Hunting
Up in America
Charles Moore
Jet-lagged, 1 wake with the dawn, and think of Sir Thomas Browne's words about drowsiness and time difference: 'The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' I am in Unionville, Pennsylvania, in the country of Mr Stewart's Cheshire Foxhounds (while abroad, this columns sheds its usual fictive guise).
And the huntsmen are up — or rather, the huntswoman is. We are staying at Brooklawn, built in 1682 and inhabited, for a decent fraction of that time, by Mrs Nancy Penn Smith Hannum. Mr Stewart, her step-father, gave his name to the pack he founded in 1912, and was Master until the war. Mrs Hannum has been sole Master continuously since 1945. According to my friend the Brigadier, whom I am accompanying on the trip, this makes her the longest-serving Master in the world.
We arrived late last night in the snow and the dark, with instructions to leave the drive clear so that Mrs Hannum could get out to the kennels at 5.30 a.m. She has done so today, as she has done most days for 60 years, and we therefore eat breakfast by ourselves. Judge Hannum, as is his title and as his wife always refers to him, is sadly bedridden. He used to ride in point-topoints and steeplechases. It is an understatement to say that the contents of the house reflect the owners' interests. There are horses and foxes involved in almost everything: paperweights and cushions and curtains and lampshades and pictures and figurines and books and magazines and photographs everywhere, not to mention hats and coats and boots and whips. In my room alone, I count 374 representations of the horse — and that is before I bend down to pick something off the floor and find a huge pile of hunting prints under the bed.
After breakfast, the housekeeper drives us to the stables which abut the elegant stone kennels with their statues of foxes guarding the gates. Outside the stables is a very old jeep, and beside the jeep is a very old lady. Mrs Hannum is tiny and smiling. She is slightly bent and walks on two sticks. She wears a very battered Barbour and the keen expression of someone always alert to the needs of horse or hound. As she introduces us to the grooms, she promotes my friend to General.
'You can't hunt today,' says Mrs Hannum. 'The meet's off. It's too frosted underneath and the snow is melting and sliding on top.' This is what we feared since arriving in the freeze. Is our journey out from Washington in vain? 'You can go on hound exercise, though,' she continues. 'The General can ride Classic: Mr Moore can ride Princess.' And so off we trot into the snow — the 'General' and I, Mark the huntsman and Anthony the whipper-in. And just behind us over the white dusting, apparently pilotless, comes the jeep. If you look hard, you can see Mrs Hannum's head between the wheel.
The cold is bitter and the ground is bony in places and slippery everywhere. Mark draws the first covert. Although these are entirely English hounds, with blood refreshed from time to time from the Beaufort, the Belvoir and elsewhere, their style of hunting is different. In most English country, hounds have to learn to hunt for themselves. Here, where the huntsman can almost always keep right up with them, they are under close command. Mark calls 'Go in', and they zip into the covert almost as if they were coursing. They work swiftly through and hurry on, responding to Mark's beautiful cries, delivered far more frequently than they would be in England.
From the top of the next chill rise, we survey the country. Except for the lack of hedges, it is like the best English hunting before the war. In every direction, grassland rolls away, punctuated by little spinneys and what Mark calls 'creeks'. Each field is divided by timber, almost all of it jumpable at any point, and there is not a single strand of wire. It has been Mrs Hannum's life work to persuade all the owners to co-operate, and to keep out new owners who don't like hunting. Sometimes she buys land when it comes on the market, inserts a covenant which keeps it open for hunting, and then sells it. The result is a horseman's paradise.
And today we have it all to ourselves. My numb fingers tingle painfully into life as hounds find, and we hasten through the trees, jumping unavoidable fences despite the snow, crashing now and again through ice on the edge of streams. Hound music fills the winter wood. We hunt two foxes but, as is customary here, do not kill. There is actually a shortage of foxes in Chester County and only a brace or two is killed each year. It is interesting to see that the hounds remain keen despite this: Mark knows what he is doing.
After nearly three hours and a recurrence of the 'General's' old groin injury, we return to the kennels. In the village café where we eat, everyone knows Mrs Hannum and greets her warmly. Her love of her way of life is unquenchable, but I find a new sadness as well. It seems that those she has brought on to help run the hunt now have their own ideas about what should be done, and are gainsaying her. There is the sense of a long, long reign drawing to its close. Standing in the garden of Brooklawn the following morning in the biting wind, I look across the country she has made. What an artist's pride she must feel, what a fierce love and anger at the idea of letting go.
Charles Moore is Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Previous page
