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

doughty and resolute lot, and stag hunting was more of a way of life.
    I went to Exmoor with Adrian. We stayed with the chairman of the stag hunt. I’ll call him Michael Thompson. He was doughty and resolute, the owner of a family sheep farm of centuries’ standing. I went to the meet expecting a scene of American seething, full of the half-suppressed violence that Americans thwarted in their beliefs or their hobbies half-suppress so well. What I found was a cheerful, natty crowd on horseback, booted and spurred and listening to a talk from the hunt secretary about strict adherence to the Hunt Act, especially in the matter of using just two dogs. The whole staghound pack was there, but the hounds had been split into pairs, with each twosome in the back of a different vehicle. The hunt secretary gave her opinion that hunting the pairs serially was in accord with the letter and spirit of the law.
    Having just two dogs in the field was exactly the problem. So I was told by the retired grocer and other hunt followers gathered on the hilltop vantage point, watching the lack of action through binoculars. Two hounds were not enough to break the stag away from the hinds. Or two hounds were not enough to bring the stag to bay. Two hounds were certainly not enough to make what I was told was the music of a pack in full cry.
    The followers were local farmers and farm wives, mostly past middle age. Many had ridden with the hunt years before. The men wore tweed jackets and neckties. The women wore tweed skirts and twinsets. Everyone wore a waxed cotton Barbour jacket. The hunt members were dressed in black and brown riding coats, buff whipcord breeches,and hunting bowlers. They wore elaborately tied and gold-pinned white stocks at their throats. All the clothes were seasoned and washed to a perfect Ralph Lauren degree. If hunting dies out, from where will Ralph draw outdoorsy English inspiration? Will suburban Americans be wearing the undershirts, rolled trousers, and hankies-on-the-head of English sunbathers?
    The hunt was moving. Horses were trotting over the far hill. The two hounds did their best in the music department. There was a spate of elderly, excited driving as hunt followers hurried to find a better view. We parked by a tributary of the River Exe. The stag either did or didn’t go into a strip of woods along the bank. The hounds weren’t sure. The followers weren’t sure. Possibly the stag came out of the woods. Possibly he didn’t. The hunters went into the woods and came out. This sounds as interesting as cricket. And to the onlookers it was. The crowd had grown to forty or more and now included children in small tweeds and small Barbour coats and a man selling tea and sandwiches from a van. They all watched intently, the tea vendor included. There was a tense murmuring, as from a golf gallery.
    The staghounds and stag hunters trotted through a farmyard, and I followed on foot. Some local farmers are not hospitable to the traffic through their property—not hospitable, specifically, to the traffic of me. I was trying to take notes and make haste and avoid deep puddles and horse droppings, and I wasn’t wearing a necktie. “Is he all right?” I heard a farmer ask.
    â€œHe thought you were an ‘anti,’” the retired grocer explained later. “They come around bothering the hunts.”
    According to a brochure from the League Against Cruel Sports, “The League . . . has collected an enormous amountof evidence of the cruelty of hunting. Years of undercover work and hunt monitoring has enabled [members of Parliament] to see the real face of hunting.”
    Beyond the farm, on the Exmoor upland, the real face of hunting was soaking wet. The scenery was an alluring frustration: heather-covered bosomy hill mounds rising above dark nests of woods. A green girlfriend of a landscape. But somebody else’s girlfriend, greeting the hunt with cold drizzle and sharp