People

 Linda Armbrust, MFH, High Peak Harriers (UK), leads her field. / Jim Meads photo

Years have passed since I was resident and MFH of two hunts in England. Now, as a married and ex-MFH in Virginia, I reflect on my fourteen years of English hunting. All the dark moments—rain, rain, and more rain, difficult farmers, and monumental mistakes—have faded now, leaving me with thoughts of good friends, outstanding hunts, great hedges and walls, and lovely hounds.

Horseman on a US Cavalry mount at Fort Riley, Kansas

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Douglas Lees photo 2019

Masters, staff, and members of the Casanova Hunt (VA) are proud and pleased to celebrate Tommy Lee Jones’s fiftieth season as huntsman. Tommy Lee has carried the horn for this venerable 110-year-old sporting establishment for nearly half of its existence—a remarkable feat made possible by a lengthy and talented career in the saddle from a young age.

Growing up, Tommy Lee was fortunate to have hunted with many fine Virginia huntsmen, among them Messrs Melvin and Albert Poe, Andrew Branham, and Duke Leech. While hunting with Casanova in 1967, Tommy Lee was appointed whipper-in to the Irish huntsman, Captain Ian Benson. When Captain Benson returned to Ireland in 1970, the horn was passed to Tommy Lee.

Huntsman Tommy Lee Jones and hounds of the Casanova Hunt / Douglas Lees photo

This season Tommy Lee Jones begins his fiftieth year as huntsman for the Casanova Hunt (VA). The popular Virginia horseman has played a leading role at every level of hunting and showing and possesses the ability to educate others through his writing skills.

Tommy Lee was the first recipient of the MFHA’s Ian Milne Huntsman’s Award in 2012, and next year he will be inducted into the Huntsman’s Room at the Museum of Hounds and Hunting.

American western horseman Bob Long wins eleventh running of the Mongol Derby. / Sarah Farnsworth photo

There are crazy things to do. And then there’s the Mongol Derby.

Foxhunters have been known to compete in the Mongol Derby, as if the post-and-rail line fences in Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire country, the wire in New Zealand, the banks and ditches of Ireland, or the hedges of the English Shires aren’t enough of a challenge. The Mongol Derby, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the world’s longest and toughest horse race. This year forty-five men and women from eleven countries gathered to race one thousand kilometers (621 miles) across Mongolia on semi-wild horses.

Finishing strongly, seventy-year-old Robert Long, originally from Cheyenne, Wyoming but now living in Boise, Idaho, was the undisputed winner of this year’s race. Long reached the finish at 11:03 am Mongolian time on August 14, 2019, seven days after the starting gun. Competitors will continue to cross the finish line for another three days.

Alexander Henry Higginson, MFHAn Old Sportsman’s Memories, the autobiography written by A. Henry Higginson and J. Stanley Reeve tells the story of a proper Bostonian, Harvard class of 1898, who turned his back on a life of commerce, finance, and philanthropy—the route traditionally followed by New England men such as he. Smitten by the sport of foxhunting to the exclusion of all else, and with the support of his indulgent father, A. Henry Higginson followed his dream: a life of foxhunting.

His father, Major Henry Lee Higginson, more than fulfilled the family’s responsibilities to his community by his own philanthropy. The elder Higginson had dreamt of being a musician in his younger years, but Puritan Boston expected other things from her sons, and so he became a businessman as was expected. In time, he founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra, however, and was its earliest administrator.

He organized the corporation that built Symphony Hall, the first auditorium designed in accordance with scientifically derived acoustical principles. It is, as a result, widely regarded as one of the top concert halls in the world. Interestingly, with all the architectural flourishes of the period that architects McKim, Mead & White could bring to their creation in the year 1900, the structure displays only one composer’s name upon a large shield mounted on a frieze centered above the stage—Beethoven. There are other smaller shields upon the frieze framing the stage, but they are still blank! Boston is a careful and thoughtful old city.

Huntsman Steve Farrin, parading Amwell Valley hounds at the Pennsylvania National Horse Show (2013).

It’s time for our annual report on the recent moves of huntsmen across North America. The huntsman is my hero. From the time we mount up and for the few hours that follow, it is he or she most directly responsible for the day’s sport. How the huntsman has bred, trained, deployed, and communicated with his troops—the hounds—has everything to do with the satisfaction of our day in the field.

The moves have been numerous this season, and, in a two cases, we have experienced whippers-in finally achieving their dream of a pack of their own to hunt. We’ll catch up with Alasdair Storer, Andrew Bozdan, Kathryn Butler, Stephen Farrin, Danny Kerr, Emily Melton, and Timothy Michel.

The Master and huntsman of arguably the most exclusive and storied foxhunting pack in the world—the Duke of Beaufort’s—looks ahead after a forty-five-year career carrying the horn. Captain Ian Farquhar is not encouraged by what he sees.

From his comfortable farmhouse on the Highgrove estate of the Prince of Wales, filled with photos, paintings, and artifacts that could be said to mock his earlier years of untrammelled post-war sport, Farquhar and his beautiful wife, Pammie-Jane—herself a noted horsewoman—contemplate their upcoming move to retirement in the West Country. Just fifteen years ago, like a knife in the heart, a despised piece of legislation, the Hunting Act, was passed by his nation.

Eric Myer wears the colors of the Genesee Valley Hunt (NY) early in the season.  /   Karen Kandra Wenzel photo

Eric Myer, DVM, is currently in his sixty-sixth season of foxhunting. And not just with one hunt. No, no. If that were the case, the hunting season would be far too short to suit him.

At eighty-two, Eric begins his season in mid-July up north near Rochester, New York with the Genesee Valley Hunt. His wife Martha has roots in Geneseo, and the couple has a summer farm there. Then, in mid-October, when the Piedmont Fox Hounds are well into their cubhunting season down south in Virginia, Eric and Martha return to their Boyce farm in the Shenandoah Valley.

Huntsman Ros Balding leads hounds and field of the Toronto and North York Hunt  /  Catherine Davies photo
Rosslynn Balding is sitting on a couch with her wool-sock-clad feet tucked comfortably beneath her. The professional huntsman has a bundle of handwritten notes in her right hand, which she keeps reminding herself, aloud, to refer to, but which she mostly keeps forgetting to check. She admits to being nervous. She has never been interviewed by a journalist before and is wary, in a most open, friendly way that, despite assurances to the contrary, I am an undercover, coyote-loving writer who has come to a 120-acre property, just south of the village of Creemore, Ontario, to blow the lid off an arcane blood sport.