Katerfelto: A Story of Exmoor

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

If such a position be granted, it follows that all hunting, conducted in a spirit of humanity and fair play, is more or less to be esteemed. The stout sexagenarian who halts his steady cob on a hill, and from that point of vantage watches in the valley below his ten couple of beagles unwinding and puzzling out the line of a hare that has just crossed under his pony's nose, without assisting them by so much as a whisper, is a sportsman to the back-bone. No music on this lower earth can ravish his ears like the tuneful cry of his little darlings, who are indeed nothing loth to hear their own voices, and refuse to hunt a yard without assuring each other that it is all right. No triumph can afford him greater pleasure than his ride home to dinner with a hare dangling across his saddle, honestly killed by the patience and perseverance of that tedious pursuit which has fairly wearied her to death! and when he lays his head on his pillow, before his closing eyes passes a vision of Challenger opening in the turnips, of Rock-wood and Reveller feathering with scarce a whimper up the stony lane.

Surely his enjoyment is undeniable as that of his converse, the scarlet-coated hero in vigorous manhood, who bestrides three hundred guineas' worth of blood and symmetry, while he watches a gorse covert shaking under the researches of twenty couple of high-bred fox hounds, wild with eagerness to push up their game and dash after him over the sea of grass that lies spread around, like falcons on the wing. A physiologist might study to advantage the countenance of the rider; an artist would long to portray on canvas the attitude of the horse.

These two friends, loving each other dearly, are moved by a common sympathy. Simultaneously the eyes of each brighten, and their hearts beat fast. A crash of music from two score merry voices proclaims that a fox has been found, a hat held up against the sky-line, and, after a discreet interval, one long, ringing holloa announce that he is away! That joyous excitement for which some men are content to live, and even in a few sad cases to die, has begun in good earnest now, and trifling, puerile as it may seem, I doubt whether any pursuit in life affords for the moment such intense gratification as "a quick thing over a grass country, strongly enclosed, in a good place, and only half-a-dozen men with the hounds!"

MOONLIGHT.

Rider and horse, I say, are moved by a common sympathy, science and conduct being furnished by the man, strength, speed, and courage by the brute. From field to field they speed rejoicing, facing and surmounting each obstacle as it presents itself, with a varied dexterity of hand and eye that amounts to artistic skill, and even should unforeseen difficulty or treacherous foothold entail a downfall, rising together, parted, but not at variance, each perfectly satisfied with the efforts of his friend. Then, when the rattling burst is over, and the hounds are baying round a good fox who has never turned his head from the distant covert that killing pace alone forbade him to reach, how fond the caress laid by stained glove on reeking neck, how proudly affectionate the muttered words of praise, a generous animal interprets by their tone. "You're the best horse in England. I never was so well carried in my life!"

But of all forest creatures hunted by our forefathers and ourselves, the stag has been considered from time immemorial the noblest beast of chase. His nature has been the study of princes, his pursuit the sport of kings. The education of royalty itself would once have been thought incomplete without a thorough knowledge of his haunts and habits, while books were written, and authorities quoted, on the formalities with which his courteous persecutors deemed it becoming that he should be hunted to death. To this day the royal and gallant sport flourishes in West Somerset and North Devon with its former vigour. When George the Third was king, that wild, romantic western county was already famous for staunch hounds, untiring horses, and daring riders, no less than for the strength, size, and lasting qualities of its red deer.

An animal that can fly twenty miles on end for life, and die with its back to a rock, undaunted in defeat, a true gentleman to the last, is surely no unworthy object of pursuit.

But what are these shadows that cross the Barle by moonlight, with the water dripping like molten silver off their sides as they emerge one by one from the glistening stream to disappear again in the black night of its overhanging woods? And is not that their king who lags behind, with beam and branches of those wide-spread horns flashing in points of white as he stoops his crowned head to drink, and passes on? No shadow this, but a stately beast in all the strength and beauty of its prime. A stag of size and substance, with goodly fat on his ribs and many tines on his antlers. Thickening, too, somewhat in the neck, for already the clear air of an autumn night tells of early frosts, and soon the peaceful majesty of his repose will change to turmoil of love and war. In the meantime he feeds lazily on, turning without apparent object in a different direction from the herd.

Thus he wanders over a broad surface of country—now cropping the rank grasses that border the Exe, ere he dashes through its swift and shallow stream as though disdaining a bath that only reaches to his knees. Anon dallying with the standing oats, that pine thin and scanty on a bare hill farm, by the verge of the forest; then crossing the swampy skirts of Exmoor at his long jerking trot, to rouse the bittern and the curlew from their rest, he makes his way by many a broken path and devious sheep-track to the impervious coppices and steep wooded declivities of Cloutsham Ball. It is an hour or two before dawn when he reaches this well-known haunt, and the lordly beast, penetrating to its inmost thicket, lays himself down with the intention of sleeping undisturbed till late in the day.