by Alex Miller
What a way to start the day!
I can sense the Tiger and the others off to my right, their attention directed at me and what I’m up to, but I haven’t got time to check them out or pretend to be in control. I’m about to get tossed into that moving tonnage of hungry dog muscle! Bait! Kabara’s forgotten I’m up here. He’s on the point of snapping into a few high leaps and pirouettes! There’s just a chance I could make it if I lunged off his back and dived into the centre of the hedge. And I’m measuring and considering this move when the huntsman’s voice drifts back to his hounds and they back away, taking the pressure off, growling and complaining and reluctantly disengaging themselves from this interesting situation, reminded, at last, of their real business. They are followed by a rush of the rest of the pack; the eager younger dogs, the new entry, the less bold, the ones who still hope to become leaders and those who never will; and, skulking among this motley, those miserable survivors who once led and have since been deposed. Kabara steps out into the middle of this lot and rips out a piercing challenge, the stallion’s whistling scream, sending these tail-enders scrambling for their lives.
‘You’ll watch where you’re putting his feet, boy!’ The Tiger, sharp, annoyed, coming up on me, accompanied by Mathew Tolland the whipper-in, who’s grinning. And they go past me, Tolland’s voice coming back; ‘Isn’t that the Australian’s black horse?’ I don’t catch the Tiger’s response. It wouldn’t be much. He won’t be drawn on the subject of Kabara till he owns him. I have to laugh, though, at him thinking it was my mishandling of Kabara that nearly got us into trouble then, rather than the fact that I wasn’t handling the stallion at all, that Kabara was making his own decisions and had forgotten I was on board. I keep to the middle of the road, talking to him, reassuring him, and myself. And the two second-horsemen come up on us and ride past, giving me a nod and looking at Kabara with interest. They’re each leading an unsaddled horse, one for Jack Perry, the huntsman, and the other for Tolland. I fall in a few yards behind them.
Ten minutes later we ride into the village of Winsford. The stallion and I bringing up the rear of this little cavalcade. There won’t be many here today who will have ridden as far as we have. Once over the bridge we follow the main road. It’s a long, thin village, jammed tight up its narrow valley, overlooked by the steep, thickly wooded slopes of the moor, the River Exe down one side of the main street and houses down the other. It’s only just after ten o’clock but already there’s quite a crowd; cars parked each side of the road, and riders and people on foot wandering around in the middle. The locals out in force. A few tourists, labourers, housewives, kids and, of course, those who’ve come here specially for the hunting season. Not real hunters though, most of them, just people out for some fun; satisfied if they happen to see a deer in the distance at some stage of the game; whether the one being hunted or not. And they’re all milling around on the road together, getting in the way of single-minded Mr Perry and his hounds.
He’ll be glad when the winter comes and hind hunting gets going. Then the only ones who come out in the bitter weather to bother him mean to ride with him to the death. I look out for Morris but I can’t see him anywhere. The horse and I are jammed up close behind Tiger and the hunt staff as they pilot the hounds through; Perry’s still out front on his own, keeping the leaders in a tight formation, making sure they are not distracted and that their minds stay focused on the serious business ahead of them. Tiger and Tolland yell out impatiently, ‘Hounds, please!’
We’re getting down towards the pub when, pulled up on the river side of the road, and a little apart from everyone else, or given a wider berth out of respect, there’s the master’s old black motor car, nose towards a fir tree, a small party of foot and horsepeople gathered around the open front door. Strapped securely on the back of the car is the massive wooden box for the stag’s carcass. Perry and Tolland, the Tiger and the rest of them salute her as we go by, doffing their hats. I can’t actually see her, she’s obscured by the people around her. But I’ve seen her before. She’ll be sitting on the front seat with a little table set out for her bits and pieces—a thermos of tea, binoculars, and one thing and another. Who knows what else? Her special things for the day. She’ll be holding court. She is very old. And, according to Tiger and Morris and anyone else I’ve ever heard speak about her, she nurtures religiously the old ways of hunting. Do they mean the ways, I wonder, that are spoken of in The Master of Game? Ways as old as that? Or older? I don’t know. She’s small and shrunken, always in need of being helped by someone else, and, no matter what the weather, is always dressed to the neck in dark green tweeds. She has been the master of these staghounds since long before anyone here can remember. She has outlived her own generation. One opinion is that when she dies true deer-hunting on the moor will die with her.
And there she is now! Being got out of the car and onto her feet to salute her hounds and her huntsman. She stands for a moment, unaided, alone, her right hand raised not much above the level of her shoulder. A stationary little figure, almost a head shorter than those who are standing around her, and while she looks towards Jack Perry and the hounds, it is at her that they are all looking. She is isolated for a moment with all these people looking at her, before her companions help her back into the car.
There must be some here today who wonder what to make of it all.
The three riders in her party mount up and head over towards us. One of them is Mrs Grant. I’ve seen her around often, a regular. And everyone knows the other two as well. The man about thirty or so on the blood bay stallion is Lord Harbringdon, and the big man on the huge grey gelding is Harry Cheyne, the chairman of the Hunt Damages Committee and a friend of the Tiger. Fanatics, anyway, the three of them. Cheyne urges his horse forward, bumping Mrs Grant’s mount as he pushes through, but not apologising or even noticing, cutting straight across to us, clearing a swathe through the crowd in the road as if there is no one there—too bad if someone gets trodden on—and calling out to the Tiger while he’s still more than twenty yards off; ‘A fair morning, Bill!’ People can’t help staring at him as he goes by, especially people on foot. He’s something to see. Obviously a man of great physical strength and, even from a distance, there is a sense about him of impatience that is only just under control, as if he might go crazy if you made a real point of getting in his way. He surges forward and takes up his place smack in front of me, and right next to the Tiger, who offers him a du Maurier from his tin, and responds with: ‘It’s starting to look promising, Harry.’
They are happy to be with each other, these two, and for the Tiger this is his most cherished friendship. A lot of people, besides the Tiger, admire Harry Cheyne, and there are quite a few who can’t stand him, but for the Tiger there’s something more complicated than admiration in it . . . I see Harbringdon and Mrs Grant still picking their way across, taking it easy, in no big hurry, exchanging a greeting here and there as they go by, acknowledging the social nature of the occasion . . . The rump of the grey horse in front of me must be almost four feet wide. And Cheyne’s back isn’t much narrower. He and Tiger would be a matched pair if the Tiger weren’t about three sizes smaller. Both packed into their clothes. Bursting at the seams. And I see Cheyne’s gelding’s taking one step to Finisher’s one and a half! What a monster! Cheyne never rides anything but greys. I’ve heard him roaring about his theory on it: ‘A grey’s either a very good hunter or a very poor hunter. I know where I am with grey!’
He knows where he is with grey!
His horses are like him. Nothing stops them. When other riders are ducking and diving around the place, everything confusion and people wondering what’s going on, you see Cheyne looming up at a slow canter with a loose rein, aimed straight at some huge obstacle, a hedge on a bank or something like that, and without pausing or gathering himself or taking up the slack in his reins and without any change of expression or stride he goes up and over, twigs and branches and clods of earth exploding around him, and on
ce over he keeps going at the same pace and disappears into the distance. Everyone standing around gaping, not a hope of following him. And that’s the only view of Cheyne some people ever get. They might imagine he’s a romantic figure. He’s not. He’s hard. Few claimants for deer damage compensation would have the courage to dispute his assessment of their due, and none would have any success in altering it. He makes no secret of his contempt for people who, for one reason or another, might need to take things a little carefully. Morris’s wife has no reason to love him. When she reported to him that her mother and father’s vegetable garden, up in that dump behind Monksilver, had been eaten out by a herd of hinds in one night last winter he refused to go over there and assess the damage, or even to explain why he wouldn’t go. The thing with Cheyne is, he’s not a tenant farmer like the Tiger. He owns a freehold estate of over twelve hundred acres and his four sons and their families work it for him. He used to be a rugby international and, though some people might wonder about this, he’s an educated man. Really he’s in another class altogether to the Tiger, an enviable position somewhere between the responsibilities of the old gentry and the dependence of people like Tiger himself, but he doesn’t let that get in the way of his friendship for him. Cheyne’s a squire! And in some ways Tiger’s probably about the only man he really respects. As an equal, or near-equal. Of course that’s not down there in the valley crutching sheep and feeding pigs, or sitting around in Roly-Poly’s parlour. It’s a respect that only operates up here. On the hunting field.
But, after all, it’s not just Cheyne’s peculiar way of taking obstacles in his stride, or the fact that he is like him, though larger, in his temperament, that has cornered the Tiger’s admiration. They might be friends without these things; what makes Cheyne special, what marks him out even among the few around here who know what deer-hunting’s really all about, is his almost uncanny ability to be in at the kill after the most bewildering runs when hind-hunting during the winter. Hinds are light, they are thinkers, and they can run for ever. They are native to the iron winter, it being in their biology, and any one of them looks much the same as another, especially when momentarily glimpsed through a sheet of freezing rain. They can change ten times a day, putting the exhausted and bemused hounds on to fresh quarry every half-hour or so if the huntsman is not alert. Elusive is not the word for them! There must be times when even Jack Perry has come to a standstill, alone and out of luck in the dark at the end of a fruitless day, and wondered whether he was hunting a hind or some kind of trick of his own imagination.
Being there when one of these wild females is finally run down and can run no more, takes other things than brute force and self-confidence. As well as luck, it takes knowledge of the moor and of the habits of the deer; and it takes a certain artfulness as well, a local, an almost inherited, feel for the business. But apart from all these things, which Tiger has as good a share of as anyone else, for a man of Cheyne’s immense weight (probably seventeen or eighteen stone mounted), it also takes at least two very large, intelligent and well-fed horses; horses with massive size, heart, muscle, and stamina, a combination of qualities not arrived at by chance. Breeding, in other words. And Cheyne’s got them. He can afford the best.
And that’s where the Tiger gets left behind.
That’s where not only Cheyne, but Mrs Grant, and Lord Harbringdon and Jack Perry and even Tolland leave the Tiger behind during the big gruelling runs. If the Tiger were nine or ten stone there would be no problem. But he’s fifteen stone and like Harry Cheyne he needs big horses. For horses there is a rule: the bigger they are the better bred they must be. Large ill-bred horses are the worst kind. They are death traps on this moor. I can pick out half a dozen from here, right now, lolloping and stumbling around the place, tripping over their own feet and getting in everyone’s way. They won’t be going far. Their riders will take a peek over the first hill, probably not see a deer, then retire from the field for the rest of the day to the pub.
If he’s to stay with the hounds to the end the Tiger needs a big blue-blooded aristocrat under him. He’s never been able to afford a horse like that, and in the normal course of things never would have the chance to own such an animal. Then suddenly there it was! Falling into place with the record harvest more sweetly than he could ever have dared dream: Alsop staggering around the corner of the rick almost begging him to buy Kabara, the wonder horse!
From the cheerful way he’s going on there in front of me with his friend Harry Cheyne no one would suspect the Tiger of being at a delicate point in negotiating the price of this horse.
Twisting around in his saddle and yelling at me. Something about close up and stay with him. And here we go. Horses and cars and people and dogs all struggling and yelling and mixed up, a bottleneck as we turn into the pub yard. And there’s Morris’s car. No sign of Morris or Alsop but Mrs is sitting in the front seat waving at me. We’re pouring through the gate and in to the stone-flagged courtyard, people all over the place trying to get a look at the hounds and Tiger and Cheyne roaring for a passage through.
Jack Perry’s off his horse. He opens a low door in the end of a cowshed and urges the hounds into the dark hole. They don’t like it, but the whips start singing and Perry has his way. The last of them in, he bolts the door. They howl mournfully for their freedom. We’re all watching the huntsman. He eases the girth on his mare and things go quiet suddenly in the yard. There’s a labourer staring at me, or staring, rather, at a point half-way down Kabara, his hands held loosely behind him, shoulders down, waiting and watching, without having anything to do. He looks away as I look at him and kicks at the wall with the heel of his boot, dislodging a silvery flurry of lichen from the old stone. I climb down off Kabara and lead him over near the Tiger.
Mrs Grant has joined him and Cheyne and they’re talking animatedly about the condition of the hounds. The foot people begin drifting out of the yard, realising the excitement’s over for the time being. Tolland and the second-horsemen go off somewhere, taking Jack Perry’s mare with them, and the huntsman sits on an old mounting block and takes off his cap. There’s a deep red line across his forehead and above that, in contrast to his weathered face, his skull is white and shiny. He gives his head a vigorous rub with the palm of his hand before jamming the hard riding cap down on it again. He’s waiting for John Grabbe, the harbourer, to bring in his report.
I loosen Kabara’s girth and lean back against the sunlit wall. My thighs are throbbing pleasantly from all the riding. I feel good. Hungry. It’s warm, and I half listen to Cheyne and Mrs Grant and the Tiger talking, without actually following their conversation. They’ll go round to the front of the pub in a minute or two and have a glass of sherry or brandy, or whatever it is they drink at this time of day. They’re staying mounted for that. Out through the courtyard gate I can see the people and riders milling around, and cars nosing their way cautiously down the street between them, hoping to find somewhere to park. Every now and then someone comes and stands in the gateway and looks around the yard expectantly, then, seeing nothing happening, goes away again. And after a few minutes I spot John Grabbe making his way through the throng out there. Few of them know who he is, or that it is he we are waiting for—the master, the huntsman, the hounds yelling again now in their black hole as if they have winded him. And even impatient men such as Harry Cheyne and Tiger Westall—they all wait for John Grabbe on these mornings without complaining. He’s riding to this meeting place mounted on a damp-looking mud-spattered moorland pony that is half asleep. He’s been out slotting deer in the dark most of the night, or at least since the worst of the storm passed. There’s a scruffy-looking spotted scarf pinned at his throat, almost as if he must intend a private joke by it. That it could be taken to represent a silk hunting stock, perhaps. His jacket’s open, and under it he’s wearing a dirty grey woollen jumper over a black waistcoat, and under that a few more layers of clothing. His pony’s coming along head down, plodding, going by instinct, smell or something, h
abit maybe, but not by eyesight because its eyes are closed! He makes his way through the last of the sightseers on the road, overhearing rumours and speculations about stags seen in the area lately, but not looking around or saying hullo to anyone. Knowing all and saying nothing, he rides into the yard. The minute Cheyne and Mrs Grant and the Tiger see him they stop talking and turn their horses and watch him with great interest, but they don’t go over to him or call out. Jack Perry gives his hat another firm push and stands up, going forward only the last couple of yards to meet the harbourer and putting his hand on the pony’s bridle; ‘Good morning, John. What have you got for us?’
The crucial question!
The huntsman’s voice carries clearly across the courtyard, and the three enthusiasts here can’t help leaning forward and rising a little in their stirrups, straining to catch Grabbe’s response. The Tiger and his friends would love to get close enough to those two to tune in on this conversation, but both men have lowered their voices and are standing close together. You can see by the way they arrange themselves that their conversation is to be a private one. Grabbe dismounts, leaving the reins slung loosely over his arm, and he gets out his tobacco and makes himself a cigarette, his back firmly towards us. Jack Perry watches his every move closely, bent a little forward so as not to miss anything, frowning and nodding his head every second or two, his concentrated gaze following Grabbe’s gestures as if the harbourer is about to conjure a stag out of the air for him. But Perry’s expression lets us in on nothing definite, one way or the other, about the quality of the information he’s getting. He shows no elation or disappointment. He’s pressing Grabbe, he’s prying and probing and cross-examining him, to get the detail out of him that he wants. And Grabbe shrugs and puffs his cigarette, he points up then he points down, mesmerising the huntsman with hints and possibilities, and once he laughs suddenly and takes a kick at a stone. It’s all the same to him. He never hunts.