Hunting the Fox in Virginia

Roger Scruton

I am in Virginia, and have been invited to the first day of cubbing with the Rappahannock Hunt.  In England, “cubbing” means the staged confrontation between young hounds and fox cubs, with a view to training the first and dispersing the second.  Its essence is silence, stillness and waiting, amid morning mists punctured by the pricked ears and trembling tails of our animals.  In Virginia, cubbing means early meets, short runs and bewildered puppies.  But it also means wild spurts from covert to covert, behind a huntsman whose blood-curdling whoops dispel the lethargy of a humid summer morning.  The purpose is not to kill, but to enjoy; and enjoyment is the keynote from beginning to end.  A kill is regarded as a misfortune; the aim being to hunt the fox to ground, thereafter to offer his intoxicating scent to the young hounds as they scrabble around his earth, and the equally intoxicating scent of ham biscuits to the human followers as they scrabble in a field around a table.

American packs meet at large farms, called “fixtures.”  Our fixture is a newly restored 18th-century farmstead surmounting a tangled field of fescue grass and willow-herb, grazed by a herd of semi-wild Black Angus.  By 7:30, the field is crammed with articulated trailers like railway carriages, each long enough to accommodate four horses, a tack room, study area, cocktail bar and gym.  One lady, uncertain of her mount—it has the appearance of a mustang, though with iron gray and skewbald markings—is schooling him on a lunge rein surrounded by a ring of trailers.  She circles around his smaller circles, as though illustrating the Ptolemaic cosmology.  I am surprised to see someone training a horse in the last moments before the first hunt of the season, and somewhat less surprised later, when she is thrown from the horse at a gallop, drags the bridle from his head as she falls and then rises groggily to her feet to say, “Ah’ve gotta hold of reins an braadle, but wheresat goddam hoss?”  She is diagnosed with concussion and taken away, the horse following meekly behind her as though nothing special has occurred.

Gus Edwards is bringing a horse for me; but he is late, and I stand in the warm drizzle shaking hands and conversing.  In public, every American behaves like a presidential candidate, reminding you that it is only an accident that has prevented him from being head of state, just as it is only an accident that has kept you from being Prime Minister.  The women are equally self-assured, and they dominate the field: a right conferred by the natural bond between women and horses that no man can really emulate.  But they are cheerful, too, many of them with children in tow, and all of them, of whatever age, saying “howdee” and “good to meet you” as soon as you offer a smile.  Today’s master is also a woman, and she welcomes me with that spontaneous American inclusiveness which so bewilders those—whether old world aristocrats, European socialists or Islamist fanatics —who live behind screens.

Out of season, the dress code is relaxed.  The huntsman makes one concession to the livery idea, which is to wear a bright red shirt, though one with short sleeves and open collar.  A gun and holster sit on his hip; one hand carries a whip, while the other alternates between the horn and a short-wave radio.  Despite the persistent drizzle, most people wear nothing over their shirts.  Yet they all maintain an orderly appearance and listen attentively as the huntsman explains the etiquette of cubbing, which is encapsulated in a single pithy rule, namely, “Give the puppies room!”

They are about to move off when Gus Edwards arrives.  He has been two hours trying to coax my borrowed horse into the trailer before at last admitting failure.  He has now brought his own horse, George, and insists that I ride him.  George’s enthusiasm is not that of first youth, he being twenty-one years old and so content to stay in his trailer that Gus has to pull him out by the tail.  George comes grumpily into the light, which reveals him to be a cowboy mount of a peculiar marmalade colour.  He looks at me with a resigned and dismal expression, and seems entirely indifferent to the commotion around him or to the hounds whimpering with excitement under the huntsman’s horse.

“You can trust George,” says Gus.  “Never puts a foot wrong. Will you be jumping?”

I nod apprehensively.

“Well, he’ll look at the jump to see if you really want him to go. But he will go.”

This sounds less than convinced, and certainly less than convincing.  Still, I get on George in the best of spirits, touched by Gus’s generosity, and confident that an experienced horse will see me safely through the morning.  We ride up to the first covert, a dense wood of maples, from which large dappled deer leap across our path.  The hounds find immediately, and soon the pack is running along the edge of the wood, down a steep incline and into open country.  The master, like the huntsman, has a short-wave radio, and it crackles and coughs as we bounce along.  Beside me rides Judge Doug Ginsburg, who fits neatly into his horse, weaving like a centaur around boulders, prickly shrubs and swampy patches.  How nice it would be, I think, to be teamed with such a horse!

The hounds run into a grassy hollow, the huntsman calls them out and we veer to the right in their wake.  There in front of me is the first jump of the day, a solid coop of darkened oak.  In Northern Virginia, almost all jumps are of this design: a short chicken coop, like a tiger trap, raised three feet above ground and set in the fence with barriers to either side.  Occasionally, you find a post and rail, and I have heard tell of stone walls, though never of hedges.  For the most part, however, a jump is a manicured and level affair, which offers no excuse for failure, so that when George—or rather his rider—fails, and we turn away from the jump not once but twice, I begin to wonder whether I should not have gone with the second flight.  This second flight consists of mounted followers who do not intend to jump and who are led through the gates after the first flight has finished jumping.  Its existence says much about the character of Virginia hunting.  In England, each rider follows in his own way, often hampering his betters and confusing the field.  In America people divide spontaneously into those who can and those who can’t, overcoming a problem that no English hunt as ever solved, but also removing some of the tangle, the madness and the socially amplified danger.

By shouting, screaming and kicking, I at last lever George to the other side of the coop, with a cat-leap that costs me a stirrup.  Before us lies a beautiful valley, with the Thornton River winding among maples and locust trees, and fields of rough pasture to either side, dotted with red, blue and yellow flowers.  Hounds are speaking again, running along the river and breaking away towards a covert.  A coop lies before us and, again, George refuses.  At the second try he shrugs himself over, dislodges me and stands pensive as I slide down his forelegs to the ground.  He looks at me sadly, as though to suggest that we might call it a day.  I clamber back and we set off in search of the field.  At the next coop, George shies away twice, and then takes a running leap that causes him to clatter the wood with his hind legs and stand stock still again with an “ouch!” on his face.  His response to the next coop is an emphatic no, and I decide to dismount and go through the gate.

The second flight comes eagerly forward.  It consists largely of children and geriatrics, with an authoritative man of military appearance at the head of them.  Judge Ginsburg comes across to me. “Here,” he says, “take my horse.  He’s automatic.  Bit skittish, but then it’s the first day of the season.”  We exchange mounts; the judge’s horse, called Norman, moves beautifully and, having realised my dream, I am in the best of spirits.  To every side there are views of mist-wrapped mountains; spasmodic cries of the hounds echo in the wooded hillside, and above us two turkey vultures slowly turn on the breeze.  We move around the farm wrapped in an envelope of good will.

A coop appears; Norman sails across and I land proudly on the other side, ready to gallop with the field across open pasture. Norman, however, has sussed out that he is no longer weighed down by the judicial arm of government.  He begins to buck, dancing from side to side and thrusting his head between his forelegs.   When I reach terra firma it is a terra so firma that my knee takes a resounding knock and buckles beneath me.  Only by rolling on top of it can I escape Norman’s feet, and by the time I see him cantering across the pasture, I am unable to stand.  After a minute or so, Judge Ginsburg comes across to surrender George, who grants me an “I-told-you-so” look as I painfully clamber back into the saddle.  George mutters and wheezes in the wake of the second flight, as though vicariously afflicted by my pain.

Hounds have gathered around a woodpile where the fox has gone to ground; the huntsman is dancing and tooting, offering a kind of general illustration of the idea of victory.  The hounds gradually cotton on and begin to wag their tails, uttering barks of approval and from time to time scratching at the pile of sticks.  Like so many visions in America, the scene remains open to interpretation, welcoming whatever gloss you like to put on it.  I decide to see it as I would the equivalent event in England: as a ritual whereby the land renews itself, and the old gods return.  We turn away at last, and George regains his trailer with a look of profound relief, entering without so much as a backward glance towards his rider.

No event in America is complete without catering, and the catering must include dips, crisps, nachos, mayonnaise, Coca Cola and sticky juices.  People in England look on junk food as the enemy of home cooking, home living, family values, etc.  But in America, junk food is home cooking, home living and family values; and as for the effect on the body, no true American would want to offend his fellow citizens by advertising the fact that he is leaner and lither than they.  Hence, junk food has become a culture, a tradition, a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.  People rush towards it like children running to their mother.  And the high spirits and good will radiate even more powerfully from faces half hidden by a submarine or perched above a gooey sandwich.  Someone hands me a concoction of bourbon and sweet orange liqueur in a stoppered bottle: it is singularly awful, but nevertheless finds its way straight to my knee and quickly restores its movement.

          As we linger over our picnic and talk becomes more general, I begin to understand that the American “fixture” is only obliquely related to the English meet.  The magic of English hunts arises from an act of renunciation: when hunting begins, ownership ceases.  Hence, the retired farm labourer in his cottage offers as much territory as his ducal neighbour: the land on which we are to hunt being not theirs, but ours. All that is offered at the meet—though this is everything—is the door to a landscape.  America, by contrast, is a society founded on private property: each person in this great democracy is master of his life and sovereign of his territory.  If one person admires his neighbour’s house he will not say, “What a beautiful house,” but “what a beautiful property,” the beauty being, as it were, part of the legal title.

Hence, nobody can assume the right to enter his neighbour’s land or expect anything less than armed confrontation should he do so.  The Commonwealth of Virginia has retained a collective memory of old England, and the fixture is an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of an English meet.  But there is never any doubt that the land on which you ride is not everyone’s, but someone’s.  A fixture is always a large farm, and hunting usually will be confined to this farm and one or two neighbours.  It was not always so, as the literature of American hunting testifies.  In the early days, much of the land was wilderness, purchased for a dollar an acre, and claimed only nominally by its legal owner.  People rode freely across it, hunting and shooting whatever appeared in their path.  The rolling hills and fenced-off fields of Virginia today are anything but wilderness: indeed, they are a paradisal garden in which ordinary Americans reward themselves for a life of industry by crowning themselves kings and queens.

However, as Tocqueville remarked in Democracy in America, the American passion for personal sovereignty is tempered by a talent for association matched by no other people in the modern world.  This, too, you sense in the American hunt, as the followers spontaneously cooperate to lay tables, present food and pass bottles. Each person picks up the conversation like an athlete taking the baton, and everyone laughs when the baton drops.  To observe Americans in a social gathering, as they shape themselves into a corporate person, magically combining individual freedom and collective restraint, is to understand why America is hated by the resentful, the inadequate and the incurably morose.  But it is also to understand how unjust this hatred is, and how those who complain against America in the name of human equality are unable to perceive that this spontaneous sociability is exactly what equality consists in. American democracy, as Tocqueville described it, is not an attempt to level people, but an attempt to raise them, to promote every citizen to the position of monarch.  Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man expresses the same idea.  In America, the common man is not common in the English sense at all, but a fully realised individual, with the faults and virtues of the human condition, determined to be neither ashamed of the one nor boastful of the other.  And nothing expresses this noble equality so effectively as the mayo-smeared, muffin-crumbed faces of those who have just survived a foxhunt.

British writer and philosopher Roger Scruton is the author of On Hunting.  This article appeared originally in Country Illustrated magazine in England.