Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport. Various
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The gorse covers are splendidly thick and overgrown and take a long time to draw; a good many of the fashionable packs, I know, would hesitate to expose themselves to such rough work as drawing Toff Newton or Torrington gorse. The foxes are more like Scotch foxes, large and grey. They are wild, and take some killing, sometimes running for two hours. There are not enough inhabitants to head them or cheer the discouraged huntsman by occasional information.
In Cheshire I saw five foxes killed on one day, but a huntsman in Lincolnshire will be lucky if he kills two in a week.
I hunted two winters with the Burton hounds, and I am sure the largest field I ever saw was twenty people. The master, huntsman and two whips included. Hunting in a big country with a small field and wild foxes is the best way of learning to be independent. If, as was my experience, you have a hard-riding huntsman, who gets down early in the run; one whip who takes the wrong turn out of cover, and the other who hangs back after a refractory couple of hounds, a few poorly-mounted farmers and unlucky gentlemen, you can realise with moderate difficulty the possibility of the proud position of being alone with hounds; although this distinction may be capable of the same explanation as was the position of the Scotch boy who, when boasting of being second in his class, was compelled to admit that it consisted of "Me and a lassie."
I said the Holdernesse for horses, and I certainly never saw a better mounted field or a finer lot of riding farmers—all of them sportsmen and gentlemen. They ask long prices for their young horses, if they will sell them to you at all, but the chances are they have already promised them to some London dealer. Yorkshire horses are, perhaps, after Irish, the most famous. They are mostly thorough-bred, and can gallop and stay. I shall never forget a horse I held for a young farmer which would not allow him to mount. I can see it now. A long, loose-limbed bay, with a small, keen, bony face, and an eye that looked through you. I have a great weakness for a horse's face, and think in a general way it shows as much character as a man's. His back was perhaps a trifle too long, but his girth was deep, and he moved like an athlete. He was as wild as a hawk, and could hardly keep still for love of life, dancing at every shadow, and springing feet into the air when anyone passed too near him. He was beautifully ridden and humoured and ultimately settled into the discouraging trot known as "hounds pace." I asked his owner what he wanted for him, and how old he was. The man said that he was rising six, that he wanted £300, and had often refused £250. We had a long talk, as we trotted down the road to draw the next cover, about horses in general and his bay in particular. I fancy his feats lost nothing by being repeated, but I shall not relate them, as what they gained by tradition they would lose by print.
The Holdernesse is a light plough country, and, like Lincolnshire, its common fence is a deep drain, into which your horse can absolutely disappear. I saw eight men down in one, all at the same time, and a young thorough-bred horse in a deep drain is about the worst company in the world.
There is not a finer country to ride over in England than the Pytchley. Unfortunately, too many people agree with us, which is a slight objection to hunting there.
They have wonderful sport, a first-rate huntsman and a rich community. Lord Spencer is the keenest of masters and best of sportsmen. Whyte Melville says of him in his riding recollections: "The present Lord Spencer, of whom it is enough to say he hunts one pack of his own in Northamptonshire, and is always in the same field with them, never seems to have a horse pull, or, until it is tired, even lean on his hand." I should like to have been praised by Whyte Melville. He is one of the few novelists whose heroes are gentlemen, who can describe English society and a straight forty minutes over countries that we recognise.
The Pytchley is not cut up by railroads, like the Quorn. There is not nearly so much timber as there is in Leicestershire, but it is as big if not bigger.
In old days, Lord Spencer told me, they said, "You may, perhaps, go through the Pytchley, but you must get over the Quorn."
If anything will teach one to gallop, it is riding for a bridle gate in the company of three or four hundred people, none of them morbidly civil.
You must get there, and get there soon, as it is the only visible means of securing a start, or getting into the next field. Sometimes one's horse has a sensitive habit of backing when he is pressed, which allows everyone to pass you. In any case, you will have a horse's head under each arm; a spur against your instep; a kicker with a red tape in his tail pressed towards your favourite mare, with the doubtful consolation of being told, when the iron of his hoof has rattled against her fore-leg that "it was too near to have hurt her." Your hat will be knocked off by an enthusiast pointing to the line the fox is taking, and your eye will dimly perceive the pack swaying over the ridge and furrow, like swallows crossing the sea, two fields ahead of you. If you harden your heart and jump the generally gigantic fence at the side of the gate, you expose yourself to the ridicule of the whole field; for it is on these occasions that your favourite is pretty sure to fall on her head.
No one is responsible for the manners of a field which is largely made up of "specials" from Rugby, Leamington and Banbury. A Northamptonshire hunting-man is as nice a fellow as there is in England, and outside his own country has the finest manners; but the struggle for existence in the field with hard-riding casuals has hardened his heart and embittered his speech.
Every field has its own character; an indescribable "something" which one feels without being able to define. There is a friendliness and distinction about the Melton field peculiarly its own. The Quorn Fridays are joined by Mr. Fernie's field, the Cottesmore, Belvoir and others, and is in consequence very large. Tom Firr, the huntsman—and a man who can very nearly catch a fox himself—is less moved by a large crowd than anyone I ever saw, unless, perhaps, it be his hounds who "come up through a crowd of horses, and stick to the line of their fox, or fling gallantly forward to recover it, without a thought of personal danger, or the slightest misgiving; that not one man in ten is master of the two pair of hoofs beneath him, carrying death in every shoe."
A friend of mine—a cricketer—said that he did not know which country he preferred hunting in—Leicestershire or Northamptonshire—but there was the same difference between them as playing at Lords and playing at the Oval.
Melton Mowbray is about three hours and a half from London. By leaving London at 7·30 you can hunt with the Pytchley at an eleven o'clock meet. You must get up earlier to hunt with the Quorn. I doubt if many people would risk leaving London between five and six in a climate like ours, where you cannot be quite sure that between five and eleven heavy snow may not have fallen, or that the damp in one county is not hard black frost in the next.
Some say that Melton is not what it was. Perhaps this is because there are no poets left to sing of it. Bromley Davenport, Whyte Melville and others have left us. Perhaps the red town has spread, and the old fox-hunters who grumble have grown older. Of course the old days were better when they found themselves leading "The cream of the cream in the shire of the shires." These days do not come twice. A man is fortunate to have had them once, and be able to say with the poet and philosopher—
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