Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke Read Free Book Online Page A

them during late summer and fall.
    Each hunt has a “harbourer,” a specialist whose job is to watch the herds and select a specific stag. Only this oneis to be hunted. (When hunting hinds, which are effectively indistinguishable, the selection is made by the hounds on Darwinian principles. Thus there is an intellectual connection between the British ban on hunting with dogs and the American call for teaching creationism in schools.)
    A chivalrous aspect to stag hunting, remains, however. The three hunts in the Exmoor region maintain, with noblesse oblige, a twenty-four-hour emergency service for sick or injured deer. Mostly these are deer that have been hit by cars and have crawled off into the bushes—as many as 100 of them a year. Members of the hunts will come out in the middle of the night with horses and dogs, to track these suffering creatures. In some years the hunters do as much euthanizing as they do hunting.
    For a proper hunt, or “meet,” in which Rovers and BMWs do not initiate the pursuit, the harbourer spends the previous day and night making sure of the stag’s location. On the morning of the hunt he reports to his chief, the huntsman. The huntsman brings in older, experienced hounds, called “tufters,” to separate the stag from the herd. It was this singling-out that I was watching in the steep moorland pasture. But it hadn’t been working perfectly. As unpromising as that young stag may have been from the harbourer’s point of view, the two hinds thought he was worth running away with. Once the stag is solitary, the huntsman’s assistant, the “whipper-in,” is supposed to bring up the full pack, and the hunt’s members and guests fall in behind the hounds. Miles and miles of furiously galloping cross-country endeavor at achievement of ecological balance in the Exmoor deer herds ensues. Unless it doesn’t. As it seemed not to be doing from my vantage point across the valley. When the chase does happen, the usual outcome is that the stag, at last, turnsand “stands at bay,” facing the hounds. Then (rather disappointingly for those whose imaginations run to tenderhearted indignation or to bloodlust) the hounds do not tear the stag to shreds. They bark.
    There’s probably not much else they could do with an irked and antler-waving stag. Staghounds are not giant Scottish deerhounds or hulking, red-eyed mastiffs. They’re just foxhounds, happy and hound-doggy and friendly if you aren’t prey. “You can set your baby down in the middle of a pack,” a hunter told me, “and they’ll lick him silly.” What happens to the stag is that the huntsman walks over to it and prosaically shoots it in the head with a special, short-barreled, folding-stock shotgun. This is an illegal weapon in Great Britain. But on stag hunts it’s legally required.
    Speaking of Britain’s laws, killing wild mammals with the aid of dogs, as the Exmoor hunt was trying to do, is forbidden. Except when—as I understand the parliamentary Hunting Act of 2004—it is mandatory. The act contains certain conditions for “exempt hunting” that allow the killing of wild mammals with the aid of dogs if “as soon as possible after being found or flushed out the wild mammal is shot dead by a competent person.” No letting it go, even if it’s Bambi’s mother. Furthermore only two dogs may be used at a time. And no letting the dogs kill the wild mammals, the way foxhunters always have done. The stain must be upon you, not your pet. “Out, damned spot,” indeed.
    The Hunting Act came into effect on February 18, 2005, a few weeks before this Exmoor meet. I got in touch with Adrian Dangar, the hunting correspondent for
The Field
. Adrian said that I shouldn’t write about foxhunting. It’s all that anybodywas writing about. And it’s such a social occasion. He said that the stag hunters were a much more