HORSES AND HOUNDS
With Flurry’s Hounds, and you our guide,
We learned to laugh until we cried;
Dear Martin Ross, the coming years
Find all our laughter lost in tears.
--_Punch_, Jan. 19, 1916.
I have thought of leaving it to our books to express and explain the
part that hunting has played in Martin’s life and mine; but when I
remember (to quote once again those much-quoted lines) how much of the
fun that we have had in our lives has been “owed to horse and hound,” I
feel an acknowledgment more direct and deliberate is due.
Almost the first thing that I can remember is the duplicity of my
grandfather on my behalf in the matter of the hounds. He had been
forbidden by his doctor to hunt; he had also been forbidden by the
ladies of his household to permit the junior lady of that establishment,
then aged five, to “go anywhere _near_ the hounds.” None the less, by a
succession of remarkable accidents, not wholly disconnected with the
fact that my grandfather had had the West Carbery hounds himself at one
time and knew the country as well as the foxes did, he and I rarely
missed a sight of them, and, on one memorable day, we cut in at a moment
that bestowed upon us the finish of the run and gained for me the
brush. Absurdly bestowed, of course, but none the less glorious. The
glory was dimmed a little by the fact that just after the presentation
had been made my pony rolled, and a kind but tactless young man picked
me up, like a puppy, and deposited me on my saddle, instead of mounting
me as a gentleman should mount a lady. Nevertheless, I can confidently
say that the proudest moment of my life was when I rode home with the
brush.
My grandfather had hunted for a few seasons, when he was a young man,
with what he, after the fashion of his day, called “the Dook of
Beaufort’s” hounds. He brought over a West Carbery horse, Diamond by
name, a flea-bitten grey, and he earned for his owner the honourable
title of “That damned Irishman.” There is an old saying, “Nothing stops
a Carbery man,” and I imagine that the title aforesaid was applied with
special fervour when the hunt went into the stone-wall country and
Diamond began to sing songs of Zion and enjoy himself.
Hunting in West Carbery died out when I was a child, and the hounds were
in abeyance for many years. Political troubles and bad times generally
had led to their temporary extinction, and such hunting as came my way
was in countries far from Carbery. Of the Masters of those days not one
is now left. Hard goers and good sportsmen all round, and men too, many
of them, of the old-fashioned classical culture. It is told of the last
of that old brigade that during his last illness, a short time before he
died, he said he supposed he “would d----d soon be shooting woodcock in
Mars with Johnny B.” (who was another of the same heroic mould), and if
his supposition was justified, the Martian cock are likely to have had a
bad time of it.
In 1891 my brother Aylmer restarted the old West Carbery foxhounds, and
then indeed did that madness of the chase, of which we have treated in
“Dan Russel the Fox,” descend upon us all. The first step in the affair
was the raising, by means of concerts, public meetings, and mendicancy
generally, a sum of money; the second was the purchase of a small pack
from a private owner. These arrived with the title of “B.’s Rioters,”
and it is not too much to say that we rioted with them. It was, at
first, all thoroughly informal and entirely delightful; later we fell
into the grip of professionals, who did things as they should be done,
and inflicted decorum upon us and the Rioters. The days of “Danny-O” and
“Patsey Sweeny” passed, and the thrill died out of the diaries.
No longer are such items to be found as:
“Jack, Martin, and I took hounds to walk out with Patsey. Came on a
hare.” (This means that we went to look for a hare, ardently and with
patience.) “Ran her for two and a half hours, all on our own miserable
legs. Lost her in darkness. All pretty tired when we got back to
kennels.”
Or again. “Aylmer, Martin, and I went to kennels and christened the new
draft, seven and a half couple of puppies. Coupled them and tried to
take them out. The instant they were coupled they went stark mad and
fought, mostly in the air; it looked like a battle of German heraldic
eagles.”
Other entries, which I decline to make public, relate to drags,
disreputably laid, for disreputable reasons, and usually dedicated to
English visitors, who did not always appreciate the attention.
My brother kept the hounds going for twelve seasons, during which we had
the best of sport and learned to know the people and the country in the
way that hunting alone can teach. After his long term
[Illustration: THE WEST CARBERY HOUNDS.
M. J. R.
]
of office had ended, a farmer summed up for me the opinion that the
country people had of him:
“He was the King of the world for them! If he rode his horses into their
beds they’d ask no better!”
When he gave up in 1903, I followed him in the Mastership, which I have
held, with an interval of four years, ever since. “Of all sitivations
under the sun, none is more enviable or ’onerable than that of a Master
of fox’ounds,” Mr. Jorrocks observes, and further states that his “‘ead
is nothin’ but one great bump of ‘untin’!” I do not say that things have
gone as far as this with me, but I will admit that the habit of keeping
hounds is a very clinging one.
Many congratulations and much encouragement were bestowed upon me when I
bought the hounds and took office, but warnings were not wanting. A
friend, himself a Master of Hounds, wrote to me and said that it
required “the patience of Job, and the temper of a saint, and the heart
of a lion, to navigate a pack of foxhounds,” and there have undoubtedly
been occasions when for me the value of all these attributes was
conspicuously proved by their absence at need.
If Mr. Jorrocks’s estimate of the job is to be accepted, it is, from my
point of view, chiefly in the kennels that the “enviable” aspect of
mastership is to be found. I have spoken of three hounds, specially
beloved, but the restriction of the number is only made out of
consideration for those readers whose patience could stand no more. It
is customary to despise the ignorant and unlearned in hound matters, but
I have too often witnessed their sufferings to do aught save pity. To be
a successful kennel visitor is given to so few. I have sometimes
wondered which is most to be pitied, the sanguine huntsman, drawing his
hounds one by one, in the ever-renewed belief that he has found an
admirer who knows how to admire, ending in bitterness and “letting them
all come”; or the straining visitor, groping for the right word and
praising the wrong hound. In one of Mr. Howell’s books there is a
certain “Tom Corey,” who, though without a sense of humour, yet feels a
joke in his heart from sheer lovableness. Even so did one of my aunts
feel the hounds in her heart. Her sympathy and admiration enchanted my
huntsman; he waxed more and more eloquent, and all would have been well
had not “Tatters,” a broken-haired fox-terrier, come into view.
“Oh!” exclaimed my Aunt S. rapturously, “what a darling little hound! I
like it the best of them all!”
The disaster of a sigh too much, or a kiss too long, was never more
tragically exemplified.
Subsequently she was heard describing her visit to the kennels; amongst
other details she noted with admiration that L., the huntsman, and I
knew the name of each hound.
“Edith is wonderful!” she said fervently, “she knows them _all_! If she
wants one of them she just says, ‘Here, Spot! Spot! Spot!’”
One gathered that the response to this classic hound name was instant.
Huntsmen have, in their way, almost as much to put up with as writers in
the matter of cross-examination.
“And do you _really_ know them? _Each_ one?”
“And have they _all_ got names?”
Then, upon explanation that there are enough names to go round, “And do
you absolutely _know_ them all?”
L., like Tom Corey, was unsustained by a sense of humour, and nothing
but his lovableness enabled him to fulfil that most difficult of
Christian duties, to suffer fools gladly.
“Lor, Master, what silly questions they do ask!” he has permitted
himself to say sometimes, when all was over. Yet, as I have said,
sympathy should also be reserved for the inquirers. Insatiable as is the
average mother for admiration of her young, she is as water unto wine
compared with a huntsman and his hounds. Few people have put a foot
deeper into trouble than I have myself, on the occasion of a visit to a
very smart pack in England. I had, I hope, come respectably through a
minute inspection of the hounds, and, that crucial trial safely past,
the Queen of Sheba tottered, spent, but thankful for preservation, into
the saddle-room, a vast and impressive apartment, there to be shown, and
to express fitting admiration for, the trophies of the chase that
adorned it. All round the panelled walls were masks, beautifully
mounted, grinning and snarling over their silver name-plates. And I,
accustomed to the long-jawed wolves that we call foxes in West Carbery,
said in all good faith,
“What a number of cubs you have killed!”
The Master said, icily, that those were foxes, and the subject dropped.
Poor L. is dead now; a keener little huntsman never blew a horn, but he
never quite succeeded in hitting it off with the farmers and country
people; they were incomprehensible to each other, alike in speech and in
spirit. L. despised anyone who got out of bed later than 5 <small>A.M.</small>, winter
and summer alike, and would boast of having got all his work done before
others were out of their beds, which was trying to people with whom
early rising is not a foible. He found it impossible to divine the
psychology of the lads who jovially told him that they had seen the fox
and had “cruisted him well” (which meant that they had stoned him back
into covert when he tried to break). It is hard to kill foxes in
Carbery, and L. was much exercised about the frequent disappointments
that them pore ’ounds had to endure as a result of bad earth-stopping.
One wet day, on arriving at the meet, I found him in a state of high
indignation. The covert we were to draw was a very uncertain find, and
it transpired that L. had secretly arranged with the farmer on whose
land it was, that he was to turn down a bagman in it. “He said he could
get one easy, and you’d ’ardly think it, Master, but the feller tells me
now it was a tame fox of ’is own he was going to turn down, and now he
says to me he thinks the day is too wet to bring out such a little pet!
‘A _little pet_!’ ’e says!”
The human voice is incapable of an accent of more biting scorn than L.
imparted to his as he spoke these words. I am unable to determine if
L.’s wrath were attributable to the farmer’s heartlessness in having
been willing to hunt a tame fox, or to his affectation of consideration
for it, or whether it was the result of rage and disappointment on
behalf of the hounds. I incline to the last theory.
I have hunted with a good many packs in Ireland of very varying degrees
of grandeur, and Ireland is privileged in unconventionalism;
nevertheless, it was in England, with a highly fashionable
Leicestershire pack, that I was privileged to behold an incident that
might have walked out of the pages of Charles Lever into the studio of
Randolph Caldecott.
I had brought over a young mare to ride and sell; she and I were the
guests of two of the best riders in England and the nicest people in the
world (which is sufficient identification for those that know the
couple in question). It was my first day with an English pack and it had
been a good one. Hunting for the day was at an end, and we had turned
our horses for home, when the fight flared up. High on the ridge of a
hill, dark against a frosty evening sky, I can still see the combatants,
with their whips in the air, laying in to each other happily and
whole-heartedly for quite a minute or two, before peacemakers came
rushing up, and what had been a pretty, old-fashioned quarrel was patted
down into a commonplace, to be dealt with by the family solicitors.
I had had my own little _fracas_ that day. The young mare was hot, and
took me over a place which included a hedge, and a wet ditch, and an old
gentleman who had waited in the ditch while his horse went on. I feared,
from what I could gather as I proceeded on my way, that he was annoyed,
but as I had caught sight of him just in time to tell him to lie down, I
could not feel much to blame.
I had an English huntsman for two or three seasons whose keenness was
equalled (rather unexpectedly) by his piety. He was an extraordinarily
hard man to go (“No silly joke of a man to ride,” as I have heard it
put), and his excitement when hounds began to run would release itself
in benedictions.
“Gawd bless you, Governor boy! Gawd bless you, Rachel my darling! Come
along, Master! Come along! He’s away, thank Gawd! He’s away!”
There was a day when hounds took us across a bad bit of bog and there
checked. Harry, the whipperin, also an Englishman, and not learned in
bogs, got in rather deep. His horse got away from him, and while he was
floundering, waist-deep in black and very cold bog-water, he saw the
hunted fox creeping into a patch of furze and rocks. He holloa’d to G.,
who galloped up as near as was advisable.
“Where is ’e, ’Arry?” he roared.
“Be’ind o’ them rocks ’e went. I wouldn’t ’a seen ’im only for gettin’
into this somethin’ ’ole,” replied Harry, dragging himself out of the
slough. “Can’t ye catch me ’orse?”
“That’s all right, ’Arry! You wouldn’t ’a viewed ’im only for the ’ole.
All things works together for good with them that loves Gawd!”
With which G. laid on his hounds, and left Harry to comfort himself with
this reflection and to catch his horse when he could.
G.’s word in season reminds me of a prayer that my nephew, Paddy Coghill
(whose infant devotions have already been referred to), offered on his
sixth birthday, one “Patrick’s Day in the morning.”
“And oh, Lord God, make it a good day for hunting, and make me sit
straight on Kelpie, and show me how to hold my reins.”
He subsequently went to the meet, himself and pony so covered with
shamrock that Tim C. (the then huntsman) told him the goats would eat
him. I cannot now vouch for the first clause of the petition having been
granted, but the R.F.A. Riding School has guaranteed that the latter
ones were fulfilled.
It is impossible for me to write a chapter about hunting without
speaking of Bridget, a little grey mare who is bracketed with Candy,
“Equal First.” I have been so happy as to have owned many good hunters.
Lottery, by Speculation, a chestnut mare who died untimely, staked by a
broken bough in a gap (and, strangely enough, her brother, “Spec,” is
the only other horse who has in this country, thank heaven, had the same
hard fate); Tarbrush, a black but comely lady, of whom it was said that
she was “a jumper in airnest, who would face up and beyond anything she
could see,” and would, if perturbed in temper, go very near to “kicking
the stars out of the sky”; Little Tim, a pocket Hercules, worthy to be
named with George Borrow’s tremendous “Irish cob”; and Kitty, whose
flippancy is such that it has been said to have consoled the country
boys for a blank day. “They were well satisfied,” said a competent
judge, “Kitty filled their eye.”
But, as with Candy among dogs, so, among horses, Bridget leads, the rest
nowhere. Her father was a thoroughbred horse, her mother a Bantry
mountain pony. She herself was very little over 15 hands 1 inch, and she
succeeded in combining the cunning and goat-like activity of the spindle
side of the house with all the heroic qualities of her father’s family.
“She has a plain head,” said a rival horse-coper, who had been so
unfortunate as not to have seen her before I did, “but that suits the
rest of her!”
I suppose it was a plain head, but anyone who had sat behind it and seen
its ears prick at sight of the coming “lep” would not think much of its
plainness. I hunted her for ten seasons, and she never gave me a fall
that was not strictly necessary. Since her retirement from the Hunt
stables she has acted as nursery governess to a succession of rising
riders, and at the age of seventeen she carried Martin for a season, and
thought little, with that feather-weight, of keeping where both of them
loved to be, at “the top of the Hunt.”
The West Carbery Hunt was once honoured by a visit from an American
hunting woman, a lady who had been sampling various British hunts and
who was a critic whose good opinion was worth having. She was an
accomplished rider and a very hard goer, and her enjoyment of such sport
as we were able to show her was eminently gratifying. She made,
however, one comment upon the country which has not been forgotten. We
had a ringing fox who rather overdid his anxiety to show the visitor a
typical West Carbery line. He took us round and about a particularly
typical hill more often than was requisite, and he declined to
demonstrate the fact that we possessed any grass country, or any sound
and civilised banks. Our visitor had the hunt, such as it was, with the
best, and spoke with marked enthusiasm of the agility of our horses.
Later I heard her discussing the events of the day.
“We jumped one place,” said my visitor, “and I said to myself, ‘Well, I
suppose that never on God’s earth shall I see a thing like that again!’
And _af_ter that,” she went on, “we jumped it five times.”
I might prolong this chapter indefinitely with stories of hunting; of
old times in Meath, with Captain “Jock” Trotter, or Mr. John Watson,
when Martin and I hunted there with our cousins, Ethel and Jim Penrose;
of characteristically blazing gallops with the Galway Blazers, in recent
years, ably piloted by Martin’s eldest brother, Jim Martin; of many a
good day at home in our own country. But an end must be made, and this
chapter may fitly close with a letter of Martin’s. The hunt of which she
writes did not take place with the West Carbery, but the country she
describes is very similar to ours, and the incidents might as well have
occurred here.
V. F. M. to the Hon. Mrs. Campbell. (December.)
“We had an unusual sort of hunt the other day, when the hounds,
unattended, put a fox out of a very thick wood and up a terrible
hill; when we caught them up there ensued much scrambling and
climbing; there were even moments when, having a bad head, I was
extremely frightened, and, in the middle of all this, a fallow doe
joined up from behind, _through the riders_, and got away over the
hill-top. To the doe the hounds cheerfully attached themselves, and
we had much fun out of it, and it was given to us to see, as they
went away, that one hound had a rabbit in his mouth. It is not
every day that one hunts a fox, a deer and a rabbit at the same
moment. It was like old hunting scenes in tapestry. C., the old
huntsman, and his old white horse went like smoke in the boggy,
hilly country. It was pleasant to see, and the doe beat the hounds
handsomely and got back safely to the wood, to which, in the
meantime, the fox had strolled back by the avenue.
“Last week we drew another of the minor mountains of this district,
and the new draft got away like lightning after a dog! who fled
over a spur of the hill for his paternal home. All went out of
sight, but the row continued. C. sat and blew his horn, and the
poor Whip nearly burst himself trying to get round them. Then they
reappeared, half the pack by this time, going like mad, and _no_
dog in front of them! We then had a vision of an old humpbacked man
with a scythe, like the conventional figure of ‘Time,’ set up
against a furzy cliff, mowing at the hounds in the full belief that
they were going to pull him down. They swept on up the hill and
disappeared, having, in the excursion with the dog, put up a fox!
E. had divined it and got away with them. By cleaving to C. I
caught them all right, otherwise I should have been left with
everyone else at the bottom of the hill, saying funny things about
the dog. It was touching to hear C. saying to E. in triumph, ‘Where
are your English hounds now, Miss?’ She had praised the United, and
this sank into the soul of C., and indeed it was his beloved
black-and-tan Kerry beagles and Scalliwags who were in front, and
the rest not in sight. The new English draft were probably occupied
in crossing themselves instead of the country--for which I don’t
blame them. Personally, however, I feel as if an open grass
country, and a smart pack, and a sound horse, would be very
alarming.”
The reference to “a sound horse” may be explained by the fact that owing
to her exceeding short sight we insisted on her being mounted only on
old and thoroughly reliable hunters, who were able to take care of her
as well as of themselves; it need hardly be added that such will not
invariably pass a vet.
It was ten years from the date of her bad accident before she was able
to get out hunting again; this chapter may well end with what she then
wrote to Mrs. Campbell.
“I have once more pottered forth with the hounds, and have had some real
leps, and tasted the wine of life again.”
* * * * *
There are some whose names will never be forgotten in Carbery who will
drink no more with us what Martin Ross has called the Wine of Life. For
her that cup is set aside, and with her now are three of the best of the
lads whose pride and pleasure it used to be to wear the velvet cap of
the hunt servant, and to turn hounds in West Carbery. Gallant soldiers,
dashing riders, dear boys; they have made the supreme sacrifice for
their country, and they will ride no more with us.
The hunt goes on; season follows season; the heather dies on the hills
and the furze blossoms again in the spring. Other boys will come out to
follow hounds, and learn those lessons that hunting best can teach, but
there will never be better than those three: Ralph and Gerald
Thornycroft, and Harry Becher.
“Bred to hunting they was,” said the old huntsman, who loved them, and
has now, like them, crossed that last fence of all, “every one o’ them.
Better gentlemen to cross a country I never see.”