Exmoor mobilised
Charles Moore
We had a good opening meet in the Vale of Tears Hunt (VT). We ran hard, killed two and a half brace, and our MP fell off. He had quite rightly decided to prevent a by-election at this trying time for the Tory party by lurching sideways to avoid a branch.
I shall leave fox-hunting for this week, though, and move the scene to the Crown Inn in Exford, in the heart of the country of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds.
In the parlour after breakfast is a tall, thin figure who reminds me of a John Buchan novel. He is perfectly dressed, with a long riding coat, a stockpin with a deer's tush set in it, and supremely polished boots. Too perfectly dressed, in fact. His short-cropped hair is suspiciously neat; the tops of his boots, rather than the regulation mahogany colour, are almost red; he looks out severely behind rimless spectacles tied on with a chain. Yes, this faintly sinister figure is a foreigner — obviously a criminal mastermind, masquerading, for purposes of world domination, as an English gentleman. He turns out to be a shy Austrian dentist from the Tyrol, who spends all his holidays in some form of English hunting. He describes his previous day with the Devon and Somerset in rain and fog as 'very horrible'.
To one who has never hunted deer before (me), the meet that morning is like every other, only more so. There is the same weird assortment of the urban on a jaunt and the rural in their element, the nervous children well protected by crash helmets and body armour and the wizened old men, often limping or bent through previous injury, who grin from under the angle of their mouldy bowler hats. Compared with the VT, there are a lot of people — about 120 mounted at the meet, with many more sliding in later in the day. Crowded into the great Ann Mallalieu's farmhouse yard. the clans have gathered. This isn't a leisure activity, this is Exmoor mobilised.
It is the hunting itself that is really different, Fox-hunting, on the whole, has tactics, but little strategy. You find the fox; if you can, you chase him, and if you kill or lose him, you look for another one. Stag-hunting has a grand plan. The night before, the harbourer has found a stag suitable for hunting. As we move off, the tufters, the elite hounds, are separated from the main body of the pack. They go ahead to identify the stag in question. It is only when they have done so and are hunting him that the rest of the pack is laid on.
And whereas the hunt for a fox will generally be sporadic, and runs often short, the search in stag-hunting can take all day, and never more than one stag will be killed. The stag is chased until bayed by hounds, and then shot through the head by a marksman.
On this clear day, though, with every October leaf glowing, we spend the whole morning in a pursuit that fails, and only begin the final hunt at to o'clock.
Other people's fear is a funny thing. Because they are out on the moor, staghunters never jump. They therefore speak with awe of the bold jumping exploits of us fox-hunters. We, on the other hand, are terrified by the gallops down the slippery steeps into the combes, and by bogs. The bravest of our visiting party gets herself separated from our group. We start seriously to wonder where she is. Eventually she canters up, muddy and almost distraught. She was thrown into a bog: she didn't mind that, but she was upset when her horse started to sink. There she was all alone, out of ear-shot of the posses hurrying hither and thither as if in some 17th
century battle. Luckily, a man on a quad bike found her in time. If he had not, the horse might have given up the struggle. When they do this, apparently, the only way to give them the will to live is to bite their ears.
At last the stag is killed, right down beside Exford itself. I don't see it, only hear the hang from the stable yard where it is bayed, and then see the dead beast dragged into the field, where it is eviscerated, as deer always should be as soon as dead. Whisky is drunk. At the end, as at the beginning, the community celebrates. Teenage boys zoom up on noisy motorbikes and buy ice-creams from the van that has followed all afternoon.
Professor Patrick Bateson, whose report on stag-hunting caused the National Trust, without consultation, to ban it on its land, said that the effect of the chase was cruel. He described the red deer as 'sedentary', one of the odder words ever used about this swift, alert, noble creature. But I did notice that, compared with the Scottish Highlands, where I have stalked red deer with a rifle, the beasts on Exmoor seem placid. Without the threat of the bullet, they seem to regard horse, hounds and people as part of the furniture of the moor, They do not live in fear, though presumably they die in it.
But even if Prof. Bateson is right, we come up against the great conundrum of conservation — the good of the individual versus the good of the species. Each stag may suffer as he is chased, but if no stags were hunted, they would all but disappear from Exmoor. When the Trust banned hunting on the Holnicote estate, the deer count there fell from 429 in February 1998 to 163 in September 1999. Ted Hughes wrote about this shortly before he died. Deer are considered as something better than vermin or meat for money only by the co-operative culture that hunting brings, the strange but true fact that people care for what they kill. He called it 'the spell of the hunt'.
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