'YOU SCUM, YOU BLOOD JUNKIE'

As the hunting season gets underway,

Tabitha Troughton joins those

who would sabotage it

I HAD RUN up hills. I had run down hills. I had ploughed through bushes, jumped over logs and scrambled under barbed- wire fences. I was soaked to the skin, cov- ered with mud and bleeding from innumerable scratches. Worst of all, I was now lost in a forest with two teenage boys whose every second sentence ended in 'not'. 'This is the way out — not.' I've got some chocolate — not.' I'm sure we'll be home soon — not.' I was in a very good mood. Not.

The idea of going undercover to infil- trate a hunt saboteur organisation had ini- tially given me no qualms. At one stage I'd been a dedicated saboteur myself. Admit- tedly it was at the age of 16, and in a small village where the hunt viewed our idealis- tic antics with affectionate tolerance. It helped that most of them were our par- ents. Sabbing, they realised, was something peculiar to youth which, like acne, we would no doubt grow out of. I had happy memories of strolling through fields, sav- ing the odd fluffy animal and stopping off for frequent picnics. No one shouted at each other, no one got hurt and we were always home in time for tea.

But this was sabbing for grown-ups. This was sabbing in Land-rovers, with CB radios, combat fatigues, maps, tactics, blood, sweat and body odour. And listen- ing to the conversation of the Brixton sabs, the seasoned pros who were taking me down to the hunt, made me feel very uneasy indeed.

'They're all going to die, man. The peanut gallery are all going to die. Pigs and bumpkins, they're all going to die,' one of the sabs, called Jez, was wailing out of the Land-rover window as we screeched towards Guildford to do battle with the Surrey Union Hunt. In modern-day sab parlance, 'pigs' are the police (aka the enemy), while a bumpkin is anyone who lives outside the M25. I decided not to ask what 'peanut gallery' meant; it obviously wasn't a term of endearment. 'We're the Brixton militia. And we're gonna get 'em all,' the other sabs shouted, more or less in unison.

There was a pause. Everyone looked at me expectantly. 'Er . .. save the foxes?' I offered, weakly. `Foxes?' said Jez with dis- gust. `I hate foxes. They're vermin. I'm only in this for the paramilitary connota- tions.' Pete, the driver, looked round with concern. 'Save the foxes is fine,' he said kindly. 'That's what we're here for, after all."Bang, bang,' shouted Jez with glee, aiming an imaginary gun at a passer-by.

In between these bursts of bravado, I was offered a quick course on how to be a sab in the Nineties. If you're arrested, give a false name. Don't answer any questions 'the pigs' put to you. If you're lucky, they'll lock you up for a few hours and you can sue them for holding you without proper cause to the tune of £300 an hour. Of course, this didn't really concern me as I was not going to be arrested. I might have been wearing my undercover gear of bower boots and a dirty mac but I wasn't sporting a pink Mohican or dreadlocks. No one sensible could ever believe I was with this hardened bunch of activists.

The first thing I saw when we arrived in the village where the Surrey Union Hunt were gathering was a woman in a Volvo estate, who looked rather like my mother. She leant out of her window. 'I don't know why I pay my taxes to keep people like you on the streets,' she hissed. Julie, a sab

from the Brighton group, sprang to my defence. 'You ugly old bat,' she screamed. 'You shouldn't be out with a face like yours, you scum, you blood junkie.' Julie stopped and smiled sweetly at me. 'Just helping you out,' she explained.

We wandered down the road to join the rest of the sabs just in time to see Jez leap- ing balletically into the air in an attempt to pull a huntsman off his horse. 'Citizen's arrest,' he shouted. Apparently, the hunts- man had jostled a villager who was trying to block his path. He cantered off, leaving Jez deprived of his quarry but unbowed. 'There's no way out, man. No way. Kill 'em all.' He paused, looked maniacally into the middle distance and burst into a cracked rendition of 'There is a Green Hill Far Away'. I ran off after the hunt. It seemed safer.

Hours of endless misery followed. Hunt sabbing (for the benefit of the uninitiated) falls largely into three parts. The first is running very fast. This is so you can occa- sionally catch sight of the hunt, who are obviously much faster, disappearing over a distant hill. The second, and most impor- tant part, is the verbal abuse of hunt fol- lowers. These are easily differentiated from hunt sabs because they are a) better dressed; b) swear less; and c) look much more cheerful. The third and most depress- ing part is driving around in a freezing Land-rover trying to find the rest of the sabs who have given up on the running and have huddled under a tree to escape the rain.

There were sporadic outbursts of excite- ment. The time when the sabs rescued a lost spaniel puppy and had to call in the despised 'pigs' to take it home. The time when they actually stumbled across the hunt, who starting galloping down the main road to get away from them. 'That's very bad for your horse,' shouted Julie at one huntsman. 'Fuck off,' he replied suavely. Best of all, the time when I'd managed to get a lift with two boys in a mini, instead of with the Brixton sabs in their Land-rover. They had a heater, a thermos full of coffee and some chocolate bars. Bliss. I was just starting to defrost for the first time that day when both of the mini's left-hand tyres sus- piciously deflated at once. We got out. The other sabs had disap- peared into the countryside. By this time, I was beginning to feel mildly irritated

with

the hunt. Not only did they unsportinglY vanish as soon as you got anywhere near them, we were now stranded miles fro1. anywhere and it was getting dark. 'This Is really, like, cool. Not,' said one of the boys, trying hard to sound grown-up. I agreed with him. After two hours of wandering round the deserted forest I was even begot.- fling to think of the Brixton sabs and their Land-rover with wistful nostalgia. I discovered when I got home that theY had been searching frantically for me for hours, convinced that I'd been kidnapPed by a dastardly huntsman.