Huntsmen vocalizing

You might be surprised how much has been written on this topic. Or maybe not if you're one of the legions of people who've been mad at a too-quiet Huntsman! 

Excerpt from Thoughts on Hunting . . . In a Familiar Letter to a Young Huntsman by Andrew T. Barclay in Covertside, Summer 2008.

As you draw a covert, if you use your voice from time to time and an occasional short note of the horn, it will let hounds know where you are so they can hunt for their game and not you. It will let them spread out in a covert with the knowledge that you will not leave them. That also will get your game up early. While this is not always a good thing, I think that it might help your hounds find and allow your whips to get a view so you know hounds are right.

And this slightly more humorous excerpt from Hunting Pie: The Whole Art and Craft of Fox Hunting by Frederick Watson (as quoted in Fox-Hunting (Small Oxford books) by Sara and Raymond Carr).

You can tell an experienced huntsman at once, because he is about an eighth of a second quicker than the pack in saying the word ‘Go.’ After which it is his duty to amuse the Field by his language -- a purely technical expression for those traditional admonitions and exhortations, mostly of French patois origin, which every intelligent hound naturally understands. While the pack are drawing a huntsman will touch his horn to show the Field he is still all there, by which I mean, of course, still in the cover, and in a high cracked voice permit himself reflections all nicely joined up companionable-like, as ‘eleuin,’ ‘edawickedawick’ (crack), ‘yoiwindimthur’ (horn), yoirouseimmelads’ and ‘loointhur.’ Hounds in the meantime are too busy for such transports, and presently when one ‘challenges,’ as the old books called it, the huntsman will show even more medieval learning, and crying ‘Hoicktogether,’ or ‘Forridhoick,’ will proceed with a noise like a hen laying an egg. When you hear that make straight for the nearest gate, because it is quite on the cards there will follow that paralyzing call to action, ‘Taa-leo awawoy!’ when everyone with frenzied leisure permits an ambitious dealer to take the heart out of the nearest fence.

And just one more showing the particular language of English Huntsmen from There Goes Charlie by Anne Fleming

The mounted field spread out and for ten minutes they stopped their chatting. From time to time the Huntsman's voice could be heard from within the covert in a high screech, exhorting hounds to "Push 'em up! Go at 'em! Yoi! Yoi in there!"
. . . .
Cries came from within the covert. "Yip! Yip! Yip! Yoi on! Yoi on there! Rouse him! Push him up!" A hound spoke and the cry came "Hoic to Juniper!" The riders began to gather up their reins. The Master swung round on the field with a huge bellow. "Will you stop that coffee-housing and let me bloody well listen."

Hounds were now speaking as the tension built up. A great "Holloa!" came from the far end of the covert followed by the urgent doubling note of the horn and cries of "Hoic Forrard! Hoic Forrard!"

"They're blowing him away!" cried Hugo. "Come on!"

And when should the word Huntsman be capitalized and when not? I have almost no idea.

The above image is from Twelve Packs of Hounds by John Charlton.

Mark

Mark is not a term I hear widely used by foxhunters. First, a basic definition from Fox-Hunting by the Duke of Beaufort

Mark. When hounds bay outside an earth, the fox having gone to ground.

And a little more on the fine points of usage from the same book.

Hounds marking a fox to ground are said to bay. If a stag faces his pursuers, he is at bay, and hounds barking defiance are said to be baying him. A terrier facing a fox or badger underground and giving tongue is also said to be baying.

I think perhaps it is one of the qualities of a hound that is not near the top of the list in importance. After all, if your hounds can't first find a fox and can't then run it, a pack that excels at marking is useless.  In a breeding program quite a few other qualities get more emphasis than marking.

And I don't know if it is a trait that's primarily inherited or trained. The pack I hunt with most has had specific hounds that showed a strong urge to mark their fox to ground. When one hound marks well, others can be easily encouraged to do so. But, as a group, this pack definitely lacks this quality. Is it important? That depends on who you ask.

Excerpt from Foxhound Performance Trials: 2005-2006 Season by Norman M. Fine in Covertside, July 2006.

Being a judge at a foxhound performance trial can be the greatest fun in that one's job is to score hounds for performance in each of four categories: hunting, trailing, full cry, and marking. To score hounds, the judge must be close enough to see which hounds are doing the work and to be able to read the numbers painted on their sides. This means getting very close to the action -- as close as you can without interfering -- closer even than the huntsman! . . .

Clearly, it's one of only four qualities that get scored at all. Of course, for every chase during a performance trial, there are many opportunities for a hound to earn points in the other categories and very few opportunities in the marking category so it automatically assumes lesser importance than the others.

I think that's as it should be, at least in this country. Here the emphasis is not generally on killing healthy foxes. If a fox goes to ground we're usually happy to leave it and move on with the hounds. Marking is essential if the fox is to be dug out and shot (as might be done in England).

This is not to say that it's not a useful quality -- it is. In many cases we cannot keep up with our hounds or see them or get to them in thick cover. Ideally, when a fox goes to ground the hounds would stay together at the earth, mark it well enough (by vocalizing) to allow the huntsman to locate them, and stay together until either the huntsman gets to them or calls them away. Having hounds stay together at the end of a chase is a very good thing. Puppies and young hounds who wander away get into all kinds of trouble.

The above image is from Twelve Packs of Hounds by John Charlton.

Covert

A simple definition for a Covert, pronounced (and sometimes written as) cover, is: A patch of woods or brush where foxes are apt to be found.  And an excerpt from Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man by Terence Carroll

There are as many types of covert as there are kinds of countryside, and how many foxes they shelter will depend largely on availability of food, but a fairly typical covert might be a 10-acre wood with plenty of undergrowth. Most Hunts have such coverts in their defined areas of operation; some own them and a few even provide artificial earths to encourage foxes to stay in them. Such places are usually 'sure finds' (almost guaranteed to harbour foxes on a hunting day) year after year. Two or three foxes inhabiting an area of this kind, either as a sort of family or, more probably, as individuals, would leave it to hunt by night and lie up in it by day, most likely above ground rather than below. They would be content.

Ah, but what about hounds crashing through the trees and thirsty for blood? Well, that would be disturbing, for sure, but it doesn't happen that often. . . .

There really is little reason for foxes to fret themselves over being hunted by hounds, because it is a sporadic, even rare, disruption. If they were constantly being chased about the country every day, they wouldn't be daft enough to remain. Foxes are smart. They'd leg it to somewhere more peaceful!

In most foxhunting countries, at least some of the coverts have names. One of the most famous chases in the history of the sport is known by the name of the covert where the chase started, the Billesdon Coplow.

The Billesdon Coplow run took place on Monday, the 24th of February 1800, with a second fox. It was from Billesdon Coplow, Leicestershire, past Tilton Woods, Skeffington Earths, crossing the river Soar below Whitstone, to Enderby Warren, making a distance of twenty-eight miles, which was run in two hours and fifteen minutes.

There are several poems and songs which celebrate that run. The poem by The Rev. Robert Lowth, is known by the same title, Billesdon Coplow, and is available full-text online through Google books. Billesdon Coplow Song is part of the book, Hunting Songs (1876) by T. A. Griffith and Others by Well-known Writers. It's also available online through Google books.

Drat! I ought to be saving these links for Poetry Month in April.

Earths and dens

Here's an interesting use of the terms earth and den from The Red Fox by H. G. Lloyd.

In Britain most cubs are born between mid-March and mid-April. The vixen gives birth in a dry hole, sometimes a den with only a single entrance, sometimes a large earth. . . .
The vixen does not make a nest or have any form of bedding for her offspring, which may be found in an enlarged chamber in the den as often as in a small blind end of a burrow system. Although the vixen spends the first fourteen days or more below ground with her cubs, only occasionally are adult dog foxes found with the vixen and her very young cubs . . .

So, that's an interesting distinction between an earth and a den. And here's another piece from the same book.

Apart from providing warmth, the vixen probably spends the first fourteen days or so with the cubs to protect them from predatory intruders and to prevent them crawling away from each other and perhaps out into the open. Whether or not cubs from two to four weeks old wander about much in the earth is not known, nor what restrains them from wandering far from the entrance to the den in the absence of the vixen.

It might be useful to remember the author is primarily a scientist and definitely not a foxhunter. And now for a more entertaining piece from A Long Way to Go; An Anglo-Irish Near-Tragedy by Marigold Armitage.

"Best get off now, sir, 'tis a dreadful place for a tired horse."

When I did so I went to my knees. My legs seemed to be made of cotton-wool, and my feet to have no connection with the rest of me. I was not quite sure where I was putting them and I staggered along drunkenly. Away in front, abruptly, the voices died. Then they clamoured again, but singly, brokenly, mournfully, informing us of frustration and a thirst unassauged. Old George's horn told us the same and round the spine of the ridge we came upon them, a little above us, milling and crying around the great earth in the rocks, the grey horse standing amongst them, his head drooping at last, and old George's face glowing like a lantern through the deepening dusk.

And just one more from Terence Carroll's Diary of a Fox-hunting Man.

Where the stubble ends, at the far edge of the field, there is a fence -- upright posts linked by three taut strands of barbed wire. Beyond the fence is a wood that harbours foxes. The Huntsman knows this because this is a covert that has contained foxes pretty consistently for something like 60 years -- since before his time. There are old breeding earths in it that have been used so regularly that it's a wonder they haven't got electric light.

Billetts and Earths

I don't plan to deal with badger setts since I know nothing about them. They don't exist in my part of the world. Wikipedia is just dandy for that kind of thing.

This excerpt from There Goes Charlie: A Rural Murder by Anne Fleming uses the term billets but and it also leads us along to another topic:  earths.

The terrier man, young Tom Stringer, was out in the early hours on the morning of the lawn meet at Hangholt Manor, stopping earths in the Oak Wood (the morning draw). He moved softly and swiftly and calmly and purposefully like a wild animal. He knew this country as the fox and the badger knew it. He could tell where the old badger setts were and where the new. He recognized the badgers' scratching-posts and latrines, and he knew their paths through the bracken. He could tell at a glance, by the litter of food scraps, hair bones, and fox billets round the entrances of old badger setts, when their original inhabitants had been succeeded by a lazier and a dirtier race. Because he moved like a breath on the wind he had seen things few others saw: a brood of wriggling 3-inch-long baby weasels, a stoat running a rabbit 50 yards along a woodland ride before going in for the kill, a roosting tawny owl mobbed by blackbirds, three hares leaping and tumbling and circling under the moonlight. He sometimes found the flattened beds where fallow deer had lain and the great muddied pools where they had wallowed in the dirt. The stillness of the night was for him alive with tiny sounds and breaths and whispers which others might fail to recognize. But once he started work he behaved like a wild animal, totally absorbed in what he was doing. He set to work stopping up the foxes' earths, pushing gorse and bracken and earth into the holes and sometimes using a bundle of blackthorn faggots tied up with baler twine.

[Note the spelling -- billet instead of billetts. There are loads of contradictions in the literature.]

So. A simple definition of an earth: Any place a fox goes to ground for protection. Which is not the same as a den, defined as a fox's hole.

A fox will duck into a variety of holes when faced with a dire threat. Any of those might be referred to as an earth. It's a term I almost never hear actually used in this country. One reads the term far more often related to earth-stopping which is a whole subject unto itself.

A den is the hole a fox uses as its home although foxes spend the vast majority of their time above ground. They will sleep above ground much of the time. And I think it's correct to say that foxes don't generally excavate their own dens. They will start with a hole that some other animal has abandoned or a natural hole created, for example, when a tree blows down. In his choice of homes, as in his diet, the fox is an opportunist.

Scat

The joys of editorship include trying to decide how to label an entry like this.

According to Wikipedia, scat may refer to:

Excrement -- Feces, a waste product produced in the digestive tract

Ah, but there's nothing like the OED (Oxford English Dictionary).

Scat -- Dung; (pl.) droppings.

Dung is such an excellent, earthy, descriptive word. Strangely enough I associate dung with the manure of domestic animals and droppings with the manure of wild animals. Anyone else?

And then there's this excerpt from Biddable Babblers in The Keen Foxhunter’s Miscellany by Peter Holt.

Billett: Fox excrement

So, back to labels . . . poop? manure? excrement? As you can see I've gone with scat. This is by far the most commonly used term among hunters in this part of Virginia. I've never heard anyone use the term billett in real life although I have occasionally seen it in books.



And now a link to something a whole lot more educational: You don't know squat! by PBurns at Terrierman's Daily Dose. That's a short post and includes some information on the habits of foxes as well as these comments on scat. It also includes the picture at right of red fox scat as well as one of raccoon scat.

Raccoon scat is easily differentiated from fox scat. Raccoon dung always has blunt ends and is quite uniform in thickness, looking a bit like a thin, blunt-cut, cigar. Raccoon dung is much more likely to contain a great deal of vegetable matter, such as berries and bits of acorn, and only rarely has hair in it. While fox dung can be any color (black, brown, tan, white, greenish or bluish), raccoon scat is almost always quite dark due to the large amounts of vegetable matter.

Look for fox scat at the edge of fields, particularly along paths or mows where corn or soy fields border woods, as this is the "mouse and rabbit zone" where a fox can trot along very quietly listening for scurrying mice.

Fox will often deposit their scat on stones, rises, stumps, walls or tree trunks that border their patrol areas -- a form of territory marking.

The end!

Run

The term a run describes the action after hounds find the line of a fox. A good run is also a good hunt (the term hunt should refer to a run and not to a meet).

And so we had gone, pretty fast, for forty-five minutes or so. But I am not proposing to describe the run. One run described in any book or, indeed, any conversation, is quite enough. For to those who have not actually been flayed alive by thorns, plastered with wet mud, banged painfully on the nose by their horse's up-flung head, rubbed raw by an ill-placed button, had their spinal cords twisted when their horse jumped crooked off a bank, continued to gallop, breathless, exhausted and, if they are honest, slightly frightened, unable to see for the rain they have smeared into their eyes with a dirty glove, unable to breathe for the clot of mud flung in eyes and nostrils from the hoofs of the horse in front -- to those, I say, who have not actually taken part in this high glory, something of the resulting elation of spirit is bound to be missing.

Excerpt from A Long Way to Go; An Anglo-Irish Near-Tragedy by Marigold Armitage (1973).

This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books. If you can suggest the perfect illustration for this piece, or wish to add something about the book or author, please leave a comment!