(Thanksgiving, 2007)
The Bath County Hunt (VA) can be an exercise in sedate foxhunting: extraordinarily beautiful, particularly toward the closing days of autumn, but often a somnambulant snooze. Surely, there is sport at Bath County, even good sport, but no one expects the thrilling pace of a mid-winter foxhunt in Orange County territory. In truth, Bath County is expected to be relaxed, somewhat slower paced.
No one is complaining. Three days at Melvin and Peggy Poe’s rustic lodge at Fassifern Farm, nestled against the side of the valley along the banks of the Jackson River, we dine family style, passing the peas while sharing the kinds of stories that will one day be included in the history of the foxhunting in America.
Fox hunters can convene here, feel an uncanny familiarity as if they had known one another all their lives, share in a drink around the fireplace, and go out for a walk at sunset to inspect the hounds in the kennel out back. All the while Melvin Poe—the legend—walks around in his slippers, relating well traveled tales.
One Man’s Vision
George Ohrstrom had purchased the territory as a private estate deep in the rolling hills around Warm Springs, Virginia, a place that had caught Thomas Jefferson’s imagination in 1818 when he began his rides to the baths in the tiny village. In time, George had invited so many neighbors and friends down to Bath County that it had become a tradition, and when Melvin Poe finally retired from his remarkable career as huntsman for Orange County Hunt, and Peter Winants had written a book in his celebration, and when George had passed on, and so many had become supporters of the National Sporting Library he had founded in Middleburg, the annual pilgrimage to Bath County and to the family’s country house was now fixed in the hunting heritage of Virginia.
To those who have had the opportunity to be part of this experience we happily accept that it is not the best of America’s foxhunting countries: the territory is modest in size, though exquisite; Melvin is nearly ninety; his hearing is going a bit; and the hounds are castoffs from other hunts and not necessarily stellar. The best hound, for example, was a gimp with a bad forepaw, but one who would speak with a voice to fill a valley.
Melvin’s niece, Clydetta, faithfully rides just behind him, an extra set of ears to complement his eyes, and together they constitute the world-class huntsman Melvin has been. It is under these constrained conditions that some of the finest foxhunters converge on Fassifern Farm in Bath County, not expecting the best of foxhunting, but instead anticipating the finest of company. The experience is always memorable.
Shooting the Gorge
This morning, Ray Moffet, Mary and Peter Winants, and I tacked up in the old barn and then crossed the Jackson River below the barn to meet the others at the new barn across the valley: Gus and Mary Anne Schickedanz from Toronto, Leslie and Danny Hazel, Jacqueline Ohrstrom and her grandson, and John Coles, MFH of the Orange County Hunt and Field Master at Bath County.
John called for hounds, and Melvin moved the mixed pack off at 9:00 a.m. sharp. We crossed a dry creek bed to the west and rose up the back of the hill that reached toward Bacova village. Melvin cast the hounds into the long covert to the north and entered the woods behind them. Some of us jumped the coop into the grove of trees and then back out again when it appeared they would run down the wood line to the west and come out at the bottom. Melvin stayed with them chirping in his characteristic, high shrill animal voice, encouraging them from behind. The rest of us went back up to the highest point on the hill and stopped. With a view down the long slope, we waited to see where the action would lead.
Looking down the long, steep drop into the bottom below, John startled us all with a “tallyho!” Sure enough, the hounds had got up a fox at the very bottom, a fabulous fox that started his ascent up the long flank across from us. I don’t believe any of us, in all the years of foxhunting that might be shared among us, had ever seen what was about to unfold. Viewings of foxes are as short lived as they are infrequent. We were about to view a hunted fox for nearly two minutes. This, the second fastest land animal after the Cheetah, loped up the long slope, single mindedly heading for the top of the ridge and then a course of action beyond it. In amazement, our small field watched him work his way from small covert to covert, cantering along with a characteristic straight backed posture, from stem to stern.
When he had nearly reached the top of the rise, the hounds burst from the woods and into the open, far down below. The lead hound, our gimp, was speaking loudly. Dead on Reynard’s trail, he was moving quickly following the scent in the moist grass. After about twenty seconds he lost the line. We could see that he had dropped below it toward the V where the two sides of the hills met in the middle. Since he worked only on scent and never by sight, he would have to recover the line his own way. It was then we were witness to the method of a hunter. He swept back up at 180 degrees to the forward motion of the fox and came across the line once again. His logic was so apparent, so effective, perhaps obvious to the huntsman. To the rest of us who are normally several horses deep behind the MFH, who, himself, is also some distance behind the huntsman, who, himself, is still a bit back from the hounds, this was a thrilling sight.
John sat back in his saddle with a broad grin on his face.
“Will ya look at that.”
The rest of us were speechless. We were riveted on the archaic spectacle. It could not have mattered whether one was a hunter or an animal rights devotee. Something as old as time was unfolding before our eyes. We were mesmerized.
Finally, Melvin, eighty-seven years old and looking like a lad, came out of the woods and cantered up behind the hounds. As soon as he passed us we awoke from our spell and leapt into action. In a flash we were in motion and over the coop at the top of the hill and down the trail on the other side.
As we approached the mouth of the gorge through which the Warm Springs River was flowing, the lead hounds opened again with great enthusiasm, striking on the west side of the river. The gorge opened high and steep like a great taco shell. At once hounds scrambled up from the water’s edge and started to climb the increasingly vertical flanks. The deep green and slate gray hues of the shale ledges, covered with sphagnum, scrub and tenacious trees, unfurled before us in an iridescent autumnal palette. The sycamores and birches jumped out as if we were wearing 3-D glasses, highlighted in greenish yellows and deep maroons, the maples etched in shimmering vermilion against the granite gray back drop of ragged stone, luminescent, agitated with water moving across it. The hounds flowed across the sharp flanks, at once perfectly camouflaged and then strikingly visible, like whitewater flashing in a rapids. At the same time, our small field of riders mounted the east ridge along a rapidly rising track, moving up the sides of the gorge in parallel with the hounds, at eye level on the opposite wall.
The sliver of slowly moving river dropped away quickly as hounds and field rose to the tops of their precipitous ridges, as if being lifted with the fog from the valley floor, and began moving at a fast clip high along its sharp shoulders. Although we were very far from them at this point, meaning that we would have to descend to the river far below and then climb back up the opposite slopes to reach them on the west flank, we could, it appeared to us, almost reach out and touch the hounds as they worked their way along the cliffs and as we rose with them on the eastern ridge. It was as if hounds and horses were both aloft, weightless, suspended among the trees and rock ledges, horses snorting, hooves clambering against shale, hounds speaking an animated story line.
For a moment we came to a check near the zenith of our climb, the huntsman moving out to an overlook where he could listen and scan the gorge north and then south to get a fix on the progress of hounds. Turning to the Field Master, he spoke in cropped words.
“They’re still movin’ on ahead.”
He sat back into a canter and slipped off down the long downward gradient, the field directly on his heels. Like a roller coaster, the field’s long haul up the ridge, building in excited momentum was now about to let go, the energy releasing, parabolically, transformed into a decent at a splendid pace down a great arc of narrow trail distinguished by its exposure on one side that dropped off, dangerously, just inches from the horses hooves. In minutes, we were back at river level running on the opposite side of the water from the hounds, about to converge at a crossing.
The fox would continue into a few more coverts and connecting fields before it evaporated into the ether, unaccounted. The field would push on, the huntsman casting the hounds to the south. However, it was in this just-past thirty-minute burst of hunt ritual, when humans, hounds, horses, forests, and fields whirl together in their nearly preordained dance, that we came to understand why we had returned to Fassifern Farm in Bath County. For these few moments, we traveled back in time tracing our way along well told story lines, to recreate, to draw upon an ancient heritage that assembles us to listen, understand, protect and preserve this archaic purpose. Beneath the rumbling surface of great sport—pounding hooves, swift paws, elusive scent, steaming bodies—there is a kind of meaning that releases and reveals itself patiently with each outing. We are enriched by it.