The Hunt's Away For much of the past month I
have been sitting in a cottage on the edge of Exmoor, high above the coils of dense foliage that screen the course of the Exe, and in that (for England) remote stronghold I could hardly hear myself think for
the sound of flexing muscles. The world of tele- phones and anger used to close at least one eye during August. No longer. There was no escaping the exciting jabber of preparations for an autumn which at home and abroad promises tremendous strains and stresses in all directions. Early one afternoon I was reading indoors when the sound of horns drew me outside. Scattered motionless over a wide hillside were thirty or forty horsemen. In the depths of the wood beneath them I could see hounds moving in and out of thickets. A hind stepped unhurriedly across a clearing and made off up the hillside among the huntsmen who stayed as stiff as statues as it passed. Ten minutes later a stag emerged from a different corner of the wood and also went uphill, equally cere- moniously, towards open country. After what convention presumably allows as a sporting start, the whole hillside sprang into life and the hunt was away and over the crest. That's us, I thought, my mind on the stag. I can't swallow the sports- man's assurance that the beast enjoys the chase as much as the chasers. But there's no more agree- able sensation for the journalist than to feel he is being hounded by events.
STARBUCK
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