Riding to Hounds for the first time

A crisp winter’s day in the Cotswolds, cloudy breath from the horses nostrils rising in gentle clouds, and sheer terror in my guts as I sat astride the large brown horse that I had been lent for my first ever day’s hunting. Then, before I knew it, the hunt rode off, the clatter of hooves sounding on the drive. The hounds, their tails high with excitement, ran ahead with the red-coated Master on his grey, and off everyone clattered to find a fox to chase and kill on this lovely day.

After much trotting across fields and through streams, there rose the unearthly sound of the hounds baying that they had found the scent. There, in the distance, was a small shape running across a sloping field, with the hounds gaining on it. My horse seemed made of taut springs, and then the horn sounded the command to give chase, and I was lost in the moment. The sound seemed to go though my ribcage and resonate in my diaphragm. Suddenly the baying of the hounds, the sound of the horn, the horse galloping beneath me, clods of earth thrown up by other horses, all became part of a greater whole, bent to the kill. I found myself riding jumps whose height I would never have dared to leap, my whole body electric. Time and space became nothing. Only the energy and the movement, the total absorption into something greater than horse and rider, remained resonating to the sounds of the hounds chasing their kill.

I don’t know how long we galloped.  The fox got away that day. There was to be no blood, or blooding. Decades later I found myself wondering whether I had touched into an atavistic dimension. Had my early ancestors felt this on their hunts?  I went back to my University the next week, to lead a normal life.

Jane Mathison.