Hunting in the provinces has that great advantage over the shires, that you have fewer people out, and consequently you really can take an interest in the hound work and watch what they are doing, and when they run you can keep your eye on them all through, and ride to them, whereas in a fashionable country you get cramped up at a corner of a covert with three or four hundred people hemming you in, behind a narrow gateway may be, hardly wide enough for one horse to get through at a time. Your horse probably gets frightened in the thick of the fray, and tries to go backwards instead of forwards, the man's horse in front of you has his ears back and a ribbon in his tail, while those behind keep cramming on with cries of "Get on, do, or else let me come," so by the time you have sniggled yourself through this turmoil, hounds have slipped away and are out of sight. You may then ride for all you are worth, but you probably will never see the hounds again until they kill, or at any rate check. So you must e'en be content with galloping in the wake of somebody else's back, and trust to luck that he is going the right way, but it is dull work compared to picking your own places and using your own head to get to hounds the shortest way.
Of course the country in the shires makes up for almost anything, and to stride away over the pasture lands of Leicestershire or Pytchleydom, is truly the realisation of the "Happy Hunting Grounds." After you have once learned to find your way over a cramped country, intersected with lime and mortar walls and barbed wire, in Scotland, or after you have scaled the heights and fathomed the depths of the banks and drains in Ireland, then to go down for a hunt in the shires is a holiday worthy of the name. "Call this a ditch?" you exclaim inwardly as you flick over an English fence, after encountering those gruesome dykes in Meath. True, I only hunted in Meath one season, but my private verdict at the end of the time was, "a splendid education, but an awful experience as far as the fences are concerned." But then I do not like a ditch I cannot see the bottom of, especially when it has sheer cut-out sides which every person in front of you makes bigger and bigger. I also have a vivid recollection of seeing several top hats (nothing else) wandering up and down on the level of the ground, as other brave souls went at those ditches and cleared them and their contents, human, equine and all. This was on a pleasant spot in Meath, known as the "Bush Farm," and I don't mind saying that for appalling fences I have never met its equal, and devoutly trust I may never come in contact with its superior, unless I am mounted either on a bird or a balloon. But for sport it was undefeated, and the beautiful old turf was a pleasure to ride on. A great blessing too it is having no ridge and furrow, for really sometimes in England, the Bay of Biscay "is jokes" compared to the ground you ride over. The continued galloping up and down is so hard on horses, and though of course one knows the dodge of taking them slantways, still it is not half such fun as swinging away over smooth grass.
One thing about Ireland—and when I say Ireland, I am thinking only of the county Meath, for I have never hunted with any other pack over there, barring one day in Kildare—is that a pony can get over it. It will creep about and jump like a cat, and cross the country as it never could in England. Then, too, people do not seem to hurt themselves so often when they fall over there, and that no doubt is because they ride slowly at their fences, but then how one misses the gates. It is almost impossible to believe at first that there really are not any, but the cruel fact is proved time after time, till at last you are forced to own that it is only too true.
Scotland, some years ago, before so much wire crept in, was as good a school as need be to teach anyone how to get to hounds. You sometimes had to crawl and creep, and sometimes to jump a bit of timber standing, perhaps uphill in a corner, or an awkward place under a tree, with generally a wire somewhere through it or standing handy by, and it is a great thing to learn where there are difficulties, for it teaches you to use your head, which is as important out hunting as it is in daily life. Yet how few people seem to hunt with their heads. As long as they can gallop and jump in sight of someone else's coat tails, there are many who seem to be quite content, and will assure you they enjoy their hunting immensely.
But this is not the real way.
To use your own judgment, to have a quick eye to hounds, and as they turn and swing to cut off the corners, to save your horse by choosing the weak places in the fences and the best going in the fields, this is the science of riding to hounds. Yet very few know how to do it, and fewer still have the gift of being able to make a horse gallop. In a crowded country where everything depends on your getting a start much also depends on this.
To be strong on a horse is given to few, to ride light to very few, and yet to be a really good horsewoman one ought to be both. It is pretty to see a really good man or woman riding to hounds. How they keep flitting along to one side of the pack, never seeming in a hurry, but always moving on, down the furrows and over the gaps, and those who try to catch them will find they are always in front and generally clean.
One great thing to learn, and especially I think for a woman, is to go quietly and not to splash. One hates to see the women of a hunt always on the gallop, going from covert to covert across the fields. It looks so much better, and is so much wiser to trot quietly over them than to go helter skelter past everybody else, probably squelching muddy water over them as you go, and incurring the condemnation of the opposite sex, who, if they are sportsmen of the right sort, will seldom be seen bustling between times.
Not only to ride your horse quietly, but to be quiet yourself is also an advantage. I shall never forget once in Leicestershire, after an almost blank day, the whole field was drawn up to one side of a small spinney by the road, and all our hopes of retrieving the day lay in our getting a fox away from the far corner of the wood. All who understood the importance of keeping quiet were dumb, and we could not help feeling a little bit bored by one good lady, who in strident tones gave an exhaustive history of her aluminium watch. Her listener would evidently have gladly cut her short had his manners been less good, and the rest of us wished heartily that both she and her watch were at the bottom of the sea. Poor lady, she hunted with the greatest regularity several days a week, but she had never learned the why of things out hunting.
Then there are what may be called the "let me come" women—those who have to gallop at their fences because they dare not go at them slower, and if anybody happens to be before them think it necessary to shout. I know, of course, that opinions differ as to riding fast or slow at a fence, though personally I hold to the latter, and cannot help thinking that people who always ride at them fast are afraid to do so any slower. Certain it is that a horse will jump a place more surely and more cleverly if you give him time to see what he is going at, and most of them can jump very much bigger places even standing than people generally give them credit for. If you take a pull to steady your horse when you are a little distance from your fence, you will probably arrive at the other side far more collectedly, and be striding away again over the next field, before others who allow their horses to gallop on right up to the fence are near you. They are going too fast to notice the grip before they arrive at it, and consequently their horse takes off from the wrong leg and lands like a star-fish in the next field, then stumbles, pecks, and recovers again before he is once more set in motion. All this takes time and tires the horse, moreover should the luckless animal thus ridden fail to recover from the stumble and peck, he will give his rider a far worse fall than if he had gone at it slower.