The silhouette, dark, low and vulpine, slithered across the road like a snake on legs, paused to look over its shoulder at the distant huntsmen and women on their horses and at their hounds, turning in baffled, snuffling circles, then slid with anguilline ease through the hedge. "Away, away," came the cry as the brush of their quarry vanished into the undergrowth. The huntsman tootled the odd despairing yelp from his horn, the howl of a bitch in heat, and the hounds moved towards him as he headed towards the gapless hedge across the road where the fox had found a gap as effortlessly as an eel finds a hole in mud.
At the top of the field, where the riders had been looking in the wrong direction, the horses turned, all dilated nostrils and wide eyes and prancing hooves, their breath steaming as if from the boiler of a locomotive. The hunt spiralled down the field towards the gate opening onto the lower road as hounds galloped up and down the impenetrable hedge, behind them the huntsman's horse cantering handsomely, muscles moving like large regulated pistons under his noble buttocks, as his rider searched for an entrance into the estate in which the fox had vanished.
Training hounds
A hunt is a fine thing to watch. It is primarily about hounds and their master, the man (or woman) who trains them, who feeds them and disciplines them, who keeps them on lean commons so that they remain peckish for the fray, yet not so promiscuously carnivorous that any passing sheep will do. A hound that separates for long from the pack will not be allowed back, and probably has a limited future.
There is a tale of a hound which would not obey the rules of the kennel and was sent packing. Kindly neighbours took pity on it, and gave it a home. Shortly afterwards the cat disappeared. The cat's full and sorry fate became evident only when the hound passed the cat's collar undigested: the rest of the cat, being digestible and probably delicious, was less identifiable.
It is a hard life being a hound; but if hounds are not hounds, what are they but memories and prints on walls? It is a hard life being a fox, too; but not made hard so much by the odd hunt which comes its way but by the vicissitudes of having to live on its wits. To the slow, the old, comes the grave of hunger, of disease, of exposure, and not soon enough. How long does it take a fox to die of natural causes? Might not the swift hunger of a pack of dogs, whose individuals can dispose of a cat in seconds, collectively deliver to a fox a hastier and more merciful end?
But that is not why people go on hunts; nor is it as a means of pest-control. The hunting lobby did a bad day's work when it topped it the virtuous and suggested that it was no more than vermin-controlling cavalry. Hunts are not. They are people who love riding horses and they adore the thrill and the uncertainties of a chase where the quarry is as artful and as blessed with guile as a fox in its prime.
Devious mind
They must learn patience too - the patience which comes from the lost scent as the steaming horses clatter and clomp and the huntsman reassembles and rechoruses his hounds, which snuffle with eager stupidity in every hedgerow cranny. The truth is that the combined wit of horse and hound and huntsman and hunt is barely a match for the wickedly devious mind of the fox, the most perfect proof of non-verbal intelligence that we can find in Ireland outside a zoo.
And so it proved. The gates of the estate were closed, the hedges too high to jump. The fox reappeared, loping casually over its far fields, graceful as an Ethiopian, almost as if it knew what entrances were locked and which ones would be opened upon the command of a bell. And this brings us to the point of the hunt; it is not hunting. The point is companionship and uncertainty on horseback. While the huntsman hurried off on his small, lean horse to investigate a possible opening, the huntsmen and women circled affably, some of the men inhaling on cigarettes in the odd, emphatic way of riders.
Irish stock
The horses were not grand by any means. A couple resembled the offspring of pitpony-out-of-camel, shaggy things with strange, glued-on legs and wandering eyes, as if they had not seen full daylight before. Others seemed to nourish ambitions to bear a hussar; others were from that arrow-straight guardian of Irish stock, the brood mare, sound of neck and strong of heart and steady over the fences.
The huntsman chivvied his hounds towards a lane, and in the amber light of a November noon horses and hounds vanished down it, mud splashing in wet crescents around them, dogs lolloping, tongues lolling, the horn tootling, enough to scare a wise fox well clear of them. If they get a fox, it will be a lucky fox, one that this night or next will not now die of cold or famine or disease, but will be instantly despatched. It is nature, sort of: and it is part of the Irish countryside. Long may it flourish.