“What a number of cubs you have killed!”
The Master said, icily, that those were foxes, and the subject dropped.
Poor L. is dead now; a keener little huntsman never blew a horn, but he never quite succeeded in hitting it off with the farmers and country people; they were incomprehensible to each other, alike in speech and in spirit. L. despised anyone who got out of bed later than 5 A.M., winter and summer alike, and would boast of having got all his work done before others were out of their beds, which was trying to people with whom early rising is not a foible. He found it impossible to divine the psychology of the lads who jovially told him that they had seen the fox and had “cruisted him well” (which meant that they had stoned him back into covert when he tried to break). It is hard to kill foxes in Carbery, and L. was much exercised about the frequent disappointments that them pore ’ounds had to endure as a result of bad earth-stopping. One wet day, on arriving at the meet, I found him in a state of high indignation. The covert we were to draw was a very uncertain find, and it transpired that L. had secretly arranged with the farmer on whose land it was, that he was to turn down a bagman in it. “He said he could get one easy, and you’d ’ardly think it, Master, but the feller tells me now it was a tame fox of ’is own he was going to turn down, and now he says to me he thinks the day is too wet to bring out such a little pet! ‘A little pet!’ ’e says!”
The human voice is incapable of an accent of more biting scorn than L. imparted to his as he spoke these words. I am unable to determine if L.’s wrath were attributable to the farmer’s heartlessness in having been willing to hunt a tame fox, or to his affectation of consideration for it, or whether it was the result of rage and disappointment on behalf of the hounds. I incline to the last theory.
I have hunted with a good many packs in Ireland of very varying degrees of grandeur, and Ireland is privileged in unconventionalism; nevertheless, it was in England, with a highly fashionable Leicestershire pack, that I was privileged to behold an incident that might have walked out of the pages of Charles Lever into the studio of Randolph Caldecott.
I had brought over a young mare to ride and sell; she and I were the guests of two of the best riders in England and the nicest people in the world (which is sufficient identification for those that know the couple in question). It was my first day with an English pack and it had been a good one. Hunting for the day was at an end, and we had turned our horses for home, when the fight flared up. High on the ridge of a hill, dark against a frosty evening sky, I can still see the combatants, with their whips in the air, laying in to each other happily and whole-heartedly for quite a minute or two, before peacemakers came rushing up, and what had been a pretty, old-fashioned quarrel was patted down into a commonplace, to be dealt with by the family solicitors.
I had had my own little fracas that day. The young mare was hot, and took me over a place which included a hedge, and a wet ditch, and an old gentleman who had waited in the ditch while his horse went on. I feared, from what I could gather as I proceeded on my way, that he was annoyed, but as I had caught sight of him just in time to tell him to lie down, I could not feel much to blame.
I had an English huntsman for two or three seasons whose keenness was equalled (rather unexpectedly) by his piety. He was an extraordinarily hard man to go (“No silly joke of a man to ride,” as I have heard it put), and his excitement when hounds began to run would release itself in benedictions.
“Gawd bless you, Governor boy! Gawd bless you, Rachel my darling! Come along, Master! Come along! He’s away, thank Gawd! He’s away!”
There was a day when hounds took us across a bad bit of bog and there checked. Harry, the whipperin, also an Englishman, and not learned in bogs, got in rather deep. His horse got away from him, and while he was floundering, waist-deep in black and very cold bog-water, he saw the hunted fox creeping into a patch of furze and rocks. He holloa’d to G., who galloped up as near as was advisable.