by Alex Miller
For some reason, seeing Morris enjoying himself like this, looking stronger and more relaxed than he has since the exhaustion that overtook him at the end of harvest, makes me decide to tell Alsop the truth. Straight out. Which, for my own reasons, is not something I particularly like to do. ‘He’s a pretty special horse, Mr Alsop.’
He keeps his eyes on me, his hand still holding the rein. ‘Pretty special?’ He waits for clarification.
‘Well, I mean he’s out of my class! He’s got a fantastic potential!’
‘Ah!’ he exclaims, relieved, gratified! ‘Thank you!’ Then he becomes intent; ‘Listen! Will you tell that to your boss? Would you mind doing that?’
Would I mind doing that? What a joke! It’s just what I mean about coming straight out with the truth before considering the consequences. This injured old man doesn’t want my opinion about his horse, he wants my help to sell him! I should have kept my mouth shut! Played dumb! Shrugged my shoulders and mumbled something incoherent. Acted the giggling yokel! Before I know where I am I’ve almost been snared into taking sides. I rip the reins out of his grip and spur Kabara forward; ‘Tell him yourself!’ Are all Australians such simpletons? He calls out something after me, but I don’t hear what it is; an insult I think.
The huntsman has nearly finished assembling his draft of tufters by the time I get over there. There’s John Grabbe, Tolland, Mrs Grant, Lord Harbringdon, the two second-horsemen, Cheyne and the Tiger, and they’ve formed themselves into a mounted semicircle in which the half-dozen or so liberated hounds are contained. Jack Perry is dismounted and standing in front of the half-door, about fifteen feet off it, the inert lash of his hunting-crop trailing on the ground in front of him like a black signature, the stock of this weapon held loosely in his right hand. He is confronted by a packed frame of clamouring dog faces at the opening. ‘Bellman,’ he calls softly, and, despite the noise, from down in the dim interior of this temporary prison, shuddering all over with excitement, the hound whose name has been called springs from his place, bounding forward and shouldering aside the younger ones up front; then, in a kind of private signal of gratitude, lightly brushing Perry’s boots with his flank as he rushes past. For a second this great muscular hound stands still, gathering himself, then he goes half down on his stern and, tossing his black muzzle, he gives out a deep prolonged howl, his welcoming comrades in the draft nudging and circling and nosing him. Kabara shudders and stares down at this select group—most of them are the same dogs that had him up the bank half an hour ago—and he makes a threatening noise in his throat.
‘Take it easy!’ I plead with him, praying he’s not going to start carrying on again.
Tiger pulls up alongside me, bumping his horse into us heavily in his hurry. Making sure that no one overhears him, while trying to seem off-hand about it, he says to me; ‘Stick close today, boy. I shan’t want that horse to be too fresh if Finisher gets done up.’ And then he glares at me. ‘You understand what I’m saying to you?’
I understand he’d like nothing better than to ride into Gaudon Manor after the hunt this evening and show Alsop a beaten Kabara. A horse unable to take the pace. Something like that. He’s considering me narrowly. An odd sort of request for a master to make of his second-horseman. Will I do it without comment? My side of the bargain you might say.
‘Well, boy?’ he says, hating the fact that he can’t just grind this out of me, but must actually seek my co-operation.
Perry’s finished getting his draft of tufters together. Nine veteran hounds chosen to accomplish the trickiest part of the whole business. And now they’re all wearing that slightly worried, responsible expression that hounds put on when they know they’re the centre of attention. Every eye on Jack Perry shutting up the rest of the disappointed pack. Stuck in the hole! And that lot start howling and carrying on again the minute the door’s bolted on them. Perry yells at them to shut up but they defy him and howl all the louder. He climbs on to his mare and calls over Tolland and the two second-horsemen for a private conference.
I become aware of a lot of movement and noise behind me, and I realise the yard has been filling with riders. They’re pressing forward, eager to hear where Perry’s going to draw for a deer. The two second-horsemen have been told something. They know more than we. They’ve had their brief word with Perry and they’re heading off, forcing their way firmly through the crowd and out the gate. They know what’s going on. Tolland raises his whip and yells for a passage through for the tufters. There’s a fair amount of confusion developing as those behind keep pressing forward, while those in front turn into them and try to get out of Tolland’s way. There’s a flare-up of temper. Someone in there’s had more than one sherry, for certain. Some of these people couldn’t care less about doing this thing cautiously, a step at a time. Get out on the moor and gallop! That’s what they want to do. Play cowboys! A few drinks under their belts and they’re mad for action.
Cheyne looms up, thrusting himself between me and the Tiger and booming, ‘He’s going to draw Burrow Wood, Bill!’
This is headline news.
Tiger turns to me and says fiercely, ‘Hunt with him, boy! Hunt with him!’ making certain of his message. Making doubly certain that I don’t dawdle around all day, second-horsing and saving this champion’s wind for a late run.
Cheyne and the jostling press of excited horses and riders sweep him away from me momentarily, before I have a chance to react. Then, rising up out of the noise all round me, I hear the words ‘Burrow Wood’, going across the crowd and back again, going around the yard, repeated time and again like an echo of Cheyne’s voice. Something released by him. Setting them in motion. Everybody telling everyone else. It could be a magical chant bursting out of them. Burrow Wood! Relief and excitement. They’re surging and swaying in the confined area of the yard, trying to make for the gate now and calling to their friends out in the even more congested road.
Kabara’s handling the crush well, other horses don’t panic him, and it’s not difficult to manoeuvre him into line behind Cheyne and the Tiger, who’ve been quick to join the tight flotilla going along with John Grabbe and Perry. Things start moving in a minute and we’re soon shepherding the tufters out through the gate.
The word has spread. Cars are starting up, backing out of their parking spots into the narrow street, impatient drivers leaning out of their windows, gesturing and calling for room. They want to go! Now! No mucking around! Get to a vantage point! Be there first! It’s their right! They’re going to lose something that belongs to them if we don’t get out of their way and let them through! Horses shying and foot people laughing all round them.
Jostled in the crowd, Morris is suddenly in front of me.
‘I’m really going hunting!’ I shout at him, a rush of enthusiasm in me at the sight of him. He touches his cap and steps to one side, half mocking but half serious in his acknowledgement of me. As I am swept past him I turn to wave, but he is shoved in the back and stumbles and doesn’t see me. I realise this is a privilege Morris would despise if it were for himself.
Ahead of me the tufters go forward. Upright on his blood-red stallion, distinguished by the slim black line of his coat, Lord Harbringdon is leading them into the thickest of the press of people. He has no need to wave his crop and threaten as Tolland is doing, for the crowd offers him a space in which to go forward. By his side, Mrs Grant seems to ride in the lee of his presence. Cheyne’s second-horseman is waiting by the gate. Cheyne sends him off with the mob to the vantage ground of Winsford Hill, to wait there and, hopefully, to see in which direction the quarry eventually goes away; so that from there he can patiently plot an unhurried course of interception and deliver a fresh calm mount to his master when it is needed. He’d better!
But that’s not for me. Today I’m not an attendant. Today I am going hunting!
I settle in behind them and listen to Cheyne telling the Tiger all about it—information he’s badgered out of Grabbe or Tolland. The Haddon stag, he
calls it; this one we’re going out to look for now. Laid up in its lair, settled in for the day, drowsing somewhere deep in Burrow Wood. They hunted him one autumn day last year and he finally gave them the slip in the darkness of evening. Last seen looking back from the summit of Tarr Ball Hill in the fading light. Then vanished. Not a trace. Till Grabbe watches him going into the wood early this morning. A big six-year-old with a great spread of antlers.
The Tiger twists round in his saddle and squints meaningfully at me, not too unfriendly, when he gets this information. I shrug my shoulders and try to look innocent. It wasn’t me who said anything about this one being a nott stag. That was Mrs Grant jumping to the wrong conclusion. No matter what I say now, however, no one will ever believe I didn’t start that rumour. It fits me too well.
Cheyne’s going on, recounting the arduous run this stag gave them last year, getting himself keyed up for another big one today. And the prospect is stirring the Tiger too. Is his mind still on buying and selling horses? I doubt it. He’s got me tagging along quietly. I haven’t asked any awkward questions in front of his friend. I’m doing his bidding as if it’s nothing remarkable. As if, indeed, it might be because I have proved myself in the past to be incapable of doing it the orthodox way; unlike Cheyne’s efficient second-horseman. In other words, his plans are working out. I wonder if he thinks he’s bought me off? So long as he gets Kabara I don’t suppose he cares what he’s done. But when he’s home this evening and he’s telling her all about his day in the hunting field, I bet he doesn’t mention to Roly-Poly that he paid his second-horseman to go hunting a red stag on Exmoor today! An expensive privilege by anyone’s reckoning. Such information would certainly convince her, if she needed any more convincing, that her foreboding of a catastrophe is justified; that I am working a spell on him, or some such thing, its equivalent. How else could a labourer’s boy wangle it? For, in permitting it, it must surely seem to her, the Tiger was doing our bidding. An oppressive image for her, me riding this black entire on the moor today. Both of us foreigners! Both therefore against her.
We press on up the road for a couple of hundred yards, then Tolland leads us away from the crowd, down over a grassy bank by a path to the river. In mid-stream Kabara stops for a drink, his head going down and his lips flapping at the crinkling current, lightly brushing the smooth round stones, playing with it for a delicious moment before sucking the cold water in long deep gulps. I can feel the enjoyment of it going through him. We stand then, alone in the fast shallow current, when he’s finished drinking, the water cascading from his lips, the others gone on ahead, and we gaze across the warm fields towards the woods, everything bright green and yellow and the water sparkling in the sunlight, remembering being alone on other occasions in places like this.
I canter him through the stream and up the far bank. The effortless power of his body! How he steps, strides, gathers himself then leaps! Calculated and balanced. So precise I imagine I hear his joints and muscles click into place. We clatter across the Withypool road, showering spray around us as we go, diving down again almost at once and two long strides carry us cleanly over Winn Brook; this lesser stream only a hundred yards from joining the river. And we’re up with the tufters and their depleted escort of hunters.
They’ve paused. Grabbe’s pointing something out to Perry, while Tolland and Harbringdon keep the hounds away to one side in a tight group. As I come up they move off again. Climbing away from the bed of the stream, we cross a long steepening field of stubble and soon reach the edge of Burrow Wood, which begins at the point where the hill has become too steep to work with a plough.
There is an old, neglected beech and hawthorn hedge at this boundary between wood and field, its bank broken down in several places, at each of which someone has made a rough attempt to close it with stakes and barbed wire.
Grabbe leads us up to one of these broken places and gets off his pony. With our attention on him he goes over and picks up a stone. There, in the soft place where the stone has acted as his marker, is the neat fresh hoofmark of a stag. Grabbe gazes down at this large slot and Perry leans over him and looks intently from his saddle, examining it for some moments, but not dismounting. Then the two men look at each other.
‘That’s him,’ Perry says. Nothing else. No smiles. No thanks. And he turns to Tolland, who is holding the tufters together about fifteen yards away, an aroused and shivering bunch of hounds. ‘Let’s have them!’
They understand this and break from Tolland without waiting for his release, converging eagerly on the track of the stag, where they get stuck into their work, snuffling and whining, scouring the earth with their muzzles before turning from this spot as if they have all received the one signal. They are released, gone quickly, plunging in over the broken bank and away into the woods, one snagging himself on the wire in his eagerness and rolling over with a sharp yelp of pain. The echo of his cry bouncing off the close hill.
The hunt has begun.
Tolland at once canters off to the right, the flapping red tails of his coat disappearing a moment later around a jutting promontory of trees towards where Burrow Wood again joins Winn Brook, the first water if the stag should decide to go that way. Perry stays where he is, motionless, staring after his hounds into the dark summer foliage of the trees, as if he will decide to follow them when he has considered something sufficiently.
The rest of us spread out to take up positions at different points around the covert. I follow the Tiger and Cheyne, working our way up the northern slope of what must be part of Winsford Hill, though still many hundreds of feet from its summit. The Tiger stations me at the entrance to a wide path which drives deep into the woods. He leaves me here to watch while he and Cheyne ride further on, going up the steep hill and eventually out of my sight.
I’m on my own. Far down the hill to my right I can see the dab of pink of Perry’s coat, stationary in the stubble-field. I wonder what he’s waiting for? In front of me the wide silent ride winds deep into the dark green and dun shadows of the ancient woods. I peer down this track, shaded and thick on either side with bracken and underbrush. A bird is calling repeatedly in there; a sharp short urgent sound, again and again. Then it stops and everything is silent and still around me.
Those great dogs are in there too, somewhere. They are intently unravelling the labyrinth of animal scents, some of them perhaps staying true to the peculiar signature of the Haddon stag, approaching his secret lair, working the complex line closer to him by the minute. Undoing the puzzle. Hunting by scent. Another dimension! A closed world to us. A remorseless business once that elusive thread has been picked up and carried to its source.
There’s not a sound now. I look down the hill to my right again. Perry’s still there. Then Kabara is alert, his ears pricked forward, a shifting of his weight on to his hind legs and a low sound in his windpipe. He’s gazing straight ahead.
The ride is empty. I can’t see a thing. Nothing moving anywhere. Kabara’s sensed something in there, however. I trust his reactions. He’s not just on edge. I’m tempted to go in and take a look. But then, deep in the woods, maybe a quarter of a mile or more away, there is the sound of a hound challenging. It’s not the baying mournful howl of a lone staghound in full cry on a stricken quarry, or the confident song of a dozen dogs hitting a fresh line together. It’s a short urgent warning, a mixture of aggression and fear, the challenge of an immediate confrontation. Unexpected. Something’s leapt to its feet in front of a hound in there for certain, and Kabara must have picked that up a second before the sound of the challenge reached us.
From our position in the sunlit field we carefully examine the shadowed ways between the trees. There’s not a movement to be seen. A few minutes drag by like this, and I’m beginning to get blurred vision and a crick in my neck, when something startles a pair of wood-pigeons from their perch in the high branches of a nearby elm, their wings clapping sharply three or four times in rapid succession as they fly away. And there! Something is m
oving along close to the ground on the other side of the earth bank, coming this way slowly. I raise myself in my stirrups until I can just make out the backs of a file of moorland sheep picking their way along on the other side of the hedge. When the leading ewe reaches the opening to the ride she stops and stares at us, wrinkling her nose. Then, unimpressed, she gives a bleat and leads her gang out on to the stubble, each one pausing in its turn to give us the once-over.
Sheep! I nudge Kabara and we move forward into the shade, the click and scrape of his steel shoes on the stones of the stubble-field muffled abruptly as we step on to the soft mulchy surface of the track. It’s cool in here. There’s a touch of the chill and dampness of the night lingering in the air, and the rich smell of leaf-mould and rotting vegetation. The smell of the earth. And what is it, then, that the hounds smell, travelling along so close to the ground? How can their ‘nose’ be sensitive enough to distinguish one deer’s scent from another’s while they’re stretched at a full gallop, charging over the twisting criss-cross of conflicting animal scents? The pungent strength of what I’m smelling now must surely overwhelm a nose sensitive enough for that? But maybe, after all, it isn’t like that, their sense of smell, but is more like our eyesight, picking up infinite shades of meaning, gradations of tone and intensity, not a single thread but a mosaic of impressions. The most acute hounds detecting, perhaps, traces that are scarcely present, no more than stale residues stimulating a memory of a scent, hinting at the passing, hours ago, of the hunted beast. Like that.
