When he is not heading immediately for a drain, he is nearly sure to turn sooner or later, and if when he turns, the horsemen ride the Hounds past the point, and the Huntsman aggravates the difficulty by picking up the Hounds and setting out on a casting experiment before they have time to get their heads down, the most sensitive noses in the world will be doing no more good than if they were plunged into the oatmeal and flesh in the Kennel trough. The proper place for a Foxhound’s nose is on the ground. No one knew this better than Mr. Smith, and the lesson could not be expressed more tersely than it is in this book by his friend “Pytchly.”
This does not mean to say that Hounds should never be handled at all. If a pack of Hounds were literally left entirely to themselves day after day they might gradually lose the faculty of trying for themselves unless there was a good holding scent. Hounds take a very great deal from the mere presence and moral support of their Huntsman, and a certain point arrives when they need his actual guidance after they have done trying for themselves. The Huntsman who can accurately fix this point is the Huntsman they want.
After reading “Pytchly’s Story” it is impossible to believe that Mr. Smith did not appreciate and act upon the moral that it points, but actually went to the other extreme of trying to hunt the Fox himself regardless of his Hounds. Yet Nimrod in his “Hunting Reminiscences” would have us believe that he did. After characteristically beginning his appreciation of Mr. Smith by describing his horsemanship, he then goes on to say that as a Huntsman he was wild, and that there was too much of the man, and too little of the Hounds to satisfy a lover of hunting. He would go away, says Nimrod, with the leading Hounds, caring nothing for the body of the pack, with his eye “forward to some point which his intuitive knowledge of the line Foxes take induced him to believe his had taken; and six times in ten he was right.” Frankly, but with great respect to Nimrod, we do not believe it; and it should be remarked that even Nimrod himself only credits Mr. Smith with six correct flashes of intuition in every ten attempts. Invaluable as are the writings of “Pomponius Ego” as “costume pieces,” even as historical references, it is open to doubt if he was really a reliable critic of the Huntsman’s Art. He certainly makes Mr. Osbaldiston do some queer things in his imaginary description of a day with the Quorn Hounds in 1826, such, for instance, as view-holloaing with his finger in his ear before a single Hound had opened in covert. But we will let that pass.
It is just possible that he may have been out with Mr. Smith on one of those days when even the soundest of Huntsmen may appear to be taking liberties with the Hounds; but it is quite certain that Mr. Smith could not have consistently performed in the manner described by Nimrod during the season when he killed ninety Foxes in ninety-one days’ hunting. Six to ten is a different ratio.
The phrase “the intuitive knowledge of the run of a Fox” has been somewhat freely used by more than one writer. Does any man really possess it? Can the human intelligence really get inside the instincts of the Fox and perceive exactly what he is thinking about, except on occasions which are obvious to us all? The probability is that when the Huntsman does something which is set down to his intuitive knowledge of the run of a Fox he is acting naturally and almost, if not quite unconsciously, upon a mass of accumulated experience that many seasons’ hunting has fixed upon his brain, which he can produce on demand when the situation arises. Knowledge, experience, memory, and the power of drawing on them and applying them may very likely pass for what people call intuition.
Those who would understand the Science of Foxhunting cannot do better than read The Life of a Fox in conjunction with The Diary of a Huntsman by the same Author. Professor Huxley said somewhere that Science is Organized Commonsense. The Science of Foxhunting is eminently a matter of Commonsense, and there is no wiser exponent of it than Mr. Thomas Smith. So far from relying on “intuition” he has the unique distinction of being the only writer who has put upon paper a definite recipe for a cast in the form of a Map, together with the whole process of reasoning by which it is justified. The Diary of a Huntsman, in which this Map appears, is a vindication of the importance of following certain rules. The departure from these rules on the part of various Huntsmen is the cause of the satisfaction expressed at the symposium of “Wily,” “Pytchly,” “Warwick,” “Sandy” and all the other Foxes who appear in this Volume.
To the Right Hon.
CHARLES, EARL OF HARDWICKE,
etc. etc. etc.
My Lord,—It is customary in a Dedication to use the language of fulsome adulation, even in cases where the writer and the person addressed affect an equal abhorrence of it. Adopting a more simple, straightforward course, and one more worthy of my name, for few foxes have run more straight, I will candidly inform your Lordship that the love I bear you is much the same as that borne to myself by the most venerable hen now cackling in your farmyard, whose half-fledged brood I have often thinned. But, my Lord, although I openly acknowledge my aversion to the unfeathered biped species to which you belong, yet the kinds and degrees of hatred are various as the characters of those towards whom we entertain it; and while some, affecting to treat my persecuted race as noxious vermin, destroy us by day and by night with snare, trap, gun, and every other engine which their ingenuity can devise, we have always found in your Lordship a fair and open enemy, and one who disdained to have recourse to the cowardly contrivances above referred to. It is on this account, my Lord, that I have done you the honour to dedicate to you the following narrative of my eventful life.
Many are the happy hours that I have spent, some years since, in the neighbourhood of your Lordship’s hen-roost in Hampshire, and latterly many a tender rabbit, etc., have I carried home from the plantations and fields which you now so handsomely preserve for the use of myself and my kindred at Wimpole; this conduct on your part would have ensured my lasting gratitude, could I forget how frequently I have been driven by hound and horn from those treacherous coverts. Although, from the above reasons, there cannot be friendship between us, there may, I trust there does, exist some feeling of mutual respect; you and your brethren are not insensible to those merits in our species which you affect to depreciate. Fabulists and other writers, in all languages, have quoted the sayings and doings of my ancestors, as lessons of instruction for youth; while the craft and cunning of your ablest statesmen have been, in many instances, entirely derived from our acknowledged principles and practice. Our heroism in the endurance of a violent and cruel death is equalled only by our dexterity in avoiding it. It was only last winter that a cousin of mine led a gallant field of two hundred horsemen over thirty miles of the finest country in England; and when at length overtaken by twenty couple of his enemies, each one larger and stronger than himself, he died amid their murderous fangs, without suffering a yell or cry to escape him! Yet do the poets of your race celebrate as a hero, one Hector, a timid biped, who, after a miserable run round the walls of Troy, suffered himself to be overtaken and killed by a single opponent!
Such, my Lord, is the justice of historic fame in this world, wherein thousands of men have written; whilst I alone of my tribe have been endowed with the power of thus using the quills of that excellent bird, which has been for centuries the favourite object of pursuit amongst the brave and skilful of my race.