Will H. Ogilvie
The Puppy Walker
No members of your hunting community are loved by Masters and huntsman as dearly as the puppy walkers. Each year these intrepid folk accept the arrival of a couple of playful pups to their country home in early summer to teach them their names, walking on lead, a semblance of civilized behavior, and a taste of life outside the kennel.
In a couple of months, after the cuddly innocents have grown into marauding, thieving, hunting fanatics, the puppy walkers cry, “Uncle!” and the huntsman returns to reclaim them. The huntsman will be back the following summer, however, and these generous puppy walkers will smilingly welcome yet another couple of wide-eyed puppies to their property.
So, when your Masters praise the puppy walkers at the annual puppy show and bestow a small trophy upon those who walked the winning hounds, recall this poem by Will H. Ogilvie and give the puppy walkers their due!
Will You Walk a Puppy?
‘Will you walk a puppy?’ the Hunt enquired.
Being sportsmen, we did as the Hunt desired.
And early in June there arrived a man
With an innocent bundle of white and tan.
A fat little Foxhound, bred to the game,
With a rollicking eye and a league-long name,
And he played with a cork at the end of a string;
And walking a puppy was ‘just the thing.’
The Lost Hound
Lost Hound illustration by Jane Gaston from the book of the same name by Robert AshcomYoung Entry---a common phrase used to describe the puppies just entered into the pack. Very soon, most of us will be watching them with a mixture of curiosity and expectation. To the huntsman, they hold the keys to his future successes or disappointments; to the Masters they are the ratification or the despair of their breeding philosophies; to those members of the field who have walked hounds, a few are dear and even exasperating friends known practically from the cradle; to most fieldmembers, they are a curious batch of newcomers from whom much is expected. But imagine entering the pack from the puppies' point of view---suddenly turned loose for the first time midst a bewildering flurry of horses, staff, new sounds, and new sights. After a year of control and repression, the puppy is now free to blossom into the being its up-to-now-stifled genes have urged it to be. How frightening and at the same time how exhilarating! And then the moment when, experimenting with its freedom and following its nose, it suddenly finds itself completely alone for the first time ever. And utterly lost. Here's a sympathetic look by Will Ogilvie.
The winter sunset lit the leafless trees
With gold and crimson as the short day waned;
The wind had ceased its plaintive melodies;
The woodland darkened, and deep silence reigned.
Then sudden from the firs there rose a wail,
A cry that shook the heavens with distress;
A lost hound stood, one foot upon the rail,
Telling the crescent moon his loneliness.
A Fox Away
FHL features poems by the old masters every now and again. This one will raise the hair on the back of your neck!
There are many splendid moments ‘twixt the cradle and the grave
When a man may reach to rapture, but the one that I would crave
Is the moment when a whimper in a crash of music merges
And four hundred hooves are beating like the thunder of the surges
And the pack comes out of covert like the curving of a wave.
