“With his long gallop that can tire
The hound’s deep hate and hunter’s fire.”
If you had a second Eclipse under you, and rode him fairly with them, yard for yard, you would stop him in less than twenty minutes!
Yet old practitioners, notably that prince of sportsmen the Rev. John Russell, contrive to see runs of many hours’ duration without so entirely exhausting their horses but that they can travel some twenty miles home across the moor. Such men as Mr. Granville Somerset, the late Mr. Dene of Barnstaple, Mr. Bissett himself, though weighing twenty stone, and a score of others—for in the West good sportsmen are the rule, not the exception—go well from find to finish of these long, exhausting chases, yet never trespass too far on the generosity and endurance of the noble animal that carries them to the end. And why? Because they take pains, use their heads sagaciously, their hands skilfully, and their heels scarcely at all. To their experience I am indebted for the following little hints which I have found serviceable when embarked on those wide, trackless wastes, brown, endless, undulating, and spacious as the sea.
There are happily no fences, and the chief obstructions to be defeated, or rather negotiated, are the “combes”—a succession of valleys that trend upward from the shallow streams to the heathery ridges, narrowing as they ascend till lost in the level surface of the moor. Never go down into these until your deer is sinking. So surely as you descend will you have to climb the opposite rise; rather keep round them towards the top, watching the hounds while they thread a thousand intricacies of rock, heather, and scattered copse-wood, so as to meet them when they emerge, which they will surely do on the upper level, for it is the nature of their quarry to rise the hill aslant, and seek safety, when pressed, in its speed across the flat.
A deer descends these declivities one after another as they come, but it is for the refreshment of a bath in their waters below, and instinct prompts it to return without delay to higher ground when thus invigorated. Only if completely beaten and exhausted, does it become so confused as to attempt scaling a rise in a direct line. The run is over then, and you may turn your horse’s head to the wind, for in a furlong or two the game will falter and come down again amongst its pursuers to stand at bay.
Coast your “combes,” therefore, judiciously, and spare your horse; so shall you cross the heather in thorough enjoyment of the chase till it leads you perhaps to the grassy swamps of Exmoor, the most plausible line in the world, over which hounds run their hardest—and now look out!
If Exmoor were in Leicestershire, it would be called a bog, and cursed accordingly, but every country has its own peculiarities, and a North Devon sportsman more especially, on a horse whose dam, or even grandam, was bred on the moor, seems to flap his way across it with as much confidence as a bittern or a curlew. Could I discover how he accomplished this feat I would tell you, but I can only advise you to ride his line and follow him yard for yard.
There are certain sound tracks and pathways, no doubt, in which a horse does not sink more than fetlock deep, and Mr. Knight, the lord of the soil, may be seen, on a large handsome thorough-bred hunter, careering away as close to the pack as he used to ride in the Vale of Aylesbury, but for a stranger so to presume would be madness, and if he did not find himself bogged in half a minute, he would stop his horse in half a mile.