Martha Woodham

See You at Second Horses, Barclay Rives, Aterlerix Press, New York, 2014, Paperback, illustrated, 184 pages, $13.50, available at retail outlets including Horse Country Saddlery, Warrenton, VirginiaThe foxes! Oh, the foxes! When Barclay Rives undertook a marathon of foxhunting in 1999, when he went out with nine English hunts in ten days, it seemed like there was a fox popping out of every covert.

Rives, an honorary whipper-in for the Keswick and Bull Run Hunts (VA), writes about his English sporting adventure in See You at Second Horses, a delightful read that puts us galloping behind some great packs in the glory days before the infamous Hunting Act of 2004 banned hunting with hounds in the traditional manner in England and Wales.

Rives is an avid hunter who once hunted one hundred days a season, sometimes going out with Keswick in the morning and Bull Run in the afternoon. Saying he was gung-ho is an understatement. He jumped at the chance to join his friends Grosvenor and Rosie Merle-Smith to hunt with packs dating back to the 1700s: the Quorn (twice), the Cottesmore, the Fernie, and others, including a foot pack—the High Peak Harriers—after rabbits.

To Carry the Horn: The Hounds of Annwyn by Karen Myers, Perkunas Press, Paperback, 404 pp, $17.99It’s too easy to sum up To Carry the Horn: The Hounds of Annwn as “Harry Potter goes foxhunting,” but for adults who grew up on the Harry Potter series—or who used to sneak to read their children’s books—author Karen Myers has created a grown-up fantasy for you.

Myers takes readers on a fascinating ride into a parallel world where she weaves figures from Welsh mythology into a well-written tale that involves stag hunting, a huntsman’s murder, and a large case of greed and envy. Huntsman George Talbot Traherne, a whipper-in with the Rowanton Hunt in Virginia, is catapulted into the Otherworld when he takes a tumble during a foxhunt on a mysterious estate. When he remounts, George finds himself in the midst of a stag hunt where the huntsman, Iolo, has just been murdered.

Flying Change: A Year of Racing and Family and Steeplechasing by Patrick Smithwick, Chesapeake Book Company, 2012, 360 pages, $30.00If you can avoid disabling injury, horseback riding is a sport that many enjoy for a lifetime. All of us have heard anecdotal tales of people who ride—and even foxhunt—up into their seventies and eighties.

With Baby Boomers aging, those stories will become more prevalent, although many of us may be opting for the dressage arena instead of the hunt meet...or the race track.

Author Patrick Smithwick decided to meet growing older head on. He challenged himself at age forty-six to ride in the Maryland Hunt Cup, a four-mile timber race over twenty-two solidly built fences that are not for the faint of heart. It is the world’s stiffest timber race.