Graham Buston and the Bear Creek Hounds in Georgia / Alicia Frese photo
When this season wraps up, Bear Creek Hounds huntsman Graham V. Buston will bid Georgia good-bye and head to Clarke County, Virginia as the new huntsman for the Blue Ridge Hunt. While he is excited about the position, the leave-taking comes with some regrets—the wonderful friends he and his wife, Sheri, have made; some excellent hunting territory in Georgia; and that he will not get to hunt the results of the breeding program he started.
“I’ve been here two seasons,” he says, “and it takes five to see the results of breeding. I had looked forward to hunting the pups we bred.”
Buston, who never hunted a coyote until he came to Bear Creek Hounds in 2013, brought a few of his own Old English hounds with him. He introduced the bloodline into the Bear Creek crossbred pack, and those are the puppies he will leave behind.
But bloodlines are one of the attractions for him at Blue Ridge, whose hounds are primarily modern English. That and the plentiful foxes in a country that reminds him of Ireland. When the Bustons traveled to Virginia to meet the Masters, Linda Armbrust, Anne McIntosh, and Brian Ferrell, Graham spotted foxes crossing the roads during a tour of the territory. While Buston admired the challenge of hunting coyotes, he is looking forward to chasing the wily Reynard again.
“The coyote hunt was a different experience,” Buston says of his first time on coyote. “It takes a good pack of hounds to catch a coyote because he runs so far. When a fox gets tired, he will go to ground, but a tired coyote will run until he is accounted for or gets away.”
He recalled a hunt in Wadley, Alabama, where hounds ran a grey male coyote for three hours in massive loops that gradually got smaller as the coyote tired; he was accounted for in a creek.
Buston served as huntsman for both the County Limerick and Waterford Foxhounds in Ireland before he came to the Bear Creek Hounds of Moreland, Georgia, where Sheri assisted him as first whipper-in. At the time, the Bustons wasted no time in introducing some new practices to the Bear Creek kennel routine. Hounds were exercised every day, twice a day—on foot, bicycle, or horseback. And a visitor to the kennels might find four-legged creatures in the hound pens that bleat and baa instead of bark. Goats and sheep were introduced into the kennel yards to familiarize young hounds with livestock.
Buston grew up in the heart of Ireland’s hunting country in County Limerick. Although hunting is a tradition in his family, he is the first Buston to become a professional huntsman. “Every day, you could stick your head out the door and see a pack of hounds hunting,” says Buston. County Limerick is home to over a dozen packs, plus uncounted farmer packs, and when he wasn’t hunting on horseback as a child, Buston was hunting on foot.
“My family was keen for hunting, and I always had the passion. I always had working terriers.”
In 1998, Lord Harrington, Master of the County Limerick Foxhounds, asked Buston’s father if Graham could help with the hunt’s Old English hounds. The story is that Graham was apprenticed to a cabinet maker, but one day when the hounds came by, he left the woodworking and followed the pack. He became first whipper-in to huntsman Bernard McCoy in 1998. When Dick Chapman became huntsman at Limerick the next season, he taught the avid Buston a great deal about kennel management, the importance of road work, the value of bloodlines, and the cultivation of good manners in hounds.
Buston became first whipper-in at the Limerick, a position he held from 1998-2003. From 2003-2009 he was huntsman for the County Waterford Foxhounds, and in 2010 he returned to the Limerick as huntsman. Buston recalls the honor of being asked to parade the Limerick hounds in the 2011 Royal Dublin Horse Show’s Parade of Champions, and talks of hounds he showed at the annual National Hound Show at Stradbally Hall, County Laois, for nine years. His hounds won the Robin DeVere Hunt Memorial Cup five times for overall best Old English dog/bitch class. One hound, Ali ’04, which Buston bred while in County Waterford, won the cup three of those times, and Ali’s sons followed in their sire’s paw-steps, winning it twice.
Next to hunting, breeding hounds is Buston’s passion. He brought two couple of Old English hounds of his favorite championship bloodlines—two dogs and two bitches—with him to Georgia. One bitch, Graceful, whelped seven pups within six weeks of her arrival at the Bear Creek kennels. Buston quickly realized that his biggest challenge as a newcomer in the United States was his unfamiliarity with bloodlines on this side of the Atlantic.
Another of his challenges was the use of tracking collars, which he had never used before. In Ireland, Buston would keep a carpet in the hound trailer, and if a hound was lost when it was time to return to the kennels, he would leave the carpet piece behind. When he returned later, the errant hound was usually waiting by the piece, drawn by familiar scents.
He recalled one hound in Ireland who, if the fox wasn’t accounted for, would keep hunting. She always found her way home, once from twenty-eight miles away. “They have their own GPS,” he says.
Sheri and Graham BustonBuston’s goals are to provide good sport to Blue Ridge Hunt members and to increase his knowledge of foxhound bloodlines. Virginia gains not only a talented huntsman in Buston, but also a British Horse Society-certified riding instructor in his wife, Sheri. Born in Canada, she moved to Ireland in 2001 to get international experience and increase her eventing and teaching skills.
“I gave myself three months there,” she says, “but it grew into twelve years and a husband.” And a knowledge of foxhunting. Growing up in Montreal, Sheri Buston admits that all she once knew about hunting was from her Pony Club manual. She met Graham at the Clonshire Equestrian Centre where she was an instructor and began whipping-in to him when he was with the County Waterford Foxhounds.
Graham V. Buston History
1998-2003: First whipper-in, Co. Limerick Foxhounds
2003-2009: Huntsman, Co. Waterford Foxhounds
2009-2010: Huntsman, Stonehall Harriers
2010-2013: Huntsman, Co. Limerick Foxhounds
2013-2015: Huntsman, Bear Creek Hounds
Posted February 19, 2015