Hunting Weather

We went hunting yesterday. It was raining and cold. Only about 10 of us made it out, 6 of whom were from my barn. Most of those hunting were staff. It was muddy. Very muddy. Burton and Giggles and two other horse were wearing "mud tails," a very attractive way of tying up a horse's tail to keep it out of the mud. It made them look like horses out of an old English print. It accentuates the haunches.

It was a very strange day of hunting. We were at Annapolis Rock which is famed for its ditches. Within the first four minutes somebody fell off. Then the hounds hit and we ran clear over to Sunnyside -- a totally different fixture several miles away. We jumped a large-ish coop and promptly sat in the drizzling, dank, cedar woods for a while. Our hounds had "split," which means there were now two small packs instead of one pack. We could hear hounds everywhere around us. This makes things difficult for the staff and the huntsman -- if one group hits and runs, they have to hunt the fox but also round up the other pack, wherever it is, and try to get them all back together. One of the two little packs seemed to be cruising the back of a subdivision, tearing up people's yards. The other part of the pack seemed to be stuff in a large thicket, several acres big.

For the next several hours we picked through the sides of hills in the drizzle. No trail. Total bushwacking. Very mushy. At one point I said to my friend Rebecca that I felt like I was in a Ken Burns document. She said she felt as if she was returning from the Civil War. Our friend Garland said he thought he might be part of Moseby's rebellion. At several points we got stuck and Roger our master had us scaling slopes through thickets into the backs of people's yards. Imagine how we must have looked to them.

Then we heard the hounds running and careened back to the road. We were hemmed in by a guard rail where the road went over a bridge. Roger heads straight down the river to the bridge and tried to ride his horse under the bridge in the sluiceway, in the rain. We all hesitated, unwilling for once to follow our master. Our horses were parked at various angles on the side of the hill, all of us peering down at him as he picked his way in his red coat down the rocky river. And then he got stuck -- the water was too high and the bridge was too low.

I was willing to just jump the guard rail and get on the road and run. We eventually reversed back up the muddy hill.

The other major part of the day was our numerous river crossings. The banks were so soft that as soon as one horse went across the bank gave way entirely, so the next horse had to find another way. At each crossing (there were many) we all basically fanned out to fend for ourselves across. Burton, being Irish, was non-plussed and generally jumped down and in and then jumped out with minimum of fuss, his mud tail bobbing in the air behind him. My friend Mary Ann was doing the same thing on her horse Scout, how I learned speaks English. "Jump, Scout.". And he would.

One of our members was unlucky on a clumsy horse and ended up completely underwater in the cold. Another horse fell clear through the mud up to his bobbing mud tail.

At one point, oddly, we were picking through the woods and came upon our huntsman, of all people. He was off his horse, who was standing stock still, on his people feet, completely entwined in a vine. He could not moves his limbs, it appeared. We could just barely make him out through the under growth. Meanwhile the hounds are running and we can hear them rolling but there is our hunstman immobile in a vine. Roger got off and extricated him, and we were off.

Towards the very end of the day we view the dastardly hunted fox, cruising through a horse paddock behind a house. Carter runs down to the woods -- "tally ho behind the house!". Our hounds were down in the deep bottom, running straight up the river to a steep hill, in pursuit. We sat in the field high on the hill and heard them coming. For a long while. They were a ways back and the fox was on ahead. Then they pour out of the woods all around us, eventually running around the horse paddock (the horses within were a bit put off) and we sit them hit the scent and take off as one, finally reunited pack, through the fog and drizzle and low cloud cover, over the harvested fields, and away. And we followed, of course.

A good, although bizarre, day.