Among the things I do not ordinarily do on wintry Sunday afternoons is to take long walks. The other weekend I broke this tradition rather violently by taking a walk fourteen miles long with a group of Long Islanders who spend their Sunday afternoons following an over-conscientious pack of beagles. We covered this distance, a little more than half the length of a marathon race, over an area replete with obstacles, and for several days afterward I had difficulty walking at all, even on a Persian rug.
I was introduced to beagling by an agile friend of mine who is known in beagling circles as Brownie. She is a member of the Buckram Beagles, an organization which has kennels at Brookville, Long Island, containing thirty hunting beagles and, at the moment, eighteen puppies, who are being trained to devote most of the rest of their lives to the demolition of jack rabbits. There are twenty-six packs of beagles in this country, and four of them, including the Buckram Beagles, are run on a joint-ownership basis. It costs about $4,500 a year to maintain the Buckram pack, and the organization’s forty members, most of whom are Long Islanders, pay annual dues of $50 each. Additional income is provided by eighty-five “subscribing” members, who are not permitted to vote at meetings but, for $15 apiece or $30 a family, are entitled to run their legs off every Wednesday and Sunday afternoon from October 1st to April 1st. Beagling is too strenuous a sport to be carried on under a hot summer sun, and even on cool August and September days it might inflict serious damage on crops growing in fields that happen to lie in its path. On Wednesdays, only a handful of women, children, and gentlemen of leisure go beagling; on Sundays, there is usually a group of from fifty to a hundred, ranging in age from children of eleven to venerable sportsmen and women whose stamina is equal to that of any rabbit. The Buckram group have been doing this sort of thing since 1934 and never miss a Sunday, being as determined to fulfill their schedules as a college football team. To avoid monotony, these beaglers change their hunting grounds almost every Sunday. In seven years they have run over most of the big Long Island estates, some of them belonging to members and some to friends. Once, last winter, desiring a change, they persuaded T.W.A. to lend them a couple of large airplanes and flew from LaGuardia Field to Camden, New Jersey, for an afternoon’s outing, ferrying the beagles in a forward compartment. The trip over was rough and many of the members, on alighting, were green; the hounds appeared to enjoy the excursion and frisked around the New Jersey countryside just as if it had been Old Westbury.
Brownie began some time back to urge me to go beagling with her, pointing out that there is really nothing like fresh air. She is as avid a beagler as you could ask for; last winter, while recovering from a broken foot, she hobbled out every Sunday and managed somehow to participate in the chase. She is not bothered by the sight of a lot of dogs killing a rabbit, and once told me cheerfully that after the beagles have eaten their prey, which they do with gusto, they look “like the grooms in Macbeth.” Brownie is a literary girl and, when not beagling, writes books for children in which there are quite a few sentimental references to rabbits, which she is apt to describe as “soft, cuddly bunnies.” On her desk she keeps a pad, or hind foot, of a jack rabbit; the foot has been mounted by a taxidermist on a small wooden plaque. The beagles of which she is part owner have eaten rabbits in rose gardens, hothouses, swimming pools, and tennis courts, and they eat so thoroughly that pads, or masks (heads), can be salvaged only if one of the leaders of the hunt grabs the rabbit away from the hounds. Beaglers are as fond of masks and pads as other hunters are of moose heads. One member of the Buckram group, an acquisitive girl who went to England two years ago to romp with various beagle packs, returned with a dozen masks, which she has scattered around her house like ashtrays.
Before going beagling, I decided to acquaint myself slightly with some of the terms of the sport and borrowed a book from Brownie entitled The Art of Beagling, by J. Otho Paget, an Englishman. I found out, first of all, that it is improper to refer to a beagle in action as a dog; whatever the sex, a beagle is a hound. To confuse things further, all jack rabbits—synonymous with hares—are known as “she.” The followers of the hounds are called the field. The men who control the hunt are the Master, the whips, and the huntsman. The Buckram Beagles have two Masters, who have dictatorial authority over both hounds and field. The whips keep the pack from wandering off irrelevantly during hunts and keep the field from getting too close to the hounds. When the field is ordered to halt during a run, the pause is known as a check. The huntsman, customarily a professional, is on more intimate terms with the pack than anyone else; he feeds them, grooms them, nurses them, and can recognize them all. According to Paget, the choice of a competent huntsman is as difficult to make as the choice of a competent wife; according to one member of the Buckram Beagles I queried on this subject, Paget is guilty of understatement. “Huntsmen are created by God,” he said. When a beagle uses his vocal chords, I learned from the book, he does not bark; he gives tongue, or he opens. A statement like “Chieftain didn’t hark to Destiny when he opened” makes perfect sense to an experienced beagler; it means simply that a hound named Destiny cried out upon scenting a rabbit, and that another hound named Chieftain neglected to help Destiny track down the prey. A beagle, also, never wags his tail; he feathers his stern.
“I find that incessant barking eases the pain.”
On a recent Sunday, I met Brownie around noon and we had a hunt breakfast at Schrafft’s. I brought along another friend of Brownie’s named Woodward—who had never beagled before, either—on the theory that if I dropped far behind the field, he would probably be there to keep me company. It was a cold, cloudy day, and although it looked as if the weather might improve, I remembered a warning I had read in Paget’s book: “Never mind how fine the morning, always be prepared for the worst.” Woodward and I were both prepared; we each had two sweaters on and two pairs of the heaviest woollen socks we could find. Brownie was wearing a baggy corduroy outfit and knee-high gaiters, which, she explained to us, were useful when you encountered thorns or brambles. After breakfast we drove out to Brookville, where the field had been instructed to assemble at the gate of an estate belonging to Guy Cary, a Long Island sportsman but a non-beagler. It took us an hour to get there and by the time we arrived most of the field had gathered. There were around seventy-five beaglers, dressed in old, functional clothes: tweedy trousers and skirts, knickerbockers, sweaters and leather jackets, heavy stockings, riding breeches, and the like. A few of the older people carried canes. Most of the crowd were the kind you see at horse shows. Brownie introduced Woodward and me to the Co-Masters of the hunt, Morgan Wing, Jr., a young banker, and John C. Baker, Jr., a young insurance adjuster. Both of them were wearing dark-green hunting coats, stocks, white corduroy trousers, and black sneakers. Wing had on a black velvet cap with a ribbon at its back tied in a bowknot; Baker had on an ordinary checked cap. There were five other men in similar livery who, Brownie told me, were the huntsman and the whips. All five carried whips, and the huntsman, the only professional among them, also carried a small-size hunting horn.
A couple of minutes after we got to the gate, a station wagon with a screened rear compartment and with “Buckram Beagles” neatly lettered on one door drew up. When its back was opened twenty-odd dogs spilled out and scrambled about excitedly. They had floppy ears and their color was a mixture of black, brown, and white. Brownie told me they were fourteen-and-a-quarter-inch beagles. The height of a beagle is the distance from his shoulder to the ground, and fourteen and a quarter inches is considered desirable because taller hounds with longer legs might run too fast for the average field. While we were discussing the relative speeds of hounds and men (hounds are faster), the huntsman blew a sharp note on his horn and, with the hounds clustered at his heels, started to walk rapidly down a lane leading out of Mr. Cary’s estate. The pack went ahead across a highway, through somebody’s back yard, and, sniffing industriously, out onto a large, rolling meadow which had a number of jumping fences on it. A girl named Dot, to whom we had been introduced at the gate, told me that the meadow and the jumps belonged to Ambrose Clark and that the Meadow Brook Cup Race was held there every year. Dot, a bare-kneed outdoors girl, said, while we ambled along, that she knew more about fox-hunting than beagling. Horses are her favorite animals, and she said that over the weekend she had already shod a couple of them. “What else did you do?” asked Brownie. “Well, I mended a few wagons,” said Dot. We walked on down a hill and, at the foot of it, ran up against a clump of barberry bushes. Some of the field detoured around them, but Brownie, Dot, Woodward, and I pushed through, all of us emerging unscathed except Dot, who came out with both knees scratched and bloody. She seemed totally unconcerned about this and refused to accept Woodward’s offer of a handkerchief as a bandage. “It’s just a healthy glow,” she said. After going up a hill, we started across some ploughed land that was muddy and slippery. Mr. Baker asked us to spread out over it. “A hare was seen here yesterday!” he shouted. While spreading, I chatted briefly with William Rochester, one of the whips, who was trying to compute the day’s attendance for the group’s records and kept looking back to see if anyone had been permanently caught in the barberry bushes. When I left him a moment later, Brownie whispered to me in awed tones, “He is the only man who can crack a whip while he’s running.”
We went along for an hour, walking, jogging, and climbing over or through fences, while the hounds moped around several yards ahead of us without getting on the trail of a hare or anything else. Brownie told me that this was unusual. On most days the hounds manage fairly quickly to pick up the scent of at least a cottontail, which beaglers regard as unworthy of their attention, except on Wednesdays. There are too few hares on Long Island to satisfy the Buckram Beagles; there are so few, in fact, that the field thinks it can recognize a couple it has chased and failed to catch. A couple of months ago the pack caught up with one that its followers had named Flora, after pursuing her for many cold afternoons. The beaglers had grown fond of her and used to cry “Go it, Flora!” in the heat of a chase. They were all sorry to see Flora killed. “Morgan Wing just cried,” Brownie told me.
After covering the first four or five miles, the field was pretty well distributed over the countryside, with five or six hundred yards separating the hounds from the last stragglers. Most of the beaglers travelled in small groups and there were quite a few striding along all by themselves. Brownie explained that one of the advantages of the sport is that if you are in a mood for solitude and don’t want to talk to anybody, you don’t have to. The majority of beaglers are not that unsocial; they talk to each other like anyone else. There was an extreme instance of sociability not long ago when a male whip and a lady whip, after admiring each other’s green coats for several Sundays, got married. The conversations I overheard as we walked along were unromantic. They concerned horses, regiments, gardens, Long Island social activities, drinking, and the war. Two girls who had evidently been down South were chatting about beagling. “I had a marvellous time in Virginia,” said one. “I hunted with a different pack every day.” “It was simply divine in Maryland,” said the other. “We started to hunt at nine and didn’t finish till four in the afternoon.”
Brownie told me that the weather was satisfactory for hunting, although our lack of success up to that point didn’t indicate it. The ground was damp and the air was cold, a combination that would have produced a rich, clinging scent had there been any hares around. Beagles are supposed to hunt only with their noses; it is regarded as poor form for them to lift their heads at all, and they have been known to lose track of a rabbit when it was in plain sight of the whole field. I was beginning to think we would never meet up with a rabbit when the hounds suddenly gave tongue and lit out for a patch of woods, with the huntsman, the Masters, the whips, and the field scrambling after them. We stopped talking and ran. Somebody gasped out, without changing his stride, that a jack had been viewed on a knoll. We plunged into the woods, where the huntsman was yelling to a hound who had strayed from the pack on some investigation of his own, “Come on, come, come away, come, brave boy!” As we rushed down a path, stumbling over roots of trees, we passed a horseman, who seemed startled and embarrassed by the unexpected traffic. As soon as the hounds had crossed his trail, they began to dash around in aimless circles and Mr. Wing ordered us to check. He said that the horse’s scent had undoubtedly crossed the jack’s. Mr. Baker went on a short distance by himself, bending over and sniffing intently at the ground, like a beagle. A small boy grabbed a lady by the hand and asked, “Mother, have we lost the bait?” His mother looked pained.
After scouting around for a while, the Masters concluded that they had lost the bait and prepared gloomily to call it an uneventful day. It was after five and the sky was beginning to darken. We turned back dejectedly and were recrossing Ambrose Clark’s meadow when a large rabbit which had been squatting there leaped up and raced down a slope. Half a dozen people screamed “Tallyho!”—which was precisely the word to scream—and stood at attention, with their arms, in proper beagling fashion, stiffly outstretched toward the spot where the jack had first been seen. Woodward, who wanted to be helpful but didn’t know the correct manner of expression, shouted, “There goes a rabbit!,” and a few people glared at him.
The huntsman blew hard into his horn and the hounds milled around him, feathering their sterns. It took them a few moments to pick up the scent, and then they opened loudly and rushed off in the direction the rabbit had taken. When they got to the bottom of the slope, they scurried, to our amazement, into another patch of woods. We had clearly seen the rabbit head in exactly the opposite direction. The whips, who were as surprised as anyone else, summoned the hounds from the woods by whipping at their heels and calling their names and practically pushed them back on the rabbit’s course. “This is more like steering a pack of dogs after a rabbit than being led by the dogs,” said Woodward.
The hounds, having retrieved the scent, dashed up a hill and into still another wood. We went right in after them, with a couple of the green-coated men shouting “Hoo!” and “Hoy!” and “Cooee!” and others cautioning us not to get too close. Rabbits frequently run in circles and if the field gets too close are apt to turn and run right through somebody’s legs, the whole pack hurtling along behind. I knew from Paget’s book that human scent is strong enough to obscure rabbit scent, and I had been told by Brownie that any humans who inadvertently got into the middle of the chase were supposed to stand absolutely still, or, in beagle parlance, to freeze, since scent increases with motion. We froze two or three times in the woods while we watched the rabbit swerve back and forth through the trees, with the hounds sometimes only ten or fifteen feet behind her. When the rabbit resumed running in a fairly straight line, we resumed running too. Now and then the rabbit would obligingly go along a narrow path through the brush, which made it easier for us, but some of the beaglers, who felt that single-file progress was too slow, made their own paths, pushing along through the underbrush with one arm held protectingly in front of their faces. (Dot, the girl with the scratched knees, had a solution of her own for making rapid trips through narrow channels. Whenever she thought she was being held up unduly by the people in front of her, she would shout commandingly, “Hold hard! ’Ware hounds!” At that everybody else would freeze and she would blithely slip past, as if she had official business up ahead.) It seemed unlikely that the rabbit would escape, since there were no disturbing horse scents around, but she was saved by a cottontail who crossed her scent and momentarily confused the hounds, most of whom started off after the cottontail. The huntsman blew his horn desperately. “Hold till the hounds get on again!” a whip shouted, and we froze.
At six-thirty, when the hounds were still trying to get back on, the whips and Masters conferred and decided it was time to quit, although Mr. Baker said hopefully, “If we wait half an hour, we’ll have a moon.” It was completely dark then, and there was no trace of a moon. Mr. Wing finally announced formally that we would call it a day. “It’s getting late and we have a long way to go,” he said. “How long?” somebody asked. “Three miles,” said Mr. Wing. We left the whips, who were calling the hounds together, and with Mr. Wing leading the way we started to walk back to our cars. Brownie, who was examining a two-inch gash on one knee, said that we had already covered eleven miles and asked me how my legs felt. They felt like lead. Our progress was slow and silent, except when one girl got stuck to a thorny bush and said stoically to her escort, “Yank me loose. Just yank.” He pulled; she came loose, rubbed her leg, and limped on. A quarter of a mile from our starting point, a car with a tattered Willkie sticker on its rear window drove up a back road out of the darkness and offered us a lift. Ten of us got in and on it. “I never saw you look better,” said Brownie to Woodward as she collapsed on the rear seat. “I never felt worse,” said Woodward. I said nothing.
| 1941 |
