He has been gone five minutes when the clamour of the find reaches his ears, twice that time ere the hounds are fairly out of covert on his line; so, with a clear head and a bold heart, he has leisure to consider his tactics and to remember the main earth at Crag’s-end in the forest, twelve miles off as the crow flies.
Challenger, and Charmer his progeny, crash out of the wood together, fairly howling with ecstasy as their busy noses meet the rich tufted herbage, dewy, dank, and tainted with the maddening odour that affords such uncontrolled enjoyment. “Harve art him, my lards!” exclaims old Matthew, in Doric accents, peculiar to the kennel. “Come up, horse!” and, having admonished that faithful servant with a dig in the ribs from his horn, blows half-a-dozen shrill blasts in quick succession, sticks the instrument, I shudder to confess it, in his boot, and proceeds to hustle his old white nag at the best pace he can command in the wake of his favourites. “Dang it! they’re off,” exclaims a farmer, who had stationed himself on the crest of the hill, diving, at a gallop, down a stony darkling lane, overgrown with alder, brambles, honeysuckle, all the garden produce of uncultivated nature, lush and steaming in decay. The field, consisting of the Squire, three or four strapping yeomen, a parson, and a boy on a pony, follow his example, and making a good turn in the valley, find themselves splashing through a glittering, shallow streamlet, still in the lane, with the hounds not a bowshot from them on the right.
“And pace?” inquires young Rapid, when his father describes the run to him on Christmas-eve. “Of course you had no pace with so good a point?”
“Pace, sir!” answers the indignant parent; “my hounds run because they can hunt. I tell you, they were never off the line for an hour and three-quarters! Matthew would try to cast them once, and very nearly lost his fox, but Charmer hit it off on the other side of the combe and put us right. He’s as like old Challenger as he can stick; a deal more like than you are to me.”
Young Rapid concedes the point readily, and the Squire continues his narrative: “I had but eighteen couple out, because of a run the week before—I’ll tell you about it presently,—five-and-thirty minutes on the hills, and a kill in the open, that lamed half the pack amongst the flints. You talk of pace—they went fast enough to have settled the best of you, I’ll warrant! but I’m getting off the line—I’ve not done with the other yet. I never saw hounds work better. They came away all together, they hunted their fox like a cluster of bees; swarming over every field, and every fence, they brought him across Tinglebury Tor, where it’s always as dry as that hearth-stone, through a flock of five hundred sheep, they rattled him in and out of Combe-Bampton, though the Lower Woods were alive with riot—hares, roe, fallow-deer, hang it! apes and peacocks if you like; had old Matthew not been a fool they would never have hesitated for a moment, and when they ran into him under Crag’s-end, there wasn’t a man-jack of them missing. Not one—that’s what I call a pack of hounds!
“The best part of it? So much depends on whether you young fellows go out to hunt, or to ride. For the first half-hour or so we were never off the grass—there’s not a ploughed field all the way up the valley till you come to Shifner’s allotments, orchard and meadow, meadow and orchard, fetlock-deep in grass, even at this time of year. Why, it carries a side-scent, like the heather on a moor! I suppose you’d have called that the best part. I didn’t, though I saw it well from the lane with Matthew and the rest of us, all but the Vicar, who went into every field with the hounds—I thought he was rather hard on them amongst those great blind, tangled fences; but he’s such a good fellow, I hadn’t the heart to holloa at him—it’s very wrong though, and a man in his profession ought to know better.
“I can’t say they checked exactly in the allotments, but the manure and rubbish, weeds burning, and whatnot, brought them to their noses. That’s where Matthew made such a fool of himself; but, as I told you, Charmer put us all right. The fox had crossed into Combe-Bampton and was rising the hill for the downs.
“I never saw hounds so patient—they could but just hold a line over the chalk—first one and then another puzzled it out, till they got on better terms in Hazlewood Hanger, and when they ran down into the valley again between the cliffs there was a cry it did one’s heart good to hear.