Shock therapy
Charles Moore
-rust before the end of the season, I am J hunting once more. Roosevelt was right about freedom from fear being the big thing. Fear is always somewhere in the background in hunting — unless you are a lunatic — and when you return after injury it is in the foreground. In strength and health, the saddle is a seat — comfortable, commanding, secure. In convalescence, it is a perch — jolting, temporary, precarious. When your blood is up, you can gallop along a tarmac road in hot pursuit. When it is thinned by staying indoors, you shiver, and wonder if you will fall off at the meet.
The physiotherapist said. 'You can go hunting again if your horse doesn't pull much.' I had forgotten that Sancho does nothing else. Being a columnist and therefore a natural tilter at windmills, I should logically have called my horse Rosinante, but instead he is named after Don Quixote's servant. This suits him because, in the great tradition of master/servant relationships, he's in charge.
Today, in particular, where we meet on his home ground, he does precisely what he wants. This means that, for the first few fields, his bucking is occasionally punctuated by a canter, rather than the other way round. As hounds work their way through a dense covert, Artemis the Master passes the time by taking us round a circuit of fences in and out of the wood behind them. Sancho is mad for it: the only thing that checks his career is the horse in front. The final fence in the sequence is a steep drop out of larches and into a field. Last season it put the Barrister into a gorse bush and this time it sends the Member of Parliament rolling across the turf. Sancho, uncontrollable, jumps it so big and staglike that I have the illusion of flying, bounds forwards into the field and then swerves left like a rugby player. I am still there. The shock therapy has worked. Fear is banished, and I'm free at last.
For the rest of the day, I can reaccustom myself to the subtler pleasures of the sport. After the long period of dry cold, and before the more recent wet and grey, this is a single day of perfect spring. Spring hunting is not classic hunting — the warmth tends to impede the scent, lambing begins to contract the amount of country available; the sense of life waxing marks the season's wane. But it has a peculiar sweetness. Without the grim purposefulness brought by the cold and the shortness of December days, hunting becomes less engaged and more contemplative. I notice a woodcock wavering past us as we wait on a ride, and from higher vantage points I survey the sunlight catching the slight fuzz in the outline of the woods that is the first symptom of new growth. Hounds work quietly and steadily through cover so thick that their cries do not echo as they would in mid-winter when everything is bare.
And then there is the long afternoon, where birds are still singing after five, and the light makes the end of the day almost voluntary. My friend from the Belmont writes of her hunt last week: 'Hounds found at 5.20 and Charlie ran for once in a straight line. Across the flat terrain near Beaudesert, past the point-to-point course and on to the valleys on the other side of the main road for four miles. Hounds were finally called off at 6.15 and we conceded defeat to the brave fox who had given us the run of the season. . . We had hunted into Claridge country and with the magical symmetry that life so joyously sometimes delivers, the Claridge hounds ran into Belmont country that same evening, finishing at the Beaudesert kennels ... The moon is full at the moment and I hacked home in moonlight so bright we could see our own shadows. We arrived back at the yard at 7.20 having tapped the tops of walls to check for wire as we negotiated our way across the fields.'
We may have the odd by-day left, but alas I don't think I shall be able to snatch it, so it's goodnight to the season. Will we have another one? Last week, I turned into Jermyn Street and bumped into a dignitary of the Countryside Alliance who warned me of trouble ahead in Parliament this summer. I passed on and, as if to prove him right, the next thing I saw was the leading 'anti' MP Gerald Kaufman lurking in a lewd plastic hat. 1 felt like a hobbit spotting Gollum in the Shire.
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