LITMIR.BIZ

      SUSPICIOUS OF AN ILL-TIMED PLEASANTRY

      "Do you hear, Whip?" repeated Mr. McOstrich, raising his bleak northern voice, "show your teeth, please!"

      "He only wants to focus us," said I, foreseeing trouble, and hurriedly displaying my own new front row in a galvanic smile.

      Michael murmured to Moses' withers something that sounded like a promise to hocus Mr. McOstrich when occasion should serve, and I reflected on the hardship of having to feel apologetic towards both Michael and the photographer.

      Only those who have participated in "Hunt Groups" can realise the combined tediousness and tension of the moments that followed. To keep thirty hounds headed for the camera, to ensure that your horse has not closed its eyes and hung its head in a doze of boredom, to preserve for yourself that alert and workmanlike aspect that becomes a sportsman, and then, when these things have been achieved and maintained for what feels like a month, to see the tripod move in spider strides to a fresh position and know that all has to be begun over again. After several of these tentative selections of a site, the moment came when Mr. McOstrich swung his black velvet pall in the air and buried his head under its portentous folds. The hounds, though uneasy, had hitherto been comparatively calm, but at this manifestation their nerve broke, and they unanimously charged the glaring monster in the black hood with loud and hysterical cries.

      Had not Michael perceived their intention while there was time awful things might have happened. As it was, the leaders were flogged off with ignominy, and the ruffled artist returned from the rock to which he had fled. Michael and I arranged ourselves afresh upon the hillock; I squared my shoulders, and felt my wonted photographic expression of hang-dog desperation settle down upon me.

      "The dogs are not in the picture, Whip!" said Mr. McOstrich in the chill tone of outraged dignity.

      I perceived that the hounds, much demoralised, had melted away from the slope in front of us, and were huddling in a wisp in the intervening hollow. Blandishments were of no avail; they wagged and beamed apologetically, but remained in the hollow. Michael, in whose sensitive bosom the term "Whip" evidently rankled, became scarlet in the face and avalanched from the hill top upon his flock with a fury that was instantly recognised by them. They broke in panic, and the astute and elderly Venus, followed by two of the young entry, bolted for the road. They were there met by Mr. McOstrich's carman, who most creditably headed the puppies with yells and his driving-whip, but was out-played by Venus, who, dodging like a football professional, doubled under the car horse, and fled irrevocably. Philippa, who had been flitting from rock to rock with her kodak, and unnerving me with injunctions as to the angle of my cap, here entered the lists with a packet of sandwiches, with which, in spite of the mustard, she restored a certain confidence to the agitated pack, a proceeding observed from afar with trembling indignation by Minx, her fox-terrier. By reckless expenditure of sandwich the hounds were tempted to their proper position below the horses, but, unfortunately, with their sterns to the camera, and their eyes fastened on Philippa.

      "Retire, Madam!" said Mr. McOstrich, very severely, "I will attract the dogs!"

      Thus rebuked, Madam scrambled hastily over the crest of the hillock and sank in unseemly laughter into the deep heather behind it.

      "Now, very quiet, please," continued Mr. McOstrich, and then unexpectedly uttered the words, "Pop! Pop! Pop!" in a high soprano.

      Michael clapped his hand over his mouth, the superseded siren in the heather behind me wallowed in fresh convulsions; the hounds remained unattracted.

      Then arose, almost at the same moment, a voice from the wood behind us, the voice of yet a third siren, more potent than that of either of her predecessors, the voice of Venus hunting a line. For the space of a breath the hounds hung on the eager hacking yelps, in the next breath they were gone.

      Matters now began to move on a serious scale, and with a speed that could not have been foreseen. The wood was but fifty yards from our sugar-loaf. Before Michael had got out his horn, the hounds were over the wall, before the last stern had disappeared the leaders had broken into full cry.

      "Please God it might be a rabbit!" exclaimed Michael, putting spurs to his horse and bucketing down through the furze towards the wood, with blasts of the horn that were fraught with indignation and rebuke.

      An instant later, from my point of vantage on the sugar-loaf, I saw a big and very yellow fox cross an open space of heather high up on the hill above the covert. He passed and vanished; in half-a-dozen seconds Venus, plunging through the heather, came shrieking across the open space and also vanished. Another all too brief an interval, and the remainder of the pack had stormed through the wood and were away in the open after Venus, and Michael, who had pulled up short on the hither side of the covert wall, had started up the open hill side to catch them.

      The characteristic background chosen by Philippa, however admirable in a photograph, afforded one of the most diabolic rides of my experience. Uphill, over courses of rock masked in furze bushes, round the head of a boggy lake, uphill again through deep and purple heather, over a horrid wall of long slabs half buried in it; past a ruined cabin, with thorn bushes crowding low over the only feasible place in the bank, and at last, the top of the hill, and Michael pulling up to take observations.

      The best pack in the kingdom, schoolmastered by a regiment of whips, could not have precipitated themselves out of covert with more academic precision than had been shown by Flurry Knox's irregulars. They had already crossed the valley below us, and were running up a long hill as if under the conventional tablecloth; their cry, floating up to us, held all the immemorial romance of the chase.

      Michael regarded me with a wild eye; he looked as hot as I felt, which was saying a good deal, and both horses were puffing.

      "He's all the ways for Temple Braney!" he said. "Sure I know him well—that's the pug-nosed fox that's in it these last three seasons, and it's what I wish——"

      (I regret that I cannot transcribe Michael's wish in its own terms, but I may baldly summarise it as a desire minutely and anatomically specified that the hounds were eating Mr. McOstrich.)

      Here the spurs were once more applied to Moses' reeking sides, and we started again, battering down the twists of a rocky lane into the steaming, stuffy valley. I felt as guilty and as responsible for the whole affair as Michael intended that I should feel; I knew that he even laid to my charge the disastrous appearance of the pug-nosed Temple Braney fox. (Whether this remarkable feature was a freak of nature, or of Michael's lurid fancy, I have never been able to ascertain.)

      The valley was boggy, as well as hot, and the deep and sinuous ditch that by courtesy was supposed to drain it, was blind with rushes and tall fronds of Osmunda Regalis fern. Where the landing was tolerable, the take-off was a swamp, where the take-off was sound the landing was feasible only for a frog: we lost five panting minutes, closely attended by horse-flies, before we somehow floundered across and began the ascent of the second hill. To face tall banks,

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