HUNTING.
As the whole object of the Manly Exercises is not accomplished in the attainment and practice of them, it was thought convenient that the business of their details should be succeeded by a partial notice of some of those sports of which they form the elementary process, and which may be regarded as their ultimate “end and aim.” It has been well said by my talented friend, Nimrod, that all the writing in the world will not make a sportsman. The pen of Pindar, and the pencil of Grant, indeed, exhibit him in all perfection to our admiration; but, could they both write for the education of the student whose ambition is Olympic fame, they would not insure success. Like the poet, he must be born, in a manner, to his cunning.
The Exercises, upon which Mr. Walker has written, admitted of being inculcated by methodical rules, and acquired by a systematic routine of practice. An acquaintance with them will be found of service to youth, whatever the destination of its manhood may be; while they are essential to the formation of a frame and character fitted for the maturity likely to be devoted to the wear and tear of our hardy Rural Sports. Driving and Yachting, though neither of them strictly coming within the pale of a course of physical exercises, still are not out of place in a practical book devoted to the science of manly recreations, because each is governed by certain rules, which may be taught and acquired. It is not so with the subjects constituting the matter on which we are at present engaged. A man may out-study Zoroaster without being one whit the better qualified for winning a fifty-pound plate, hitting off the line of a fox that has been headed, or bringing down his woodcock in cover; these are arts which, being decimated, leave one part to theory and nine in favour of practice. For this cause I have made my Article on the Turf of a character more suited to the purposes of the general reader than those of the visionary theorist, who may fondly hope to meet, on page traced by mortal hands, a recipe for breeding, training, and managing an embryo winner of Derby or Leger. The Chase, however, admits of a certain code of general maxims: it has, if not limits, at all events courses better defined than those of the Turf, and to the application of them by practical men of modern experience we will at once proceed.
Assuming that a tolerable proficiency in horsemanship has been attained before the young disciple of Diana ventures to show at all with hounds, he will do well to dedicate the first of his novitiate to hare-hunting, whether his future destination be that of a M. F. H., or merely a partaker of the “light from heaven,” dispensed by the “noble science.” As this little treatise addresses itself more particularly to the latter, it will be sufficient to point out what should be his aim in his early lessons. Of these, the most essential to the formation of a good sportsman, and the only one that will enable any man to live to the end of a severe run, is, that he cultivate the faculty of a quick eye to hounds. With harriers he will constantly have practice in this task: the perpetual doubles to which nine hares out of ten, when chased, resort, will soon convince him of the necessity of keeping a wary look out for the line towards which the leading hounds incline. He will have little difficulty in deciding with which portion of the pack, or with which individual of it, the scent is, if he only observe closely when there is any indication of a check. The instant a hound catches the scent, he will see him drop his tail horizontally, and spring to the front, the one who has lost it elevating his, as if engaged in questing. Keeping his look-out always upon the leaders, and leaving the body of the pack to follow a similar system, he turns his horse as he sees the chase lean, and thus is going at his ease inside the circle, around which others can hardly live at the best their nags can accomplish. When a huntsman is coming past with hounds,—particularly at check in a lane or road,—get out of his way all you can; the narrower the pass the greater the necessity that you give room, or hounds must break over the fence, and so run the risk of putting up, or crossing the line of, another hare: moreover, horses on such occasions are apt to strike out at hounds, and it is far from pleasant to be constituted by such a casualty “the observed of all observers.”
In the matter of riding at fences, with harriers you will be more enabled to suit your practice to the individual case than when you come to ride alongside fox-hounds. With the former, when any thing very cramp crosses your line, you may “look before you leap,” and this is no bad maxim, whoever may choose to sneer at it. Let this too be an axiom from which you never depart, as far as regards the hounds: when you are out with the jolly dogs, “hear and see, and say nothing”—so shall you earn golden opinions from the field in general, and prevent much out-pouring of wrath from the officials in particular. It will serve you to bear in mind that in almost every difficulty of ground a horse can serve himself better than you can assist him. I do not mean to say that in heavy, deep galloping you should not hold him together, and if there be a furrow or path at hand, that you should not give him the advantage of it. But in woodlands, for instance, where young timber has been felled, and the surface is covered with live stubs, give him his head: let him pick his own way; never touch his mouth with the bridle to guide him, and you will find how rarely he will give a chance away. Thus in a rabbit warren the difficulty is doubled by the nervous man who attempts to steer his horse. The biped is looking at one hole, the quadruped at another, and being diverted from the spot where he intended to place his foot, puts it in where it was meant that he should not. Still, however, you may attempt it: never charge ground of this nature without using the precaution of slacking your pace. I remember a well-known bruising rider, who thought it impossible that he could be hurt, once trying the experiment over a warren in the neighbourhood of Whitchurch, in Shropshire, and being assured of the affirmative in the first hundred yards by the fracture of his collar-bone, and the dislocation of a shoulder.
With the common run of fences, where the grip is from you, go faster at them than when it lies on the side you take off from. When they consist of live thorns and quicks newly laid down, take them, whenever the chance presents itself, aslant, rising where the top of the thorn is laid, as being the least capable of holding your horse’s knees, should they catch in rising at it. In your noviciate it is hardly necessary to offer you any advice as to water. As a general rule, however, it may as well be said here as elsewhere that, in brook-jumping, pace comes first and then judgment. With a powerful impetus you get over; should your horse blunder, somehow—if with a fall at the other side, no matter: less speed enables you to pick your ground better, but it throws all the odds on the side of a cold-bath, should the span be wider than you calculated on, or the bank be soft, and let you in. Never take hold of your horse’s head till you feel that he is safely landed; if there is a scramble for it, and you pull at him but an ounce, it may turn the beam of his equipoise, and in you go together.
Young hands are prone to think that it is necessary to the acquisition of the reputation of a sportsman that they show in front throughout a run. Indeed I might have said this idea seems to hold with many who ought to be wiser. The sooner the youthful Nimrod discards this fallacy the better. The chances are so multiplied and various against a good run that it is next to a miracle how a real clipper ever occurs. From foil, to which ground is every where exposed, down to an infant of three years old that heads your quarry, on every side you are beset with risk, even with a scent. Without it your difficulty becomes almost an impossibility, and that is the time when over-riding, more fatal than all other obstacles put together, is to be seen in its superlative degree. There is your hard-rider, par excellence, who will be first: the leader pulls up at a check—the nuisance passes him, even with hounds at fault, without a moment’s care for the mischief he must do the chase, or what he may do himself. Let such as this teach you that which you should avoid: acquire in youth the way you should go, and in your maturity you will not depart from it.
We now come to the matriculation of the “noble science,” and consider the quondam novice entered to fox-hunting. It would be bootless here to offer any eulogy upon a sport admitted, by authorities allowing no question, to be, in a political as well as a social view, a powerful moral engine. In a letter now before me, which I lately received from a gallant general, himself a master of fox-hounds, he ascribes to a taste for the chase that characteristic manly daring which distinguishes the officers of our service from those of any other. Of all field sports its claims are the most general upon the properties of manhood. The tiger-hunts of the East may appeal more directly to the courage, but with activity and physical endurance they have little or nothing to do. But see the qualities that must combine to form the accomplished fox-hunter. He must be bold, ready, decisive, capable of commanding and sustaining great bodily exertion: he must join unity of purpose to promptness of action; capability of foreseeing events, that he may best turn them to advantage, with a frame and a spirit alike competent to meet and oppose undauntedly difficulties and dangers, how and when they may assail him. I would not have it supposed that I claim for the chase a higher station for enterprise than any other of the adventurous occupations in which we find mankind employed. It would be absurd for an instant, for example, to compare it with that most exciting and magnificent of all the daring offices to which man has ever addressed himself—the South Sea fishing. But as a sport,—an act to which pleasure alone induces him, fox-hunting has nothing at all bearing comparison with it in modern days. To the present fashion of its details we will now turn our consideration.