The works of Irish sporting journalist Stanislaus Lynch were published in and around the middle of twentieth century. Earlier this month Foxhunting Life re-published a short story from his book, Echoes of the Hunting Horn. We heard from so many readers who enjoyed it, we decided to re-publish another.
One reader in the UK wrote, “I enjoyed it so much I bought the book from a second hand book shop, and it’s lovely!” Another reader forwarded it to a friend in Ireland who actually remembers hunting with Lynch on a day he had a frightening fall. We’ve included her account at the end of this story.
“A wave of dappled fury” / Illustration by Olive Whitmore
There are some delightful occasions in outdoor life when immediate happenings are so engrossingly interesting that any misbehaviour of the elements is completely overlooked, and one forgets one is being slowly, but surely, soaked to the skin. A coat-collar may be turned up, the action being more mechanical than protective. The shelter of a high hedge may even be sought, but high hedges seldom exist on a bleak mountain-side, as the mountain wind rarely allows tall whitethorns to add syncopation to the weird monotony of its rhythm. One can only stay still, forget the down-pour, and watch hounds.
The Master has just put them in. The small hazel covert battles its way up the mountain-side until the wind and the impoverished soil thin it to scattered clusters of dwarfed saplings that are soon swallowed up in the more hardy greenness of the gorse. There are great big clumps of it, old and seasoned, struggling upwards, ever upwards, using grey rugged boulders as stepping-stones in their efforts to reach the summit; efforts that are futile, for the purple-brown heather appears and completes the final stage of the ascent. On the rain-swept dome, flung in clear-cut silhouette against the very heavens, a scarlet-clad rider sits motion-less on his horse: the whipper-in on outpost duty.
Hounds are working up through the hazels; the Master is with them, chatting to them playfully, praising them, encouraging them. A one-sided conversation undoubtedly, but its effects are so obvious, one cannot help thinking that a word of kindness, even to God’s
dumb creatures, is rarely effort wasted. A hare appears with startling suddenness, flits along a sheep track and vanishes in its windings. A newly-entered puppy, fascinated by the bobbing scut, throws his tongue, gives chase, stops, then slinks away ashamedly as the Master rates him angrily for his breach of foxhound etiquette.
Hounds are now up in the gorse. A few couple have even reached the heather. The Master turns right-handed, across the face of the mountain, hounds above, about, and below him, executing an intelligent combing movement and giving this big fox-sanctuary a perfect draw. Suddenly the whipper-in on top lifts his cap in the air, but yet there is not a sound from him. The Master halts his horse, stands in his stirrups, watching intently. The cap moves in a right-handed arc. Two or three hounds feather keenly; none of them speak, scent is apparently somewhat stale, possibly the line left by a fox going into covert earlier in the morning. The quarry must have jumped up a long way in front of hounds, warned no doubt by the thoughtless note of the hare-hunting puppy, for the whipper-in leaves his post, gallops, trots and slithers down a sheep track, pops over a low stone wall; on, down again, scrambles across a gorse-covered bank into a sour-looking field, halts his horse and shatters the stillness of a rain-drenched countryside with a soul-stirring “Tally-Ho!”
Who bothers about the rain ? Who cares about wet knees and soaking elbows ? Who worries over forgotten raincoats and resultant chills? Who could feel cold having heard that blood-firing war-cry? There’s the horn! Sharp, staccato, glorious notes. Hounds come streaking from all parts of the mountainside in answer to its summons. Dashing headlong from the scattered rocks through the purple-brown carpet of the heather; on, downwards, flinging along with an utter disregard for gorse-bush thorn pricks; jumping the low whin-clumps, dashing through the taller growths. On, racing on, to the horn they know so well. The Master sends his horse full tilt along a rough pathway, his hoof beats adding a merry rattle to the sharp twang of his “Gone Away” horn music. He is heading for that anaemic-looking field where the whipper-in saw Reynard breaking covert and where that young member of the hunt staff, in his anxiety to get hounds on, seems determined on breaking his own vocal chords.
Riders jam down their hats, slippery reins are gathered in a determined grip, restive horses are spoken to soothingly, foot-followers race to better vantage-points. With a bound, the Master is over a big bank and waits beside his whipper-in. The barren-looking field is no longer uninviting. A wave of dappled fury comes surging over its boundary wall. The invasion swings left-handed, silently, towards the two huntsmen, bursts into full cry, and the bleak, rain-sodden mountain-side becomes a vivid landscape, changed from dreariness to loveliness by the glorious thrill of a huntsman’s “Tally-Ho!”
Posted February 20, 2015
Michael Sinclair-Smith, a friend near Montreal, forwarded our first Stanislaus Lynch story, “The Worst Hunt on Record,” to his friend Marjorie Smithwick Quarton, in County Tipperary, Ireland. A writer in her own right (Breakfast the Night Before: Recollections of an Irish Horse Dealer), Marjorie remembers hunting with Stanislaus Lynch.
I gratefully acknowledge from my own experience that, as a rule, visiting journalists are given good horses to hunt—no Master wants a bad report of a day’s hunting with his/her pack—but I also recall two occasions when that rule fell to pieces! Marjorie recalled one such day for Stanislaus, and here’s how she tells it:
“In the distant past I remember Stanislaus Lynch and his articles. He was always given the best horse possible to put a journalist on. One day near my home, Stanislaus was mounted on an enormous bay mare, well over seventeen hands. She could and did march through hedges and climb up and down banks, but jumping wasn’t her thing. Finally we reached a turf bank. This was a place where the turf had been mechanically cut until the seam ran out. The end would be marked by a perpendicular bank, cut straight up and down about twelve feet high and sometimes more. On the take-off side there would be a lowish grassy bank. On the landing was mud.
“It was one of the worst falls I have ever seen. I was ahead, having bypassed the danger, and I looked back and saw the big mare rearing straight up on end on the top of the bank, with Stanislaus, bottom in the air and arms clasped round her neck. The mare came over backwards onto him in the cutaway bog. By some miracle, neither was much hurt. Stanislaus was covered with mud and so was one side of the mare. It took a good hour in the pub to comfort and encourage S into writing something not too damning.”