Dismiss the moment you start two ideas which are the bane of sport, jealousy of what others are doing, and conceit of what you are doing yourself; keep your eyes on the pack, on your horse’s ears, and the next fence, instead of burning to beat Thompson, or hoping that Brown saw how cleverly you got over that rasper!
Foxes. Study the change in the appearance of the fox between the beginning and the end of a run; a fresh fox slips away with his brush straight, whisking it with an air of defiance now and then; a beaten fox looks dark, hangs his brush, and arches his back as he labours along.
With the hounds well away, it is a great point to get a good start; so while they are running in cover, cast your eyes over the boundary-fence, and make up your mind where you will take it: a big jump at starting is better than thrusting with a crowd in a gap or gateway always presuming that you can depend on your horse.
When you meet the pack with a strange horse, don’t go near it until sure that he will not kick at hounds, as some ill-educated horses will do.
Before the hounds begin to draw, you may get some useful information as to a strange country from a talkative farmer.
When hounds are drawing a large cover, and when you cannot see them, keep down wind, so as to hear the huntsman, who, in large woodlands, must keep on cheering his hounds. When a fox breaks cover near you, or you think he does, don’t be in a hurry to give the Tally-a-e-o! for, in the first place, if you are not experienced and quick-eyed, it may not be a fox at all, but a dog, or a hare. The mistake is common to people who are always in a hurry, and equally annoying to the huntsman and the blunderer; and, in the next place, if you halloo too soon, ten to one the fox heads back into cover. When he is well away through the hedge of a good-sized field, halloo, at the same time raising your cap, Tally-o aw-ay-o-o! giving each syllable very slowly, and with your mouth well open; for this is the way to be heard a long distance. Do this once or twice, and then be quiet for a short spell, and be ready to tell the huntsman, when he comes up, in a few sentences, exactly which way the fox is gone. If the fox makes a short bolt, and returns, it is Tally-o back! with the back loud and clear. If the fox crosses the side of a wood when the hounds are at check, the cry should be Tally-o over!
If you should have a cold-scenting day, and any first-rate steeplechase rider be in the field, breaking in a young one, watch him; you may learn more from seeing what he does, than from hours of advice, or pages of reading.
Above all, hold your tongue until you have learnt your lesson; and talk neither of your triumphs nor your failures. Any fool can boast; and though to ride boldly and with judgment is very pleasant, there is nothing for a gentleman to be specially proud of, considering that two hundred huntsmen, or whips, do it better than most gentlemen every hunting day in the season.
In going from cover to cover, keep in the same field as the hounds, unless you know the country then you can’t be left behind without a struggle. To keep in the same field as the hounds when they are running, is more than any man can undertake to do. Make your commencement in an easy country, and defer trying the pasture counties until you are sure of yourself and your horse.
Never take a jump when an open gate or gap is handy, unless the hounds are going fast. Don’t attempt to show in front, unless you feel you can keep there. Beginners, who try to make a display, even if lucky at first, are sure to make some horrid blunder. Go slowly at your fences, except water and wide ditches, and don’t pull at the curb when your horse is rising. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the horse will be better without your assistance than with it. Don’t wear spurs until you are quite sure that you won’t spur at the wrong time. Never lose your temper with your horse, and never strike him with the whip when going at a fence; it is almost sure to make him swerve. Pick out the firmest ground; hold your horse together across ploughed land; if you want a pilot, choose not a scarlet and cap, but some well-mounted old farmer, who has not got a horse to sell: if he has, ten to one but he leads you into grief.
There are a few hints to which pupils in the art of hunting may do well to attend.
Don’t go into the field until you can sit a horse over any reasonable fence. But practice at real fences, for at the leaping-bar only the rudiments of fencing are to be learned by either man or horse. The hunting-field is not the place for practising the rudiments of the art. Buy a perfect hunter; no matter how blemished or how ugly, so that he has legs, eyes, and wind to carry him and his rider across the country. It is essential that one of the two should perfectly understand the business in hand. Have nothing to say to a puller, a rusher, or a kicker, even if you fancy you are competent; a colt should only be ridden by a man who is paid to risk his bones. An amateur endangers himself, his neighbours, and the pack, by attempting rough-riding. The best plan for a man of moderate means those who can afford to spend hundreds on experiments can pick and choose in the best stables is to hire a hack hunter; and, if he suits, buy him, to teach you how to go.
But stag-hunting may be defended as the very best mode of obtaining a constitutional gallop for those whose time is too valuable to be expended in looking for a fox. It is suited to punctual, commercial, military, or political duties. You may read your letters, dictate replies, breakfast deliberately, order your dinner, and invite a party to discuss it, and set off to hunt with the Queen’s, the Baron’s, or any other stag-hound pack within reach of rail, almost certain of two hours’ galloping, and a return by the train you fixed in the morning.
The Surrey stag-hounds, in the season of 1857, had some runs with the Ketton Hind equal in every respect to the best fox-hunts on record; for she repeatedly beat them, was loose in the woods for days, was drawn for like a wild deer, and then, with a burning scent, ran clear away from the hounds, while the hounds ran away from the horsemen. But, according to the usual order of the day, the deer begins in a cart, and ends in a barn.
Stag-hunting from a cart is a pursuit very generally contemned in print, and very ardently followed by many hundred hard-riding gentlemen every hunting day in the year. A man who can ride up to stag-hounds on a straight running day must have a perfect hunter, in first-rate condition, and be, in the strongest sense of the term, a horseman. But it wants the uncertainties which give so great a charm to fox-hunting, where there are any foxes. There is no find, and no finish; and the checks generally consist in whipping off the too eager hounds. As a compensation, when the deer does not run cunning, or along roads, the pace is tremendous.
The greater number of what are called harriers now-a-days are dwarf fox-hounds, or partake largely of fox-hound blood.
If Leicestershire is the county for swells, Devonshire is the county of sportsmen; for although there is very little riding to hounds as compared with the midland counties, there is a great deal of hunting. Every village has its little pack; every man, woman, and child, from the highest to the humblest, takes an interest in the sport; and the science of hunting is better understood than in the hard-riding, horse-dealing counties. To produce a finished fox-hunter, I would have him commence his studies in Devonshire, and finish his practice in Northamptonshire. On the whole, I should say that a student of the noble science, whose early education has been neglected, cannot do better than go through a course of fox-hunting near Oxford, in the winter vacation, where plenty of perfect hunters are to be hired, and hounds meet within easy reach of the University City, six days in the week, hunting over a country where you may usually be with them at the finish without doing anything desperate, if content to come in with the ruck, the ponies, and the old farmers; or where, if so inclined, you may have more than an average number of fast and furious runs, and study the admirable style of some of the best horsemen in the world among the Oxfordshire and Berkshire squires.
The intense pretentious snobbishness of the age has something to do with the mysterious manner in which many men, blushing, own that they have been out with harriers. In the first place, as a rule, harriers are slow; although there are days when, with a stout, well-fed, straight-running hare, the best men will have enough to do to keep their place in the field: over the dinner-table that is always an easy task; but in this fast, competitive age, the man who can contrive to stick on a good horse can show in front without having the least idea of the meaning of hunting. To such, harriers afford no amusement. Then again, harrier packs are of all degrees, from the perfection of the Blackmoor Vale, the Brookside, and some Devon or Welsh packs with unpronounceable names, down to the little scratch packs of six or seven couple kept among jovial farmers in out-of-the-way places, or for the amusement of Sheffield cutlers running afoot. The same failing that makes a considerable class reverently worship an alderman or a city baronet until they can get on speaking terms with a peer, leads others to boast of fox-hunting when the Brighton harriers are more than they can comfortably manage.
The great Meynell and Warwickshire Corbett both entered their young hounds to hare, a practice which cannot, however, be approved. The late Parson Froude, in North Devon, than whom a keener sportsman never holloaed to hounds, and the breeder of one of the best packs for showing sport ever seen, hunted hare, fox, deer, and even polecats, sooner than not keep his darlings doing something; and, while his hounds would puzzle out the faintest scent, there were among the leaders several that, with admirable dash, jumped every gate, disdaining to creep. Some of this stock are still hunting on Exmoor. There are at present several very good M.F.H. who began with hare-hounds.
As to harriers, the people who sneer at them are ludicrously ignorant of the history of modern fox-hunting, which is altogether founded on the experience and maxims of hare-hunters. The two oldest fox-hound packs in England the Brocklesby and the Cheshire were originally formed for hare-hunting. The best book ever written on hounds and hunting, a text-book to every master of hounds to this day, is by Beckford, who learned all he knew as master of a pack of harriers.
When an old sportsman of my acquaintance heard any of the thousand-and-one tales of extraordinary runs with fox-hounds, after dinner, he used to ask Were any of the boys or ponies up at the kill? If the answer was Yes, he would say, Then it was not a severe thing; and he was generally right. Men of moderate means had better choose a hunting county where the boys can live with the hounds.
A rushing horse is generally a dangerous fencer; but it is a trick that can only be cured in private lessons, and it is more dangerous to try to make a rusher go slowly than to let him have his own way.
The great error of young beginners is to select young horses under their weight.
It was the saying of a Judge of the old school, that all kinds of wine were good, but the best wine of all was two bottles of port! In the same style, one may venture to say that all kinds of hunting are good, but that the best of all is fox-hunting, in a grass scent-holding country, divided into large fields, with fences that may be taken in the stride of a thorough-bred, and coverts that comprise good gorse and open woods that is, for men of the weight, with the nerve, and with the horses that can shine in such a country. But it is not given to all to have or retain the nerve or to afford a stud of the style of horses required for going across the best part of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. In this world, the way to be happy is to put up with what you can get. The majority of my readers will be obliged to ride with the hounds that happen to live nearest their dwelling; it is only given to the few to be able to choose their hunting country and change their stud whenever the maggot bites them. After hard brain-work and gray hairs have told on the pulse, or when the opening of the nursery-door has almost shut the stable, a couple of hours or so once a week may be made pleasant and profitable on a thirty-pound hack for the quartogenarian, whom time has not handicapped with weight for age. I can say, from the experience of many years, that as long as you are under twelve stone, you may enjoy very good sport with such packs as the Bramham Moor in Yorkshire, the Brocklesby in Lincolnshire, the Heythrope in Oxfordshire, the Berkley or the Beaufort in Gloucestershire, without any enormous outlay for horses, for the simple reason that the average runs do not present the difficulties of grass countries, where farmers are obliged to make strong fences and deep ditches to keep the bullocks they fatten within bounds. Good-looking little horses, clever jumpers, equal to moderate weights, are to be had, by a man who has not too much money, at moderate prices; but the sixteen hands, well-bred flyer, that can gallop and go straight in such countries as the Vale of Aylesbury, is an expensive luxury. Of course I am speaking of sound horses. There is scarcely ever a remarkable run in which some well-ridden screw does not figure in the first flight among the two hundred guinea nags.
Any horse that is formed for jumping, with good loins, hocks, and thighs, can be taught to jump timber; but it is madness to ride at a gate or a stile with a doubtful horse. A deer always slacks his pace to a trot to jump a wall or park rails, and it is better to slacken to a trot or canter where there is no ditch on either side to be cleared, unless you expect a fall, and then go fast, that your horse may not tumble on you.
For this reason young sportsmen should commence their studies with harriers, where the runs are usually circling and a good deal of hunting is done slowly. If a young fellow can ride well in a close, enclosed hedge, bank, and ditch country, with occasional practice at stiles and gates, pluck will carry him through a flying country, if properly mounted.
Young sportsmen generally err by being too bold and too fast. Instead of studying the art in the way the best men out perform, they are hiding their nervousness by going full speed at everything, or trying to rival the whips in daring. Any hard-headed fool can ride boldly. To go well when hounds are running hard to save your horse as much as possible while keeping well forward, for the end, the difficult part of a long run these are the acts a good sportsman seeks to acquire by observation and experience.
No man in the world ever lifted a horse over anything it is a mechanical impossibility but a horseman of the first order can at a critical moment so rouse a horse, and so accurately place his head and hind-legs in the right position, that he can make an extraordinary effort and achieve a miraculous leap. This in metaphorical language is called lifting a horse, because, to a bye-stander, it looks like it. But when a novice, or even an average horseman, attempts this sort of tour de force, he only worries his horse, and, ten to one, throws him into the fence. Those who are wise will content themselves with keeping a horse well in hand until he is about to rise for his effort, and to collecting him the moment he lands. The right hold brings his hind legs under him; too hard a pull brings him into the ditch, if there is one. By holding your hands with the reins in each rather wide apart as you come towards your fence, and closing them and dropping them near his withers as he rises, you give him room to extend himself; and if you stretch your arms as he descends, you have him in hand. But the perfect hunter, as long as he is fresh, does his work perfectly, so the less you meddle with him when he is rising the better.
Now, Dick does not mean by this that you are to go slowly at every kind of fence. He tells you that he sent him with some powder at a bullfinch; but whatever the pace, you so hold your horse in the last fifty yards up to the taking-off point, that instead of spreading himself out all abroad at every stroke, he feels the bit and gets his hind-legs well under him. If you stand to see Jim Mason or Tom Oliver in the hunting-field going at water, even at what they call forty miles an hour, you will find the stride of their horses a measured beat, and while they spur and urge them they collect them. This is the art no book can teach; but it can teach that it ought to be learned. Thousands of falls have been caused by a common and most absurd phrase, which is constantly repeated in every description of the leaps of a great race or run. He took his horse by the head and lifted him, &c.
In another place Dick says, A quick and safe jumper always goes from hind-legs to fore-legs. I never rode a steeple-chase yet but I steadied my horse on to his hind-legs twenty yards from his fence, and I was always over and away before the rushers. Lots of the young riders think horses can jump anything if they can only drive them at it fast enough. They force them too much at their fences. If you don’t feel your horse’s mouth, you can tell nothing about him. You hold him, he can make a second effort; if you drop him, he won’t.
The late Marquis of Hastings, father of the present Marquis, was one of the best and keenest fox-hunters of his day; he died young, and here is Dick’s account of his first fence, for which all fox-hunters are under deep obligations to the Druid.
The Marquis of Hastings was one of my pupils. I was two months at his place before he came of age. He sent for me to Donnington, and I broke all his horses. I had never seen him before. He had seven rare nice horses, and very handy I got them. The first meet I went out with him was Wartnaby Stone Pits. I rode by his side, and I says, ‘My lord, we’ll save a bit of distance if we take this fence.’ So he looked at me and he laughed, and says, ‘Why, Christian, I was never over a fence in my life.’ ‘God bless me, my lord! you don’t say so?’ And I seemed quite took aback at hearing him say it. ‘Its true enough, Christian, I really mean it.’ ‘Well, my lord,’ says I, ‘you’re on a beautiful fencer, he’ll walk up to it and jump it. Now I’ll go over the fence first. Put your hands well down on his withers and let him come.’ It was a bit of a low-staked hedge and a ditch; he got over as nice as possible, and he gave quite a hurrah like. He says, ‘There, I’m over my first fence that’s a blessing!’ Then I got him over a great many little places, and he quite took to it and went on uncommonly well. He was a nice gentleman to teach he’d just do anything you told him. That’s the way to get on!
The illustration at the commencement of this chapter gives a very fair idea of the seat of good horsemen going at a fence and broad ditch, where pace is essential. A novice may advantageously study the seats of the riders in Herring’s Steeplechase Cracks, painted by an artist who was a sportsman in his day.
A few invaluable hints on riding to hounds are to be found in the Druid’s account of Dick Christian.
At least two-thirds of those who go out, even in the most fashionable counties, never attempt brooks or five-barred gates, or anything difficult or dangerous; but, by help of open gates and bridle-roads, which are plentiful, parallel lanes, and gaps, which are conveniently made by the first rush of the straight riders and the dealers with horses to sell, helped by the curves that hounds generally make, and a fair knowledge of the country, manage to be as near the hounds as the most thrusting horseman. Among this crowd of skirters and road-riders are to be found some very good sportsmen, who, from some cause or other, have lost their nerve; others, who live in the county, like the excitement and society, but never took a jump in their lives; young ladies with their papas; boys on ponies; farmers educating four-year-olds; surgeons and lawyers, who are looking for professional practice as well as sport. On cold scenting days, with a ringing fox, this crowd keeps on until nearly dark, and heads many a fox. Many a beginner, in his first season, has been cheated by a succession of these easy days over an easy part of the county into the idea that there was no difficulty in riding to hounds. But a straight fox and a burning scent over a grass country has undeceived him, and left him in the third or fourth field with his horse half on a hedge and half in a ditch, or pounded before a ‘bulfinch,’ feeling very ridiculous. There are men who cut a very respectable figure in the hunting-field who never saw a pack of hounds until they were past thirty. The city of London turns out many such; so does every great town where money is made by men of pluck, bred, perhaps, as ploughboys in the country. We could name three one an M.P. under these conditions, who would pass muster in Leicestershire, if necessary. But a good seat on horseback, pluck, and a love of the sport, are essential. A few years ago a scientific manufacturer, a very moderate horseman, was ordered horse exercise as a remedy for mind and body prostrated by over-anxiety. He found that, riding along the road, his mind was as busy and wretched as ever. A friend prescribed hunting, purchased for him a couple of made hunters, and gave him the needful elementary instruction. The first result was, that he obtained such sound, refreshing sleep as he had not enjoyed since boyhood; the next, that in less than two seasons he made himself quite at home with a provincial pack, and now rides so as to enjoy himself without attracting any more notice than one who had been a fox-hunter from his youth upwards.
The popular notion of a fox-hunt is as unlike the reality as a girl’s notion of war a grand charge and a splendid victory.
Pictures always represent exciting scenes hounds flying away with a burning scent; horses taking at a bound, or tumbling neck and crop over, frightful fences. Such lucky days, such bruising horsemen, such burning scents and flying foxes are the exception.
It is safe to assert that hunting-men, as a class, are temperate. No man can ride well across a difficult country who is not. We must, however, admit that the birds who have most fouled their own nest have been broken-down sportsmen, chiefly racing men, who have turned writers to turn a penny. These unfortunate people, with the fatal example of ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ before them, fill up a page, whenever their memory or their industry fails them, in describing in detail a breakfast, a luncheon, a dinner, and a supper. And this has been repeated so often, that the uninitiated are led to believe that every fox-hunter must, as a matter of course, keep a French cook, and consume an immense cellar of port, sherry, madeira, hock, champagne, with gallons of strong ale, and all manner of liqueurs.
When indecency formed the staple of our plays, and a drunken debauch formed the inevitable sequence of every dinner-party, a fool and a fox-hunter were synonymous. Squire Western was the representative of a class, which, however, was not more ridiculous than the patched, perfumed Sir Plumes, whom Hogarth painted, and Pope satirised. Fox-hunters are not a class now roads, newspapers, and manufacturing emigration have equalised the condition of the whole kingdom; and fox-hunters are just like any other people, who wear clean shirts, and can afford to keep one or more horses.
The progress of agriculture is indelibly associated with fox-hunting; for the three great landlords, who did more to turn sand and heath into corn and wool, and make popular the best breeds of stock and best course of cultivation Francis, Duke of Bedford; Coke, Earl of Leicester; and the first Lord Yarborough were all masters of hounds.
In England all conditions of men, except bishops, from ratcatchers to Royalty, are to be found in the hunting-field equalised by horsemanship, and fraternising under the influence of a genial sport. Among fox-hunters we can trace a long line of statesmen, from William of Orange to Pitt and Fox. Lord Althorp was a master of hounds; and Lord Palmerston we have seen, within the last few years, going as he goes everywhere in the first flight. This was before the French fall of the late Premier. Cromwell’s Ironsides were hunting men; Pope, the poet, writes in raptures of a gallop with the Wiltshire Harriers; and Gladstone, theologian, politician, and editor of Homer, bestrides his celebrated white mare in Nottinghamshire, and scurries along by the side of the ex-War Minister, the Duke of Newcastle.
Hunting has suffered as much from overpraise as from the traditionary libels of the fribbles and fops of the time of the first Georges, when a fool, a sot, and a fox-hunter were considered synonymous terms. Of late years it has pleased a sportsman, with a wonderful talent for picturesquely describing the events of a fox-hunt, to write two sporting novels, in which all the leading characters are either fools or rogues.
