Wonderful day hunting yesterday at Annapolis Rock in the snow flurries. The pine forests and the rocky outcroppings up there make it seem like Narnia.

Robbie (from our barn) whipped in for the first time and was very honored and we were all very proud. Also, our field master was Frankie who is only 25 or so -- Roger was away -- and our field consisted mainly of younger people and new members. It was sort of a vision of the future -- the group of people who could in theory be hunting together for the next 20 years. And Dale was also away so we were in charge of the barn and the trailers on top of all that.

We had some astonishing feats. At one point "staff" came through and it was Robbie (which was kind of funny and which made us both laugh) and he cuts in front of me and takes off through a creek bottom that was very rough terrain with lots of scrub brush and low trees and we were going faster than I've ever gone -- it was like a car chase scene in a video game. Robbie was chasing a hound back to the pack and I was chasing Robbie because he was going towards the master and the rest of the field was chasing me. But Robbie and I were faster because Robbie's horse was a thoroughbred and Burton is seven eighths thoroughbred and they are both Pleasant Prospect horses after all so they are basically perfect. Burton was amazing -- leaping tall buildings in a single bound, etc. We jumped all kinds of things -- piles of downed logs that were very wide and mounds of stuff we didn't know what it was so we jumped it and collections of vegetative type things and crevices and ditches. There wasn't any time to think about what we were doing really, the horses were in charge and we just stayed in the middle of our stirrups.

The hound was in font of us the whole way. We looked up along the ridge top at one point and saw the rest of the hounds rolling along flat out up there. It was the hounds on top and us on the bottom for at least a mile along the creek. And it was lightly snowing -- it was very very fun. Possibly the most fun ever.

We eventually came to the Patuxent which we had to cross but the only way is a vertical bank drop down. We could see maybe 2 feet of bank above the water but we didn't know how deep the water was. Robbie's horse slides down the bank into about 2 feet of water, which makes for a total drop of about 4 feet. It seemed okay. Burton takes a different approach and leaps off the bank out into the river and into the water, converting the four foot drop into a bigger drop. It was amazing. The field behind starts going "whoa! look at Burton!" I'm up there yahooing in the air. Then after we land in the water he does the dolphin leap in and out of the water until we get to the other side. I bounced around a lot on top. It made me laugh. About 100 yards later we put the fox to ground. Someone came up to me and said, "I saw that bank -- your horse is Irish, right?" Yep.

Then we went and chased another fox and had similar amounts of fun. We crossed the river several more times. We scaled a near vertical cliff that was so steep and long we had to go up it one by one -- very Man from Snowy River. We circumnavigated three or four fields of winter wheat up on top of the ridge at top speed. The light started to fail. The snow kept up. People got cold. Our flasks were empty. We went in for the day.

After putting the barn to bed Frankie, Robbie and I went to the Olney Tavern to get warm and we had dinner and stayed late and talked about how much fun it was to have the next generation in charge and how we did pretty darn well for ourselves and weren't we lucky to have such an unusual hobby.