As a pale wintry sun dropped toward the moors, Harry Stephenson — grandson of a Gypsy and huntsman of England's oldest fox hunt — pulled up his gray mare, put his horn to his lips and repeatedly blew two sonorous notes into the afternoon chill. For the eight of us who had followed the hunt on horseback since morning, the call was a poignant indication that the time had come to call it a day; for Stephenson's pack, it was a routine signal to gather around him. And while the black-and-tan called Mayday briefly broke away in pursuit of a fresh scent, the other 28 hounds of the Bilsdale Hunt loped, tongues lolling, after their pensive huntsman, oblivious to the fact that today was one of the last times they would legally chase a fox across England's green and pleasant land.
At midnight tonight, just two days after Stephenson sounded his horn, the 2004 Hunting Act will come into effect in England and Wales, banning hunting with dogs. The bill was the product of years of stormy political debate that came to a head last fall in what members of the Skilbeck family, who invited me to join the Bilsdale's last hurrah, remember as a "pitched and sometimes bloody battle" in Parliament Square between police and people like them — usually law-abiding citizens who want to carry on doing what the Bilsdale has been doing for more than 300 years, hunting foxes.
But upsetting the old order is what the hunting legislation is all about. The bill finally became law in November after the invocation of an obscure 1949 act that gives the elected lower House of Commons the final say over measures defeated (as the hunting bill was) in the unelected upper House of Lords. And tonight's deadline marks the end of an appointed three-month lag since the Hunting Act received its ritual royal assent: La Reyne le veult. That's Norman French for "the Queen wills it," though in this case it's hard to believe that she did.
Many in Britain's ruling Labor Party have celebrated the ban as a triumph for animal rights — and a hobble on the ankles of the rural elite. But for its opponents like hunt secretary Richard Barry, who tells me from his hardy bay mare, Rosie, that he's "the oldest member of the oldest hunt," it is a sorry assault on an already threatened rural way of life.
The ban saddens the 20 or so men, women and children who gathered this snow-dusted morning on their restless mounts to enjoy fruitcake and a stirrup cup of port at Manor Farm, nestled in the amphitheater of hills — or knolls — that give this sandstone village its name. Mentioned in the Domesday Book, an 11th-century land survey, this is the kind of place that time usually passes by, where one of the high points of the parish calendar is the vicar's annual blessing of "the human and animal participants in all country pursuits and activities." Now, by hosting the Bilsdale in its last week of fox hunting, Kirby Knowle is providing a backdrop for what has been the most heated controversy in modern British politics.
Countryside vs. towns
"This is a divisive government," a farming friend told me the day I arrived in England, and though the rift is about class warfare, it is not between rich and poor but "between people who live in the country and people who live in the towns." They are words echoed to me in various forms by Bilsdale riders. Their nostalgia is not only for the loss of a sport they love, but for a fragile agricultural economy that is fast disappearing under concrete or being suffocated by regulations. Nailed to tree trunks and gateposts and tacked up in village shop windows throughout England's countryside are green and red posters that read "Fight prejudice. Fight the ban." And while a series of legal appeals organized by a lobbying group called the Countryside Alliance looks to many like the long-overdue death throes of the feudal system, for others the fox hunting legislation has become a potent symbol of the so-called townies' hostility to Britain's rural traditions.
And it's hard to imagine an event more vested in tradition than hunting foxes. There's an undeniable thrill to the blast of the horn, the clatter of hoofs and the splash of scarlet when Stephenson, his two whippers-in and his hounds lead us into the lane in front of Manor Farm, and my gray mount, Jemima, stablemate of the huntsman's horse, joins the spanking trot toward the first copse. There we are, re-creating the iconic image that adorns pub place mats and walls of stately homes alike — a realization tempered only by the friendly gibes of 16-year-old Ginny Skilbeck and a friend, the hunt's groom Gemma Jackson, who've assured me that "we'll have a good laugh" out riding today, and I realize that that their good laugh will probably come at my expense.
The mounted pageantry of the hunt, depicted on colorful medieval tapestries, came to Britain from France after the Norman Conquest, luring kings and their guests out into the royal forests in pursuit of stag and boar. But chasing foxes is a time-honored tradition up here in the Yorkshire Dales. According to Baily's Hunting Directory, the bible of British blood sports, the nearby Staintondale Hunt traces its history back to the early 13th century; legend has it that King John granted a charter in 1208 to local men to cull predatory wolves and foxes.
But the father of the modern fox hunt was probably the ne'er-do-well George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, who combined the sport of kings with the pursuit of predators in the late 17th century when he founded the Bilsdale Hunt, the first pack of hounds kept solely for the purpose of hunting foxes. More than three centuries later, the duke's legacy is a thriving pack of 60, followed twice a week by some 40 mounted subscribers as well as assorted others — like me — who pay 30 pounds for a day of hard riding in pursuit of Stephenson, his hounds and a fox or two across the spectacularly hilly, boggy dales that James Herriot made famous.
Witless toffs?
Better known for chasing skirts than foxes (Buckingham seduced the Countess of Shrewsbury, killed her husband in a duel and installed his freshly widowed mistress in his household), the duke may also have helped to give hunting a bad name. Diarist Samuel Pepys dismissed the philandering horseman as "a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a whore." A century later, the Whig Party lampooned the country gentry who rode to hounds as witless toffs, slaves to their animal passions. And Jane Ridley, author of a history of hunting, says the caricature stuck: "Country gentleman equals Tory equals fox hunting equals stupid is an association of ideas which still persists."
The people who ride with the Bilsdale these days take a certain pride in their founder's rakish reputation, but his two modern-day successors as joint masters of the Bilsdale foxhounds — Stephenson and Ginny's mother, Judith Skilbeck — have little time for the snobbish stereotype. "It's ridiculous, isn't it?" Stephenson tells me. "Rich people are in the minority." Skilbeck adds: "We're ordinary people." And if I need any proof of the point, it comes when Stephenson tells me the night before going hunting that he'd start the day "behind the wheel of a school bus in boots and breeches" because he was short of a driver in the bus company he runs with his brother.
But fox hunters across the country haven't forgotten about being called witless toffs. Today, nobody (or nobody who knows) calls the fox "the fox." He's Charlie, or Charles James, so named after the 18th-century Whig prime minister Charles James Fox.
And just minutes after we arrive at the first copse, hounds begin to give tongue, indicating they've found a scent. Then — "Wha . . . aay" — there's a banshee-like holloa from someone who has spotted a fox slipping out of the undergrowth.
It's the moment everyone has been waiting for, an exhilarating moment to be sure. And — for somebody like me who has not ridden with a hunt for more than 20 years — a moment that cannot help but bring to mind the gasp of a young Siegfried Sassoon in his "Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man":
"Don't do that; they'll catch him!"
We're off, though, and as Jemima takes me at a divot-churning gallop across the first field, I remind myself that foxes are vermin in Britain, and that catching them is part of the point. My brief philosophical reveries are interrupted, first by a riderless horse careering across a lane in front of me and then by a yell of "Race you!" And Ginny and Gemma hurtle past, churning their own divots up into my face.
The fatal bite
Race me they do, reminding me of the first lesson of hunting — that it's not a good idea to be at the back, where you make a meal of mud and are expected to close all the gates. As I move to reach them, I ponder this method of nabbing a fox — whether, if the hounds do catch up, Charlie will die by an efficient nip to the neck with "barely a mark on him," as Stephenson has told me, or whether an exhausted animal will finally falter, to be torn to shreds by the pack, as the animal rights activists argue.
And, despite Jemima's gameness, despite being only yards from the fox at one point when it darts through undergrowth, I'm not there to witness the moment but way up on a hillside with the rest of the riders, about half an hour later, when the broad-headed hound called Manager delivers the fatal bite.
As the steaming horses and riders stop to draw breath and share a pause in the ride as well as the port in their hip flasks, I'm brought back to Judith Skilbeck's argument that bypasses class warfare to get to the root of my questions: "If what we are doing is right, we should be allowed to continue. If not, we shouldn't." Being no expert myself, I turn to the result of a government inquiry, known as the Burns Report, which concluded in 2000 that hunting "seriously compromises the welfare of the fox" but that alternative methods of fox control are no better. The difference is that hunts are more apt to kill mangy and damaged animals.
Unquestionably, Britain's largest and most successful predator is not in danger of extinction. There is a stable population of about a quarter-million foxes, which produce around 425,000 cubs every year. In fact, Vulpes vulpes, a slightly different breed from the American red fox, is proving far more adaptable in the dog-eat-dog evolutionary stakes than either hunts or farmers. Some 33,000 have made the move from the country to live in cities, according to a count of fox droppings by Bristol University scientists. And they are taking their country ways with them. They are omnivorous scavengers, with a fondness for kitchen scraps and pet bunnies. And although John Peel's horn may be silenced in Britain's subdivisions, for the three midwinter weeks that mark the height of fox fecundity, eerie mating yowls awaken the dead and bring townies from their beds before morning.
Chasing foxes across fields on horseback is certainly not the most efficient way of keeping their numbers in check, but the Hunting Act will undoubtedly increase the numbers killed by guns, in snares and with poison, particularly during game shooting season, which is just over, and during lambing, which will soon begin in the countryside Jemima carries me over.
We pass breathtaking scenery at a breathtaking pace. The great gray mare gallops around open fields, sprouting with the spring crop, scrambles and slides down treacherously steep and rocky paths, picks her way through bracken and over moorland, where deep peat bogs can swallow a horse, and stands still for me at great lookouts over the Vale of York and toward the Pennine range, England's backbone. She combines the sure-footedness of a native pony with the ground-eating stride of a hunter, and when Stephenson's hounds pursue another scent for a while, and the number of followers gradually drops, Jemima keeps going.
There are exclusive hunts like the Beaufort, with its tailored blue livery and royal following, just as there are fancy tennis and golf clubs. But, for the most part, British fox hunts are open to anyone who has a horse. And that's the way it's always been, Ridley, the hunting historian, tells me: "Put peer and plowman in front of the fence, and the best man gets over." The Bilsdale has no clubhouse. The subscription for a season's hunting is about $475, with an additional $9 per meet, and farmers hunt for less, as I occasionally did as a teenager with my closest friend, whose parents farmed in the south of England.
The people who ride with the Bilsdale may be Tory (and if they weren't before the Hunting Act became law, they almost certainly are now), but there's nothing the least bit hoity-toity about them. The hunt's genial field master, Ivan Holmes, wears a moth-eaten coat with mismatched buttons and a red band around his threadbare helmet to identify him as the man whom riders should follow. And the Skilbecks' home, the 24-acre High Paradise Farm where I spend the night, is aptly named. But it's an unfussy kind of paradise, with muddy terriers on the sofas and a gaggle of white geese out front acting as the morning alarm clock. "I'm passionate about hunting," Judith Skilbeck tells me. It's a passion that crosses class barriers and that she, the daughter of an atomic scientist who lived as a child in Washington, can share with Stephenson with what he describes as his grandfather's scrap-dealing, horse-trading Romany background.
Life-and-death choices
It would be very unusual to find a farmer who'd rely on the hunt to catch a predatory fox, and not all landowners like hunts trampling across their fields. But members of the hunt staff have long provided a valued service by hauling away the carcasses of dead livestock, as well as offering a day's sport and a splash of color and excitement on dank winter days. And across the country, rural people have become keenly aware of their tenuous hold on the old ways, following the imposition of European Union agricultural regulations and a series of natural crises. Four years ago, after a case of hoof-and-mouth disease was confirmed at Manor Farm, some 2,000 sheep and lambs were slaughtered. On neighboring land, farmers watched as their disease-free animals were destroyed in an attempt to curb the spread of the disease.
In rural communities, those sorts of hardships are to be met with stoicism. Not so what people they see as the misplaced class resentment and legislative maneuvering that led to the Hunting Act.
These mud-spattered hunting people are not likely to give up easily. It's not done to talk about defeat: Take a tumble, and you brush yourself off, get back in the saddle and ride on.
That's why the members of the Bilsdale have arranged an extra unscheduled outing today, just hours before the Hunting Act comes into effect. And they say they will be back in the saddle on Saturday to exercise their animals and chase the hounds along a man-made trail. Hunts across England say they will do the same. "We've got to keep the riders interested," Skilbeck tells me, so that they will continue to pay to ride with the Bilsdale and so support the upkeep of the hounds. Bred for generations to hunt foxes, hounds can't simply be given away or turned into house pets. The alternative is familiar enough to anyone who knows the life-and-death choices of country life. But it's clearly unpalatable to Stephenson, who takes me back to the kennels after the hunt to watch him feed and praise his hardworking pack.