The Hunt

When the hounds left the castle gates, there was in each living thing a great excitement. As the riders saw it, there were magpies that perched on branches to get a better look, autumn leaves that began to swirl in the air as if for a pre-hunt entertainment, there were caterpillars, spiders, ants, moles, butterflies, bats—all of whom ceased their normal activity in anticipation of the hunt. Before the gates opened, the castle grounds were in an unresponsive slumber; now as they creaked open, ears were pricked and commotion was summarily raised.

One of the hounds who went by the name of George—a very old hound—was particularly expectant. He had greater reason than most. Being old, he was nearing retirement, and there was one unfinished task he still hoped to achieve. One fox had managed consistently to avoid capture, and he could not let this pass. The other hounds even tried, tactfully, to convince him to let it go. To expend so much energy on so difficult and ultimately so thankless a task would not reward him, they intoned, and was ill-befitting of his age. Despite the obvious truth of this, George carried on with this one purpose in mind. To capture the fox would be the crowning achievement of all his long years as a foxhound.

The fox, called Toby, was not unaware of George’s psychic turmoil. Indeed, he had cautiously planned for it by erecting a series of traps. Presently he awoke from his slumber by the rude sounds of the distant hunt. He could hear, faintly, the hounds baying, and having to be disciplined out of riot. He knew that among those hounds was his enemy, the indefatigable George, who like a hound obsessed, was unable to live with the thought of leaving an uncaptured Toby free to wander the land.

“He’s a quaint fellow, that George,” thought Toby. “Perhaps he might once have captured me. I grant that he may not have had the brain, but the spirit and the legs, he had. Now his spirit poorly misrepresents itself, and his legs cannot carry him far. Who can speak the truth to such a dog? It’s inevitable that nature—as far as it can think—must give him another shot at me: it wouldn’t be so poetic otherwise. But what poetry! A uniformly cruel one. Alas, that cannot be helped, only observed. Yet he makes this sport so irresistible to me! All my life I am hunted: is it not right, then, that I should love to hunt?”

Toby’s preparations were crude, he thought, but certainly sufficient. He knew enough of the mind of George and dogs like him to know their weaknesses. And he knew, above all, that no matter how well George had planned his capture, he would not be able to resist his most base, animal nature, so long as it was correctly and precisely brought to the fore. And that was the essence of Toby’s strategy.

But George was at the whim, for the time being, of his human masters, who had no desire to capture Toby in particular. Therefore they were not easily lured into Toby’s little redoubt; they kept themselves sensibly in the open field. But after two hours had passed, this yielded no result, not a sign of a fox. All parties had become impatient; the master settled on entering the wood.

*

By the time the hunt had entered it, a thin fog had magicked itself. George’s fellow hounds warned him that this was not a good sign, and that certainly it could not bode well for his intended capture. George did not respond. He merely thought that it would make the capture all the sweeter.

The countess, whose husband owned the castle and its grounds, began to feel some consternation at the intrusion of the fog. Beside her was not the earl but an elderly gentleman named Terence, who felt it his chivalric duty to accompany her at all times, despite her two decades’ experience of hunting. Terence succeeded in comforting her, but he could not stop the direction of the general conversation, which was now of whether they should leave the wood, or even abandon the hunt entirely.

“Nonsense!” shouted one of the younger riders, who before now had only been on a handful of hunts. He had not once been the master of a kill, and as such was eager to prove himself; it was widely acknowledged that to prove oneself with a fox was a necessary prelude to proving oneself on the battlefield. Some of the more experienced riders recognised this in the young man and gave in to his charming eagerness.

But soon the entire party began to look somewhat disarrayed. The order that once was there was gone. The countess decidedly did not approve. She tried to find the master of the hounds, who was riding on ahead. When she found him, he appeared as if out of nowhere and she was startled.

“I very much doubt there will be any foxes today,” she said.

“Patience,” replied the young man, who was eagerly riding alongside the master, desperate to glean all the tricks it was possible to glean, in the shortest possible time.

“Patience, indeed,” the master recurred absentmindedly.

By now the party was thoroughly mixed, and they found themselves in increasingly tangled territory. In this terrain, the master knew, it was near-impossible to catch any living thing, let alone a cunning fox. The fox knew this also, and upon hearing the footsteps and deliberations of these men and women, approached with a measure of caution. Moving slowly and silently, he knew that he would not be spotted unless he were unwittingly surrounded. So he moved with the express intention of singling out George, his would-be assassin, so that George and only George could see him. In this he had the benefit of years, for, not being the perfectly adapted hunter, a measure of cunning was necessary for mere survival.

“There is that rabble,” he whispered to himself—having not yet seen the hunt, but hearing and smelling it distinctly. “On they plod, in complete ignorance of my presence. How strange it is that the crowd, which goes about with strength and arrogance, is disabled by its own noise, and finds it difficult to seek out one individual—but the individual, unaided, finds the crowd with ease?”

And his smell bore him easily towards the hunt, which he now saw as clearly as he smelt.

*

The pack of hounds kept closely together. Where most of them were irrationally eager, George distinguished himself by appearing altogether more collected and alert. At all times he looked around him at every tree, every bush, every thicket, every bump on the ground, every crevice—for any sign of Toby. The other hounds had abandoned him as a lost cause, thinking it now impossible to convince him to give up his obsession.

And now a very distinct sound of sudden movement came from nearby. George reacted instantly, but the other hounds were still deafened by their bloodlust, and did not hear. George did not alert them to it, and kept searching. He began to walk more slowly now, and separated himself from the rest of the pack. Every second something fox-like appeared like a taunting apparition. Finally he settled on a statuesque figure half-obscured by a tree. He now stopped completely, and approached it.

It was his arch-enemy Toby. The fox picked his moment. Just as George was certain it was he, but not so close that George could feasibly catch him; just as George was too far away from the pack to receive aid; and just as he saw with full clarity the whites of George’s desperate eyes—he ran, and George gave immediate chase.

*

Meanwhile the riders noticed something amiss. The countess, along with Terence, looked upon the hounds worriedly.

“Isn’t one of the hounds missing?” the countess asked.

The master counted them.

“So they are. Old George is gone.”

The young man laughed.

“Probably gone to take a stroll!”

Nobody laughed in return, which rather disappointed him.

“Well, it’s no loss, is it? Good riddance! He was getting old, anyway. Better not spoil the rest of the hunt on account of one hound.”

Terence turned his horse around abruptly.

“I’ll try to find him. We may yet save an old, unloved hound.”

After he left, the men and women of the hunt all looked at the young man disapprovingly, and he felt accordingly ashamed.

Terence’s journey did not last long. His best horsemanship was long behind him. He truly believed he was nearing the lost hound; but his instinct in these matters was as nothing when compared with that of the hound himself, not to speak of the fox: that is to say, he failed, and found himself stuck in a thicket. Seeing no easy way out, he was at first frustrated, but very quickly resigned. He laughed morbidly to himself.

“All these years of horse riding and foxhunting, just to be outwitted by a thicket!” he said aloud. Then more quietly he said, “and what will become of poor George?”

*

George’s stamina, and hence the chase, was coming to an end. His adrenaline-addled brain was filled with excitement, and he had no concept of how cunning Toby was being. For even though he was surely catching up to his life’s enemy, he was being led just as surely into a trap. The fox was the only animal of the field that knew the lay of these woods. Every corner and every trap was embedded safely in Toby’s mind. There was nothing that could surprise him, but much that could yet surprise George. It was this knowledge that would ultimately present the fox with the victor’s prize. Just like the old man Terence, George was led into a trap of nature—this time a well-disguised hole.

Now after all the excitement of the chase, there was nothing but silence. This was soon broken by George’s pained whimpers. He was bleeding profusely, and knew that he would surely die that day. Toby stopped. These lowly animal sounds were to him the signal of his victory.

“Perhaps it is a trick”, he thought momentarily. “The poor hound won’t have many more chances to capture me. Would he debase himself so, merely to trick me?” He seriously considered the possibility, then remembered his previous assessment of the nature of hounds, and considered it unlikely. So he walked confidently back in the direction of George; and indeed he soon saw the hound lying disfiguredly in a hole.

But George’s thoughts were now beyond the battle. He presently remonstrated himself harshly and aloud, as if to pass on to the entire world the message of his folly.

“How is it that I—a hound of some years, a learned hound, a wise and clever hound—should have fallen to such animal lows?” he wailed. “How is it that such a dog as I, who could do no wrong in a hunt, who’d never let his hunger be the guide of his run, how could I have descended so? Why, could it be that I have really learned nothing at all?”

The fox now entered the clearing where the hound was lying, and George saw him. Toby said nothing, and, looking down at the ignominious sight before him, felt rather disinclined to gloat.

“Yes, yes,” said George. “You will tell me that I was a fool! And you would be quite correct! Alas, I ask that you look away and do not pity me. Savour your victory however you will—tell your friends, compose an epic poem, raise a toast to yourself—I would have done the same. But do that alone, and far away from me, please.”

The fox saw that there was no amount of cosmoses he could travel to lessen the hound’s pain.

“I will oblige you, my dear hound. But not before I make this brief observation, if you will allow it. It is strange that you should think of me as the villain, or indeed as yourself as the fool. Are we not born into these curious lives, in which the rules are dictated to us at birth that one of us must hunt and the other must be hunted? You will see after no lengthy reflection that if we begin this way, so must we end. Now I myself am a thinker, and not a fox of action. If I had it in my power to impose new rules, or to abandon them altogether, I would do so at a glance. But as it is we can do little within the cloistered shells of our own natures that is not prescribed to us by our very nature. And so if the invisible forces that govern us should deign to lend an ear to your oration, they would think it very strange indeed that such a thing should complain of its end. If such a speech as yours is in your nature, why then, so is your end. To protest would be like a leaf protesting of its falling off a tree.”

The sound of a horse approaching interrupted Toby’s speech. Without a second’s thought, Toby ran. It was Terence, who saw the back of the fox just as he entered the clearing.

“The villain,” he said to himself when he saw the bloodied state of his favourite hound. He dismounted, and approached George with very little hope of saving him.

“Are you alright, old boy?” he asked, to which George only whimpered.

Terence strained his back while picking George up.

“Come on now, George. There’s life in you, yet!”

Now the sounds of a whole troop of horses and riders were heard, and soon the hunt entered the clearing. The young man shouted, “what’s all this? Did you find the fox?”

Terence told him the fox’s direction: the young man whipped his horse into action, and went off in pursuit.