COUNTRY MATTERS The hunt is on and the quarry is… me
*** NEWSHOUNDS The dogs are loose and chasing a trail across the hills. finds out what it’s like when you are the prey
Being chased by bloodhounds and horse riders is supposed to make you run faster, what with the howling and the hoof-thundering and the realisation that your body may as well be a large and slow-moving bag of Pedigree Chum. And yeah, sure: being pursued you do get a thrilling, rhino-startling rush of adrenalin, as would any prey animal mindful of its own deliciousness.
But then – and I am speaking from recent and humiliating experience – the hills get steeper and the wind gets stiffer and the pain in your lungs goes from chasing-a-taxi-shortnessof-breath to Oliver-hardy-trying-tosprint-up-everest.
Not that it matters, because bloodhounds, I had been informed, are much friendlier than foxhounds, and instead of mauling you when they catch you they just lick and cherish you instead. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I had told a friend the night before. “They’ll just lick and cherish me.” “That’s what they told the foxes,” he said darkly.
Mmm. Foxes. There is some overlap between fox-hunting and what I was setting off to do: both entail a mounted chase, led by dogs, of some kind of quarry, and both probably provoke similar excitement in their dressed-to-the-nines human participants. But the main difference – apart from fox-hunting’s illegality – is that chasing a human quarry does not end with a bloody death. Unless the quarry coughs up his intestines because he is that out of shape, but we will get to that.
When it is a human quarry, they call it hunting the clean boot. It is a term that distinguishes the chase from drag hunting, in which the dogs track an artificial scent that, earlier in the day, has been laid by a human. In both instances, the hunters tend to use bloodhounds, which are distant, friendly, droopy-faced cousins of foxhounds. Their intimidating name is apparently derived from their fine bloodlines, rather than their bloodthirstiness.
In summary, drag hunting and cleanboot hunting both seem like laudably benign alternatives to traditional hunting. It was this comparison that prompted Chris Packham, the TV naturalist who co-presents Springwatch, to tell his local hunt, the New Forest Hounds, that if they switched from trail hunting (which uses a genuine fox scent, often involves fox habitats, has been known to result in fox deaths, and has been observed by judges to look an awful lot like illegal foxhunting) then he would serve as their quarry.
Now it would be a huge shame if a national treasure such as Chris Packham were torn to shreds by ravenous hounds, so I was sent to try it instead. I asked the Four Shires Bloodhounds, a friendly group of clean-boot hunters who meet in the Peak District, if I could be their quarry, and by the following Sunday was nervously warming up on Hoe Grange Farm, Derbyshire, with horses milling around me and the howls of bloodhounds audible from a large trailer.
Standing beside me was Patrick Wright, a lean, 37-year-old personal trainer who was dressed in the kind of very serious Lycra you might dress in if, say, you were about to flee from hounds over 20 miles of hills. This is exactly what he was going to do: Wright is one of the Four Shires’ usual quarries, and is so good at fleeing that sometimes they do not even catch him, even when he has run 12 miles just to get to the start of the hunt. All I had to do was keep up with him.
Under a grey sky, Wright was examining a map that had been handed to him by Chris Kane, the master huntsman. The role requires Kane, a thickset 57-year-old possessed of spotless white breeches and a forklift truck of a handshake, to devise a course for Wright to follow.
Today, as usual, the course was going to span 15-20 miles of precipitous Peak District farmland. The distance was split into several “lines”, a term I took to mean sections, the idea being that Kane could stop the line and regroup the hunt when the terrain got dangerous. Only Kane and Wright get to see the map. After all, if the dogs saw it the whole exercise would be pointless. Wright and I had a short head start, and we set off along a muddy path. I immediately stumbled into a puddle so muddy that my foot sprang out of my trainer. Swearing, I squished my newly muddy foot back into it and followed Wright into Hoe Grange’s big green fields.
The farmer had removed the sheep, but had not reckoned on the plodding apparition of a lamb for the slaughter. While Wright was working hard to put the hounds off the scent, running in Keplerian orbit around my labouring frame, all I could muster was a geodesic line from my entry point of each field to the closest possible exit.
The wind shifted direction and suddenly I could hear the distant howling of the bloodhounds. “They’ll have set off now,” said Wright helpfully. More muddy fields, all of which seemed to be so steep as to be almost vertical. At the brow of the latest hill stood David Brown, who is the farmer who owns Hoe Grange, and a marshal with a quad bike. This was the end of the first line. I looked down and saw dogs swirling through a gate and into the bottom corner of the field like a swarm of bees.
By this point I was beyond exhausted. The dogs, 16 of them, galloped towards me. The riders, in similar number, followed. Soon they were upon us. Defeated, I held out my hand to the dogs for them to eat as an appetiser – and they stopped! Some of them rolled on the ground to have their bellies scratched, others came to be petted. Suddenly they were no longer a pack of starving wolves but a litter of merry puppies. I had shown myself to have the athletic endurance of a soufflé, and for this reason excused myself from the rest of the chase. Brown and I walked back to the farmhouse, and were soon followed by the hunters,
(below left)
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