ON A RECENT SATURDAY, I attended a brief memorial service for Fred Stone, the late, longtime master of the Wolver Beagles, a private pack in Middleburg, Virginia, that has hunted the rolling Loudoun County farmland since 1913. Fred, who died at 72 this past March, had been master for some three decades.
Gathered in a grove at the corner of his property in Middleburg, there were about 50 people in attendance, as well as two old girls from the pack, Hurry and Sapphire, both now retired from hunting, and standing patiently by on their leashes. Members of Fred’s family offered stories, and one of the new joint masters read a letter to Fred–purportedly from Hurry and Sapphire, and from Spiteful, who preferred to stay in the kennel–about their years of hunting the surrounding countryside.
This was, of course, a decidedly whimsical gesture; but it lightened an otherwise somber mood and, I have to admit, was both funny and touching. At one point the master pretended she couldn’t decipher a phrase, and lowered the page to hound-eye level for translation. The two matronly beagles moved forward in unison, and seemed to be peering closely at their handiwork.
I should like to have written such a letter to Fred Stone myself–a thought that, no doubt, has occurred to more than one person attending a funeral. I have been a beagler for many years, and it was Fred who kindly invited me into his pack and patiently taught me the rudiments of an ancient, and uncommon, pastime. I am not ashamed to say that one of the prouder days of my life was when Fred anointed me a whipper-in of the pack, entitling me to wear the beagler’s dark green woollen hunting jacket with the characteristic “buff collar [with] light-blue piping” of the Wolver.
Hunting rabbits with hounds is an ancient sport, and originated in England. But the stylized beagling I know–with hunt gear, wood-and-leather whips, horns, and strict choreography–is, perhaps, a few centuries old, and was exported to the United States in Victorian times. There are now about 32 recognized packs in America, mostly concentrated in the Middle Atlantic states and upper South.
Once a year, in early November, the National Beagle Club holds trials at its headquarters, Institute Farm in Aldie, Virginia, where the packs converge and compete on the basis of form and success in flushing out game. The beaglers sleep in tiny cabins, owned by the packs, circling the manor house and, at the end of the trials, there is a riotous dinner where the cups and ribbons are awarded.
There are two distinguishing facts about beagling. The first is that the members of the hunt follow the hounds on foot, not on horseback; and the second is that the object of the enterprise is not the kill–which, in any event, is rare–but the hunt.
Admittedly, chasing rabbits across hill and dale while encased in foxhunters’ garb gives beagling, at first blush, a certain Monty Python quality. But horses are impractical in these circumstances. A beagle’s range is much narrower than a foxhound’s, and rabbits are prone to course through woodland, or dive under hedgerows, or hop along stone fences. The hunter is obliged to plunge into thick brush, splash across streams, roll over barbed wire, and, strictly speaking, run where no sensible horse would go.
The other point is more subjective. Like a Thurber cartoon, beagling is something you either get or you don’t. The pack, usually a dozen hounds or so, sets out with the master and four whippers-in while a gallery of spectators (“the field”) follows at a respectful distance. The master blows a small copper horn to move the beagles along, while the whips, jogging at the four corners of the pack, strive to keep the hounds together in a roughly rectangular position.
If a whip spies a rabbit (“a view”), he cries “Tally-ho!”–I’m not kidding–and points the way for the master while steering the beagles in the general direction of the hare. When the hounds catch the scent, they are off in pursuit–across the field, over the hill, through the stand of trees–ears flapping, tails wagging, and singing in the unmistakable baying voice of the hound that is music to a countryman’s ears.
I confess that I am scarcely the most capable of whips, and there are moments, especially when bounding up those lovely, but steep, Virginia hillsides, when I wonder if I will live to see the end of the hunt. But in those moments is there anything more blissfully remote from political Washington, or more soothing to a middle-aged suburbanite?
For those reasons, I was thankful to Fred Stone, and glad to count myself among his friends when his ashes were strewn to the wind. The local Episcopal priest recited a prayer, somebody blew on the horn, and Hurry and Sapphire cocked their heads as if ready to run.
–Philip Terzian
