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal. I felt very mysterious for a few moments, secretive and gloomy, but returned to the Lotti for a five-hour nap. Dinner would be extensive and required rest.

On my fifth afternoon in Paris Count Guy de la Valdène, a friend I fish with in the Florida Keys, picked me up for the ride seventy miles out into Normandy to his mother's place near which a stag hunt would take place. Guy usually eschews the title “Count,” claiming that it is mostly handy for making difficult restaurant reservations. The trip out of Paris seemed maniacally fast; even through the gentle Bois de Boulogne most Frenchmen think of themselves as Grand Prix drivers, even if in a humble model of Renault or Citroën. We talked of the coming tarpon season, still six months away, but the stag hunt, the knowledge of which was limited in my poor brain to old tapestries in art books, was also discussed. Guy kept using the French pronunciation for the word “equipage” (ek-kee-pajjh) and rather than admit my ignorance I chose to think of the word as a description of a malaise, say a virulent form of hiccups, though of course my associations fit into none of Guy's sentences. I had decided days before that my two years of college French, taken a decade before, were sloppily insufficient. All other attempts had been met by querulous stares from waiters, bartenders, the concierge, even the gendarmes, who after slight bows and responses would glare snottily at my long hair and Pancho Villa moustache. Perhaps they took me for a student bent on loosening a cobblestone to throw through the Van Cleef & Arpels window. Or perhaps in preparation for Brezhnev—there were a million Soviet flags flying—they too had read The Day of the Jackal and were sizing me up as a potential international bad guy. Most likely though, subtracting the drama, I was thought of as just another dumb-dumb tourist asking dumb-dumb tourist questions. I asked Guy what would happen if you walked up to one of those De Gaulle-sized cops in front of the American Embassy and called him a pig. He said that you would have to start running immediately, hopefully like Bob Hayes out for a sideline bomb from Starbuck. Guy was very irritated at missing the pro-football season.

We finally drew up to the small village of St. Georges-Motel, if drawing up is an accurate phrase for one hundred kilometers per hour. We stopped before an enormous iron gate and an old lady ran out from a rather attractive cottage and opened the gate. We drove down a long double aisle of trees and turned left, crossed a moat and entered a large courtyard. In the twilight I could see a huge dwelling which I recognized from years of moviegoing to be a château. My efforts toward nonchalance were rather weak, and when we walked in I uttered a not very appropriate “nice place you got here.” After changing my clothes and a quick drink-—I was wishing I owned a cape or something similar—we went out to eat at a pleasant little auberge down the road, the inside of which resembled a florist's shop. Guy and his lovely wife Terry ate rather simply but at their insistence I had a woodcock pâté, a heavily-truffled omelet, and a huge serving of wild boar, plus fruit, cheeses, a few bottles of wine and a tasting of several brandies.

The next morning I awoke early with severe indigestion. Why must good food in quantity exact pain? I meditated on Igor Stravinsky's fabled digestive powers and the gourmandizing of Balzac and Diamond Jim Brady, who had willed his enormous stomach to a medical school for study. Perhaps I am not cut from such cloth, I mused while shaving. I opened the drapes and looked out on some rather mammoth formal gardens and a colonnade a quarter of a mile in the distance. I tried to slip out but was slightly delayed by a kitchen girl with coffee and croissants. I was eager to walk around the grounds. Guy had mentioned in passing that his mother raised horses and I wanted to give them a look. With my years of familiarity with the animals (we keep three on our own little farm) I can instantly tell between a Shetland pony and a draft horse, and after many nasty falls and doggish bites I have settled on looking at these creatures from a distance as if they were ambulatory paintings.

I walked around for several hours. There were swans in the moat and several ponds and also a large flock of wild mallard ducks. A fair-sized river and several brooks meandered through the grounds which were covered with huge beech and oak trees. The stables, paddocks, and neatly fenced pastures appeared to take up several hundred acres and I counted some forty horses including foals, fillys, colts, and mares. In the stable courtyard I tried some of my French on a man who quickly explained in good English that he had received some of his training at racing stables in the United States. Guy's mother, Diana Manning, shares an interest in thoroughbreds with her brothers Raymond and Winston Guest. I decided I liked the horses. They trotted up to the fence to be lovingly petted and lacked the gestures of hostility I associated with some quarter horses (offer a carrot and lose a finger). Despite their gentility and beauty I still didn't want to ride one. A particular mare that had just returned from training and had proved a bit recalcitrant was running around her pasture at a speed that closed on fifty knots. Only a tenacious badger could have stayed on her back.

I returned to the château thinking of Hemingway's fascination in his Paris days with horseracing and how he often considered his winnings as “funny” money, like winning unexpectedly big at a poker game. He would treat a group of friends to a long meal and drinks. My single experience at Saratoga years before had lost me a considerable amount and purged me of this sort of gambling though I enjoyed the beauty of the track. I walked up to the third floor where there was a charming room decorated in the manner of a small American cocktail lounge, a place to escape from the elegance of the rest of the place. I had a not very moderate Armagnac and played Pink Floyd's “Atom Heartmother” on the phonograph which made me a trifle homesick. I momentarily longed for my Merle Haggard albums and my home where the grouse season was in full swing now, as well as the steel-head fishing I alternated with the grouse. I walked back downstairs and took one of Guy's fly rods and cast from a bridge into the moat for several hours. There were no fish other than minnows in the moat but I figured that I wouldn't fly cast in a moat very often during this short life.

That afternoon we took a long drive through the forest where the hunt would take place. There was a startling resemblance to some of the good grouse and deer areas in Michigan with swales and brambles and stunted oaks, the acorns covering the ground. Our drive ended at a pentagonal tower with a lawn in the center of the forest, the pavilion from which the hunt would begin. Just down the road from the pavilion we stopped at a white-stucco farmhouse with a huge kennel behind it and met Serge Hervé, the head working man of the hunt, and his wife and daughter. Serge Hervé exudes an impression of strength and incredible vitality—he doesn't walk, he struts and trots and bounces. We looked at the stag hounds which are called chiens de meute. I asked if they all were named and was quickly introduced to Massena, Sombrero, Rubens, Tintoret, Quasimodo, Plantagenet, Tarzan, Potemkine, Offenbach and Opium, among others. I asked to see the best of the hounds and Serge entered the kennel and brought out Kroutchev, a fourteen-year-old with grey whiskers. Serge hugged and kissed the dog before returning it to the pen. The latter is a gesture I find common among the best dog trainers the world over. The markings and tickings were varied—some of the hounds resembled outsized foxhounds and others looked like blue ticks and walkers—and sizes were impressive, running from sixty pounds up to one brute that struck me as weighing over a hundred. Their dispositions were sweet and Serge had complete mastery over the whole lot, something I hadn't managed with a single pointer or my two current Airedales.

We entered the clubhouse to see some of the trophies, the largest of which was hanging over the fireplace. The head approached the size of an elk's though the spread and size of the rack wasn't nearly as large. Serge whispered, "C'est un Monsieur,” which is the ultimate compliment, meaning a noble and huge stag that provided a difficult hunt. Then Serge showed us another head collected only two weeks before. He cursed the rack with some humor and explained to us that the stag had tossed him high over its head with its antlers when he had “served” it. When a stag is brought to bay by the hounds part of Serge's job, certainly the most dangerous aspect, is to approach the stag and plunge a silver dagger into its heart. Often the stag isn't as fatigued as he might appear and Serge has been gored and tossed a number of times. The act of “serving” requires bravery of a rare sort. Anyone who has watched two male deer or elk arguing over a harem before the rutting season will understand the butting and goring power of these animals. Or if you're not familiar with these beasts try to visualize being charged full tilt by a four-hundred-pound mastiff with a set of well-honed horns on its head.

I loitered around for two more days, picking up information on thoroughbred breeding and any incidental lore I could comprehend on the hunt from the ancient books in the château library. But the weather was too splendid to read after a month-long dose of Soviet snowstorms. We made a desultory attempt at a duck hunt on some of the many ponds but the ducks were near the pastures and one doesn't fire shotguns near a dozen foals, the net potential worth far exceeding what I'll earn in my own lifetime. I was also apprehensive about scratching up a mint condition Holland & Holland, a shotgun that bore no resemblance to my own battered and overused bush double. There were a minimal number of brown trout in the river to cast to, most of them having been destroyed several years before by an effluent release from an upstream factory. How like home!

The evening before the hunt we dined with Pierre Firmin-Didot, who is the maître d'équipage d'honneur of the local hunt syndicate, the Normand-Piqu'Hardi, the costs being shared by the twelve full members. For many years Pierre Firmin-Didot had owned a private hunt which was called Rallie Normandie. He proved a splendid source of information and had hundreds of years of the history of la vénerie française at memory's tip. Unfortunately for me he lapsed immediately into intricate French after explaining that such a splendid tradition couldn't be described in my own humble language, a point over which I expressed some quarrelsome doubt. But Lorraine de la Valdène, Guy's very beautiful sister, and her friend Christian, a Paris film-maker, translated all the germane information, while I mostly daydreamed about the after-dinner champagne we were drinking. Earlier in the day we had retrieved it along with the dinner wines from the cellar where there were dozens of cases of musty, soiled bottles. All of the wine back home comes in squeaky clean bottles and doesn't taste nearly as good. Guy was off talking horse business to his mother and stepfather who were on the verge of a trip to Argentina. I kept thinking of how we were to get up at five A.M. for the hunt, an hour of horror I reserve for only the most promising trout fishing, and even then I usually only manage it by staying up all night after fishing an evening hatch.

Very early on Saturday morning, when the sky lacked even a trace of light, we drove the half-dozen miles through the forest to the circle around the pavilion which looked splendid in the headlights. I thought of Diane de Poitiers waking on the morning of a hunt hundreds of years before in her nearby château, then riding with the others on their mounts to this same pavilion. I momentarily wanted some share of a glorious history, a history with what is called “class” rather than the casual 30-30 bushwhacking of deer moving along their feeding runways back home. We always called it “meat hunting” and there was not even a vague pretention toward a search for a trophy. We pulled up in Serge's yard and the lights were on. The hounds, all forty-seven of them including the aged Kroutchev and a timid dog named Oxford, set up a bellowing that deafened. Serge stepped out of the kitchen door and yelled and they became silent and stood at attention. Even the small pet terrier that trotted along the outside of the kennel fence as if these huge hounds were part of his fiefdom paused for a moment—fortunately terriers aren't the size of Great Danes or they would rule us all.

The kitchen was warm and yellow with light and we accepted a half cup of coffee which Serge with promptness topped off with a big lashing of calvados. Calvados at dawn? Oh well. I finished mine in two gulps which proved a mistake as the cup was immediately refilled with another half-and-half. Even my lungs felt the heat and I thought of my dad's term for the homemade whiskey he used to drink, “pop-skull.” There were five of us around the table including Guy and myself. Serge and the other two trackers spoke in a rapid patois of where best to locate a stag. We all stared at the calvados bottle which had just been refilled in the back room by Serge's wife. It was a party bottle, evidently a prized possession. Serge's shy little daughter Jeanette picked up the bottle and wound a key in the inverted bottom. A small porcelain ballerina twirled in a circle in the center of the amber liquid and the miniature music box that surrounded played “Lara's Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. I was overwhelmed, though my emotions might have been a victim of the instant fire of the calvados. I began to daydream, unable to pick up a word of the rapid colloquial French. Two weeks before in the Sadko nightclub in Leningrad the band had closed the evening with the very same song and several hundred people stood and cheered. Bad champagne flowed. And the movie and the book and the music were banned there and the song was anyway written by a Frenchman, Maurice Jarré. But the Russians somehow knew and loved it and lacked my stiff and priggish cynicism.

We stood and went outside. Serge sorted out the tracking dogs, three hounds that were especially trained to bay at a stag scent. We wanted to locate a likely animal for the hunt which would begin in three or four hours. The information we gathered would be presented to Jean Ferjoux, the maître d'équipage, who would select from the three searchers the most likely stag for the chase.

Guy and I accompanied Serge and his daughter down a small lane on the other side of the pavilion. Our hound, Ouragan, was anxious and we walked at an alarmingly fast pace. This speed was to continue for the next three hours, during which we would crisscross dozens of lanes for well over ten miles. It all seemed excessively swift to me, having overeaten again the night before on some fresh pâté de foie gras with a big chunk of truffle in the middle (with a ‘28 Anjou), a poached trout, a serving of the small forest deer known as the chevreuil and a quantity of cheeses, the last being a rank goat cheese I would retaste for the next several days. But then one doesn't travel to France to be temperate when one can be temperate in Michigan without even trying.

It was still the first pale morning light and Serge was pleased with the slight ground fog—the moisture in the air and the heavy dew would make it easier for the hounds to follow a stag. An unsuccessful hunt often hinges on extremely dry weather which provides poor scenting conditions. We found frequent tracks among the stunted oaks but the hounds are trained to the peculiar scent of the male and Ouragan dismissed the tracks as female. Then at the edge of the forest in a tilled field we found our first stag tracks. Serge and Jeanette and the hound became very excited but Serge knelt and judged that by the splay and size of the tracks that the stag was too small to bother with. The incident reminded me of a hunting friend in Michigan who could likewise accurately judge the size and sex of a deer by the tracks.

We continued on at what I thought of as an even brisker rate and out of pride I tried to conceal my wheezing. I had imagined myself to be in good shape from summer backpacking in Montana and the early grouse season back home but I was clearly outclassed by Serge and the ten-year-old Jeanette. I was very pleased when Guy dawdled with his cameras, and I desperately wanted a forbidden cigarette but the smoke would be scented easily by the stag and make him a bit edgy, perhaps moving him out of our section of the forest. After another two miles or so the hound picked up a good-sized stag and we spent an hour on a stratagem that would locate the hundred-acre plot of forest where the stag was hiding. We walked a square of four lanes and saw where the stag had crossed one path but had failed to emerge onto the other three that made up the rectangle. Serge and Jeanette were happy, and so was I as it meant we could return to the pavilion where I would smoke several cigarettes consecutively and rest my tired body. But on the way back we met the other two trackers and were mildly disappointed to discover that the one with Oxford had located a very large stag indeed, his proof being a chunk of fecal matter which indicated a stag with ample bowels. After seven hundred years of hunting in essentially the same manner no tricks arc missed.

Back at Serge's we had another drink and spoke with Michel Pradel who was to drive us during the hunt in his small, sturdy Pibolle Citroën. Then we went back to the château and ate an enormous breakfast. Someone in the kitchen had packed our picnic basket for the afternoon and I snooped through its contents: some fruit, mineral water, two bottles of Margaux, Dutch beer, a variety of ham, cheese, and pâté sandwiches on miniature loaves of bread. Oh boy, I thought in my capacity of Mr. Piggy. How unlike the tawdry junk I carried along while grouse hunting, or what had been my father's favorite, incomprehensible deer-hunting snack—a baked-bean sandwich with a half-inch slice of onion. I reflected on how horribly my feet ached in my cowboy boots which have, of course, no sensible relationship to the act of walking but were the only boots I'd brought along to Europe. A thuggish type in Moscow had offered me seventy-five roubles ($80) for them and I wished that I had taken his kind offer.

When we returned to Serge's at eleven the hunt was nearly assembled and Michel was waiting for us with his friend Lorette. Michel had a small silver hunting horn called a corne over his shoulder. Though a university student Michel is an addict of the hunt and knows the forest intimately. Guy might have driven but he confessed that we would probably have become lost and he needed a free hand for his cameras which some of the mounted hunters were busy staring at. They shun publicity as it is mostly bad, the hunt being generally scorned by the fourth estate and the intelligentsia, the situation bearing some similarity to the United States. As an instance, whenever most fellow writers of assistant professor mentalities learn that I hunt and fish they usually say something on the order of “Oh gawd, the Hemingway bit!” The grand one from Oak Park has made it difficult for others in his craft. In any event my usual response to the quip is non-quotable.

Half of the hounds were loaded into a truck to act as replacements later on and in the cramped quarters some fighting broke out which was quickly stopped by a shout from Serge. Ferjoux, the master of the hunt, was standing in the courtyard with everyone assembled in a closely packed circle. The three trackers with hats in hand made lengthy and elegantly descriptive speeches on the possible virtues of the stags they had located. Ferjoux was preoccupied with the minutest details and asked many questions. We were still disappointed when our stag, as expected, wasn't chosen. The timid little Oxford had won out.

Michel knew precisely where the hunt was to begin and we drove around the forest through the small villages of Saussay and Montagnette and then on a lane deep into the woods. I was frightened at the speed at which Michel drove the lanes but Guy assured me that it was nothing compared to what would come later. But the rather solid-looking trees were whizzing by only inches from my window in the front seat and with each bump my head narrowly missed crashing into the roof of the little car. We parked and stood around for a few minutes, then saw with excitement the approach of the mounts, usually a mixture of Arab and thoroughbred, followed by the hounds. Serge located the tracks with no difficulty and gave a blast of his horn which was answered by the horn of Ferjoux. In Serge's capacity as master of the hounds he follows the hunt on foot, something I couldn't comprehend after the morning's jaunt. We were idly talking and smoking when not fifty yards away the stag and three females suddenly broke from cover. The females raced across the lane but the stag paused, then circled back within his own block of woods. Michel signaled with his horn that he thought that he had seen a stag but wasn't absolutely positive. One must be sure. A day chasing the wrong stag is the worst of form. The fifteen or so hunters with Ferjoux well in the lead descended on us and I dove for the brush to avoid a trampling. A quarter mile off we could hear Serge bellowing at his hounds, then a signal from his horn that it was indeed the correct stag. The hunters were deployed by Ferjoux to visually cover any escape as the hounds drew nearer; the first few hounds to reach the stag would drive him from the cover, unless he chose a quick standoff in which case a few hounds might die.

While we waited I thought again of how a whitetail buck will send a doe or a number of them through a clearing first to test for any conceivable danger. Not very noble to use your mates as decoys but then you don't get to be a great big buck or noble-sized stag by acting stupidly. I was told that an experienced stag will often follow a smaller one, butting him on by force for several miles, then veer off in an attempt to fool the hounds by this intelligent ruse. But then the beast broke full tilt across the lane not far from us and Michel gave a definite horn signal to Ferjoux, who answered and gathered his group with some beautiful blasts from his hunting horn, the golden trompe de chasse, and they were off within seconds. As we walked back to the car I reflected on the natural authority Ferjoux seemed to possess, a sort of unassuming “macho” and uprightness that demands immediate respect and obedience: the master of the hunt has the dictatorial powers of an eighteenth-century sea captain and there is simply no breaking of the etiquette of la chasse. The horns over each hunter's shoulder reminded me of the walkie-talkies often used by those who hunt bear in Michigan's Upper Peninsula with hounds, the only local place back home where it is permissible. They always reminded me of huge teeny boppers with transistor radios pressed to their ears: picture the wiley Chub “Dink” Farley with his 10-4 10-4 10-4, then shrieking into the machine that “Big Bruin” just crossed the road. This unsavory bit can be contrasted to the one-armed Roy Close from Emigrant, Montana, who will alone enter the mountains for weeks at a time to destroy a rogue grizzly with an excessive appetite for domestic beef. But then the stag hunt is as ritualized as the bullfight, the only apt comparison, though the hunt is incredibly less cruel.

We stuffed ourselves back into the car and Michel and Guy began guessing the stag's next move. We drove even faster this time toward an area where Michel expected the stag and hounds to emerge. I thought of how any respectable wine steward would express disgust at the way we were drinking the Margaux straight from the bottle as the car jounced along. We loitered around a recently timbered area of the forest for a half hour until the baying of the hounds far in the distance told us our guess had been wrong by several miles. We perfected a manner of jumping into the small car within seconds, a performance we were to enact a dozen times in the next few hours. We began to enter hilly country, plunging down narrow aisles into what could be fairly called gorges. Occasionally we spotted a stray hound that had apparently lost its way; the hound would look at us, then immediately act very intense and interested, much like a bird dog that is either too lazy or tired to enter a briar patch but still wants to present a good appearance. Along a ridge we saw a dozen or so hounds pass in front of us. We jumped out of the car and ran over the top of the ridge to find that it overlooked an entire valley and the village of Montreuil with the river Havre running through the village. It was evident that the hounds had chased the stag straight through town and across a wide field of hay stubble, at which point the stag plunged in and crossed the river. In the distance from our hilltop we could see the riders regrouping to Ferjoux's horn, the sound echoing melodiously throughout the valley. We plunged down the roadless hill, fairly flying in the car through thickets and over rocks, and passed through Montreuil to the point of reconnoitering. Guy was worried as we were drawing near his mother's estate as it would be impossible to allow the hunt to enter the château grounds. Stag hounds and hunting horns don't make a wise mix with a breeding farm—one could imagine an errant hound nipping the heels of a colt destined eventually for Longchamps. Fortunately the stag had headed off through a cornfield toward Dreux, the largest village in the area, actually a small city of some 25,000 people. But this was a bad break for the hunt as the area surrounding Dreux is a semi-urban sprawl and a major four-lane highway, “National 12,” is in the area.

While the hunters paused to discuss tactics with Ferjoux, Guy and Michel told me how lucky I was to see a débucher (the stag leaving the forest for open country) as it makes for a more varied though certainly less classic hunt. Some consternation could be sensed on Ferjoux's face as the hunters headed at a gallop toward Dreux. At another small village we paused for a moment, and a gas station attendant told us that the stag had passed through town and had headed across a large field and through a woodlot toward a sanitarium we could see in the distance. I had a rather dark, surrealistic image of the stag jumping the sanitarium fence and bursting through a group of strolling loonies with the hounds in pursuit, scarcely an aid to therapy. But it turned out to be a tuberculosis sanitarium surrounded by a fair stretch of forest. We continued down through another valley where we spotted several hounds swimming across the river. Down the road a group of cars had gathered, full of people semi-attached to the hunt, and all were discussing stratagems. Serge and the riders looked fatigued and everyone had a worried appearance. One of the women present had spotted the stag recrossing the river and heading back toward the sanitarium. She said she had seen the stag pause in a field for a rest, having temporarily outwitted the hounds.

An hour of utter tenseness had begun. The stag had hidden himself in a small patch of forest, perhaps a hundred acres, and Ferjoux entered with the best of the hounds in attempt to flush the beast. But if the stag ran the wrong way he would be headed toward the freeway not to speak of a smarmy Americanized housing development and after that, the possibility of a flight through downtown Dreux, which would make for very bad publicity indeed. Luckily while we were waiting near the housing development drinking wine the stag reversed himself again toward clear country. Michel ordered us back into the car. I sort of wanted to stay, having spotted a very pretty spectator to whom 1 asked nasally, "Où est le stag?” She giggled and shrugged but then Guy told me discouragingly that she didn't have the foggiest idea what I was talking about.

Michel and Lorette and Guy seemed to think the hunt was nearing the end. We retraced our lane to the river and while crossing the bridge saw on a not-too-distant hill the stag and the hounds close behind, with the riders straggling a hundred yards back. By the time we got to the hill, a matter of minutes, the stag was standing at bay while Ferjoux and his riders watched from a few yards back. With great ceremony Serge drew the dagger from the scabbard and walked past the wary hounds, many of whom had been gored in the past. The stag appeared in shock and Serge quickly plunged the dagger into its heart. The stag dropped at his feet.

There was perhaps a minute of full silence except for the shuffling of the lathered horses in the dry grass and the guttural mutterings of the hounds, which Serge kept away from the fallen stag. However stunned and confused I otherwise felt it was good to see that old Kroutchev was one of the few hounds to complete the hunt. This would be his last year. Then a strange pandemonium broke loose: all the hunters unshouldered their horns and began playing a particular melody in a modal chord that resounded and returned from the far hills on the other side of the valley. The hunters played with a glazed intensity, truly the moment they had been waiting for. A young man in a long army surplus overcoat and very long blonde hair began playing with more capability than the others. He owned no mount so I assumed he was playing for the joy of it. One of the trackers stooped over the stag and cut out its testicles and threw them in the grass. I wasn't sure if this was a ritual gesture or an act to protect the venison from the strong scent. Many cars began to arrive and a large group of farmers, local workers and those who had followed the hunt stood looking rather blankly at the fallen beast. With the mid-afternoon sun glittering off their horns the hunters profusely congratulated Ferjoux, whose face had lost its apprehension and was now glowing. The stag was loaded with effort into the back of a station wagon but not before the largest of the hounds had grabbed a leg and pulled the three hundred pounds of dead weight several feet, a show of strength for which he was punished only lightly. We got back into the car for the ride to the pavilion, some fifteen miles distant, where we would meet the hunters for the ceremonies that would end the day.

At the pavilion a crowd of a hundred or so had gathered. Guy was rather irked, claiming that the crowd was there, much like those who surround auto accidents, only to watch the gutting and caping of the stag. There would be an hour's wait while the hunters returned on their horses, washed up and had a brandy or two. We sat in the car drinking from a good bottle Michel had produced and finishing the picnic basket. Guy fiddled with his cameras and talked of hunts he had witnessed in his youth. He said that a decade ago he had allowed a few men from the hunt to enter the château grounds to dispatch a stag at bay. Guy had been very nervous about the race horses and then the man, not Serge, who was to serve the stag lost his nerve and the brother of Pierre Firmin-Didot had dismounted and in his elegant hunting clothes had directly done the serving, narrowly missing a thrust of the horns. I've always been interested in this primitive form of courage, never having felt much of it in my own bones. An angry dachshund can be an overwhelming threat to a former paperboy.

The trackers arrived with the stag and quickly gutted it out and performed the deftest skinning job I had ever seen. Some in the crowd were offended by the smell, which was actually sweet compared to butchering a Michigan deer that had received a gut shot from a 30-06. The trackers carved the meat, skillfully stripping the loins and placing it in a large burlap bag, leaving only the sparsely meated trunk and the intestines which they covered with the hide, propping the stag's head in an upright position.

The hunters emerged from the clubhouse and took their places a dozen feet behind the stag. A short, gracious speech was made by Jean Ferjoux and then Serge arrived with about half the hounds, perhaps twenty or so. The hounds became berserk at the smell of the carcass and surged and growled within the circle of spectators but were easily controlled by the tracker who cracked a whip above their heads. Then the hide was pulled back and placed near the hunters and Ferjoux gave the order for the hounds to be released. Within an instant an indescribable squabble took place: the innards and trunk were pounced upon in unison by all twenty hounds. Fights over morsels were broken up instantly by the whip cracking well above the hounds’ heads. Ouragan trotted away proudly with a lung, a reward for his early-morning labors. He evidently held a high place in the kennel pecking order as no other dog challenged his prize. In a few minutes the remains of the stag had disappeared except for a well-chewed thick white spine. Even the sturdy ribs had been ground up and swallowed. Then Serge returned the obedient hounds to the kennel in an orderly group.

The hunters with horns in hand organized themselves in an order evidently based on seniority, with Jean Ferjoux standing in the middle of the group with his hands behind his back. They took turns playing solos, then choruses: this music, which was to last an hour, was a complete retelling of the four-hour hunt in song. There are over three hundred possible melodies to describe particular incidents including the débucher and the crossing of the river. Ferjoux requested several tunes that apparently characterized the parts of the hunt most pleasurable to him. The young man in the long army coat again played with great beauty and intensity. When the music finished the forest began to darken and the crowd and hunters shivered in the evening coolness. The hunt disbanded.

That evening we sat and rather drowsily talked about the hunt: our natural sorrow and empathy for the stag that all but the most moronic hunter feels for his quarry, but also our sympathy for the hounds, also noble beasts in whose blood runs this ancient urge for the quarry—dogs that had begun anyway as predators and had their instincts refined by man to hunt a particular beast, just as a good bird dog singles out his grouse. The sport is nearly a millennium old in France and in some parts of the world dates back five millennia, as in the stele I had seen in a museum of the great Abyssinian lion dogs upon their own quarry. There is no apologia now for hunting except that the desire is in us. Some are born hunting and rarely in our time out of need. I thought of the painting I had seen last summer in Browning, Montana, of a Blackfoot Indian delivering an arrow while riding full speed along a buffalo's side. Of course then it was what is called “necessary” but at the very least la chasse had preserved the ritual dignity of the hunt. It wasn't a million licensed hunters in my home state wandering around the shrinking woods, probably killing more trees with their stray shots and target practice than the sixty to ninety thousand deer taken yearly. Without becoming stupidly atavistic one might say at base that we are meat eaters still and some like to kill the meat they eat, which is not far removed in dignity from letting someone else do the killing.

Early the next morning on the way to Orly at two hundred kilometers per hour (I'm not kidding), my emotions left the remnant of the sixteenth century and reentered the twentieth. The hunt would be finally doomed not by its outraged opponents but by the fact that there is simply little room left in which to “chase” an animal. Dreux, the sanitarium, National 12, housing developments and villages left its edges a bit frayed. So the already minuscule remnant of the past suffers further attrition from the usual bane of population. And the motorized cavalcade that follows each hunt confuses the hounds with auto exhaust, diminishing the privacy of the sport. Cars. Population. My eight-hour jet took me from Orly to Detroit, another French name, and in part the ironic source of the problems, the coming end of it all. Even noblemen seem less interested in being regarded as “noble,” what with the force of all of us in the middle who inadvertently will deny them by our press of numbers their ancient pleasures.

1972