Chapter 29
The end of the season

Email To: Kathy and Ronnie
From: Leslie Ann
Date: 9 October
Subject: Strange things are happening

Dear Kathy and Ronnie,

You won’t believe this. Bill and I woke up this morning to find a flock, or is it herd, of sheep in the front pasture of the Hall. We don’t know where they came from or how they got there. They just popped up like weeds. I’m not sure this is normal. I’m beginning to wonder what is anymore. Yesterday deer came bolting across the fields and this afternoon I saw a posse of men in red jackets galloping across the horizon in pursuit of a fox. I think we are living in a zoo.

I can’t wait for you to see for yourselves.

Leslie Ann

Waiting for winter to come is a bit like watching a warm, glowing fire slowly fade and dwindle. The crackling wood softly tapers to a gentle glow, then to a listless burn. Drowsy cinders begin to turn white, then gold, grey then cold and dark like the light in the afternoon. It’s the time of year you either love or hate, as it signals the end of British Summer Time. Cool and airy pubs that once had their front doors flung open for the summer trade now ready their inglenooks for winter-warming logs. Al fresco lunches once served in the garden are now gladly enjoyed indoors. Picnic tables showing the wear and tear of too many boozy, big-bellied drinkers and the scratchings of lovers who no longer love are carted away by publicans for a well-deserved refurbishment. Parsnips, swedes and Brussels sprouts replace long-fingered green Norfolk asparagus on menus. Everything seems to be preparing for the annual hibernation.

On the home front, football shirts spring forth from hot dryers fresh and fluffed for the season’s matches. Woolly pullovers, companion to all who venture outdoors, are coaxed from the back of drawers to replace soft, embroidered camisoles and popular white T-shirts. Television schedules change to reflect longer days indoors. With the click of a remote control, lavish period dramas burst onto the screen. Endless travel programs are launched to whet the appetite of future travellers seeking sexy new destinations and hot hotel deals. Sun blistering beaches and ptomaine toting tavernas are always an easy sell to those facing the prospect of a long winter.

Eventually the blue, humid sky of summer gives way to hues of soft, yellowy orange. Sunsets, once seen from our north-facing roof patio are now only visible from our west-facing dining room windows. Forests also begin to change, running up flags of russet browns and copper tones. Crisp winds tickle the armpits of half-naked trees. Squirrels riffle through the autumn debris sifting for any seeds that might have fallen on the ground. Mornings and evenings are often misty as the sun slowly begins to lose intensity. The summer’s panic to prune, trim, weed and maintain a garden is switched over to autopilot, not to be fully engaged again until spring. The soil, having given up her bounty to farmers and gardeners, now prepares for annual retirement. You can sense a heaving, almost audible sigh of contentment for all the effort that has gone into the long growing season.

In the side garden, overlooked by our two bedroom windows, stands an exotic gingko tree wilfully holding on to her last dozen fan-shaped, umber leaves. Her spiny branches look like an umbrella that has encountered a gale-force wind and lost.

Beneath the tree is a sprawling crochet quilt of invisible threads producing phallic, plump fungi. Harnessing the urge to turn the garden into a football field by kicking their tops in the air, I decide instead to check local knowledge for edible varieties, then set my fingers to work harvesting the young, firm puffballs. These meaty little fellows make a succulent topping when gently sautéed in fresh butter and layered over slices of brown toast. For me this is a triumph of nature over need. The junket to the supermarket has been averted for yet another day.

One of the several planned farewells to summer is held in the picturesque village of Uffington, where a motley crew of scarecrows is assembled to welcome autumn. Nothing here is as ordinary as a scrawny straw man with a pole up his axis guarding against scavenging crows. No, these sophisticated bale men, made by local children to raise money for the church, are excellent fundraisers. Standing 3 metres tall is Cereal Killer, with balaclava-covered face, arms of Shredded Wheat, legs of Corn Flakes and a head of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Rivalling the massive size of Bilbao’s flower-encrusted Puppy, protector of the Guggenheim Museum, is Pound Hound weighing in at eighteen bales and six straws. As the official guard dog at the church door, he reminds all who pass by that agriculture can be as much about humour as it can be about profit.

We discovered, however, as one door closes for the summer another opens for the autumn. Wishing to be a part of our community, it was essential that we again took advantage of the outstretched hand of friendship and local knowledge. So, with keen interest we accepted an invitation to attend our first hunt, organized in Toft, a slip of a village only minutes away. This amazingly colourful and ancient sport once referred to by Oscar Wilde as the ‘unspeakable chasing the uneatable’, is part of our landscape from late October to early March.

To the untrained eye the circus and the hunt have much in common: the vibrant tones of the body-hugging costumes, the smell of the animals prancing and primed for performance, the confidence and demeanor of the riders and the sense that at some point it will all come together in a crashing crescendo. As Neil Coleman, one of the chaps in a red coat, explained while discussing the adversarial role of the hound and fox, ‘Everyone has great respect and affection for these intelligent animals. The point of the hunt is really the chase and not the kill. You’ll never catch a good fox. Good luck to him, I say.’ Suddenly, with the blare of the hunting horn cutting through the crisp morning air, horses and hounds were off.

The wily vulpes vulpes, better known as the red fox, is a cunning pest and a felicitous forager of fortune both in rural and urban landscapes. In fact, the country set grant him almost equal status with the horse. Thanks to public relations gurus, an image of Aesop’s reynard can resemble a wide range of characters from the cross-dressing lech in Grimm’s Little Red Riding Hood to the aging lothario, former president Bill Clinton, a grey-haired fox still on the prowl. Love them or hate them, foxes, as green-belt city dwellers know, will likely come to a nearby allotment, garden, field, farm or garbage bin at some point in time. It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 urban foxes roaming the United Kingdom looking for morsels to eat, from mice to nappies. The latter, I understand, are a special delicacy. It’s in summer that the young juvenile delinquent cubs go off to be masters of their own hunt, dicing up guinea pigs and gardens alike. Large house pets, however, are seldom at risk and there have even been rumours of affectionate nocturnal snoggings between the species. In the metropolitan environment, attempts have been made to control this predator with chemical repellents, motion-activated water scarecrows and relocation. These urban corrective methods would not make a dent, however, in the countryside population and thus over time means have been developed, with great success, to maintain the necessary numbers while concurring with conservationist principles.

The reality of the countryside is far from the romantic notion that both beauty and lushness are a divine right, a gift from God. The influence of agriculture and hunting has clearly dictated the lay of the land. As humans began to perfect the principles of animal husbandry by incorporating fencing, hunting for food became less of a priority while tracking vermin that prayed on livestock became an economic necessity. This cycle has continued for the past 300 years.

What Bill and I did not understand, coming from the city with a rather biased press, was the symbiotic relationship between the hunter, the farmer and the landscape. Lose one and the land can become vulnerable. It’s only through cooperative preservation that the fragile balance of the countryside can be maintained. Just as cities need tending, so do woods and fields.

The role of farmers is vital in this process. By giving their consent for the hunt to ride across their land, they acknowledge the threat to their earnings from ‘Charlie’, the name affectionately given to a fox. At the same time, farmers affirm that they are not willing to use less humane deterrents such as poisoning, trapping or shooting. In return for this service farmers maintain hedgerows, build strong fences and leave corners of fields for foxes to roam. Hunters, by controlling the number of foxes, not only ensure the preservation of the strongest and their young, they also help to conserve the woodlands. As James Barclay, joint Master of the Cottesmore Hunt, said, ‘The farmers and landowners in Rutland are wonderfully supportive to us and we have to look after them in return.’

No one is really quite sure if hunting was invented for the benefit of the English aristocracy or whether the aristocracy was created to avail the fox but today it is a popular sport in England with 270 registered hunts. Americans enjoy the sport in thirty-seven states and, along with Ireland, France and Australia (where the European fox was introduced in 1855), have registered their shock at the government’s legislation to ban the hunting of foxes, allowing only tracking of scents and dispatching by shooting. The heated debate has years to run with legal challenges already on the docket. In the meantime, if it looks, smells and sounds like a hunt, it most likely will be a hunt. In England the traditional ‘tally-ho’ call to mount has been replaced by a defiant, and resounding ‘fox off’ to the government.