Fox Tracks

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Hateful. Hateful. Hateful.” Sister knew exactly what the cat had done.

  “I am the Queen of All I Survey! Dogs do my bidding. Humans feed me right on time.” With that loud declaration, she shot through the door into the kitchen, crossed the floor at a good clip, and ran up the narrow back stairway to the main bedroom. Then she dashed out into the long upstairs hallway to run victory laps.

  Gray heard the paw-pounding even down in the den. Sister came in and listened as the dogs joined them.

  “She’s mental. She needs counseling.” Rooster had watched enough TV talk shows to parrot such claptrap. “Anger management, that is what’s called for.”

  The laughter rolled out of Sister in waves as she told Gray what the conniving cat had done.

  “Cats and women.” Gray laughed. “They’ll do as they damned please and we’d better get used to it.”

  This made Sister laugh all the more. She reached for a Kleenex to dab her eyes. Up above, Golly was still running victory laps.

  “She has to slow down sooner or later.” Sister sat down. “You know I forgot to tell you the Custis Hall girls came out Tuesday. Tariq rode with them. Rode well, too. Their coach has the flu. He had to keep up with those girls, then get them all back to school. Being a coach is quite a job. Being a stand-in coach can’t be easy either, but what fun working with young people.

  “He’s better off here than in Egypt. Sooner or later things will stabilize there. It seems like the world is turning upside down, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.” She switched back to the hunt. “Actually we had quite a few people for a Tuesday.”

  “Bet a lot of them figured we’d be snowed in for Thursday’s hunt.”

  “That’s what the Weather Channel said, but this part of central Virginia doesn’t seem to pay much attention to forecasts. It’s the mountains. They create their own weather system.”

  “Don’t know how those forecasters do it, but I wish I could be wrong half the time and still keep a job.” He chuckled. “I learn a lot from the channel, though. I really like it when they explain things like plateaus, vortexes, and stuff like that.”

  “Bull. You like the weathergirls.”

  He smiled devilishly. “Yes, I do. Sister, when a man stops looking, it’s all over. And I hasten to add no one is as fascinating as you.”

  She nodded at the compliment before returning to the topic of Tuesday’s hunt. “Oh, Donny Sweigart was out and on one of Sybil’s older horses. He said the hauling business has really slowed down. Tough times. Given that it started to snow the last half hour of the hunt, no one had the time to catch up or chat. We all know how quickly the roads can go bad, especially out there at Old Paradise.”

  “McMillan.” Gray smiled. “The Egyptian teacher. Just thinking about his last name. Ever notice the more sophisticated a society gets, the more people mix and marry?”

  “The Scots and Irish blanket the world,” she playfully reported. “So some Scot somewhere fell in love with an Egyptian. You know, Nicaragua has many people with Scottish surnames. There were so many troubles in Great Britain over the centuries that in certain historical periods, a person’s best shot might just be to get the hell out.”

  “Well, it made our country great.”

  “Yes, it did.” She was ever mindful of her nation’s odd genetic makeup, one often covered up, too, as certain groups were once considered undesirable.

  Sooner or later, as Gray said, it all comes out in the wash.

  He lit up one of his Dunhill Menthols, which cleared his sinuses, and put his feet up on the leather hassock.

  “How come you never started?”

  “I don’t know. It never appealed to me. I wish you wouldn’t, but it’s not my business to live anyone else’s life for them. I feel the same way about smoking as I do about alcohol and drugs. If you can handle it, fine. If you can’t, seek help. None of those substances does a body much good, but I really don’t think demonizing them helps. And I think sin taxes are just vile. In my little foray on the computer, I was looking at the demographics of who smokes. For cigarettes, it’s overwhelmingly those who are less well educated. So we punish them with taxes. How many poor people do you know who make the laws?”

  “Such taxes are punitive,” Gray said, crossing his legs. “I tell myself I’m going to stop smoking and then I don’t. It really is a bad habit.”

  “There are worse.”

  “Oh?” He gave her an expectant look.

  “Yes, like not taking care of your goddess.”

  “Come over here. I’ll do my best.”

  As she walked over to him, she stopped for a moment, cocked an ear. “She’s stopped.”

  Finally, Golly had ceased. She was most likely in the bathroom then, unspooling the toilet paper.

  CHAPTER 8

  Silver silence. The snow had fallen to a foot and a half. Sister waded through it to get to the equipment shed. She needed to plow a path to the kennels, to the barn, to Shaker’s house, and back to her own. As nothing was shoveled, the going was tiring.

  The snow, light and soft, barely crunched as she pushed through. Raleigh and Rooster followed, letting her be the bushhog.

  Golly remained in the kitchen. Sprawled on the sink windowsill, she watched the three creatures flounder along. Not for her. She hated when ice formed between her toes and she never, ever enjoyed getting her dainty paws wet.

  Halfway between the house and the barns was the equipment shed, hidden by graceful Leyland Cypress. Once inside, Sister reached up and grabbed the tractor’s hand bar to swing herself up. About as old as she was, the 80-horsepower tractor was plenty versatile. Every now and then, she’d dream of a big 120HP John Deere with a batwing bushhog attachment, but who could afford tractors like that? Then again, she consoled herself with the fact that her old green monster was all steel, with no computer parts. It had no cabin either, a fact she regretted the minute she pulled it out of the shed.

  The sky, gray and low, kept the glare off, but nothing could keep the wind off, which blew at a steady pace. A twenty-mile-per-hour wind in 18°F cut like a knife. She’d wrapped herself up, even putting on the earmuffs she disliked. The great old machine rumbled along, and she dropped the snowplow, slowly pushing the snow to the side of the paths. Funny, you can walk down a path for fifty years and yet, when it’s covered with snow, you’re not quite sure where the edge is.

  The lights shone in the kennels and in the barns, too. Shaker, bless him, was feeding the hounds a warm gruel. He had a potion and a recipe for everything, devoutly believing that on cold days animals need to be warm from the inside out.

  The state roads had to have been plowed because Betty Franklin’s yellow Bronco, another old vehicle made of heavy steel, was parked by the tack room door.

  On and on Sister chugged, feeling the same satisfaction she felt when she mowed the lawn or cut hay. There’s something about seeing an immediate result for your effort. So much of her labor took years to come to fruition. Training the horses she’d bred took about five years before she felt they were secure in the hunt field. But then some horses that had been donated to the club or that she’d bought herself, like Matador, a former steeplechaser, took hardly any time at all to train, if you know how to buy them in the first place.

  You had to study the animal’s mind.

  “You can’t put in what God left out,” her mother used to say.

  Boy, was that the truth and not just for four-legged animals.

  The plowing took two hours of careful, cold work. She’d slaved too many years over her herringbone-brick walkways, her English boxwoods and other gardening delights, to mess them up now. She’d put burlap over most of her bushes and all the boxwoods. They could withstand the cold, but snow deformed their lovely shapes. The branches didn’t always bounce back. Sister had a thing for symmetry.

  Finally, task completed, she drove the serviceable tractor into the shed, cut the motor.

  “You have no more sense than a sack of
hammers,” she called down to the two dogs who’d followed the tractor the entire time she’d plowed.

  “You never know when an enemy might jump out of a bush,” Raleigh soberly replied.

  “Yeah, something big and hairy,” Rooster agreed.

  Sister swung down a lot more stiffly than she had swung herself up. The cold gnawed into her joints. Even with the superheavy gloves, she couldn’t feel her fingers. She knelt down to kiss the two canine heads.

  “Come on.”

  They fell in behind her.

  Pushing open the door to the tack room, she felt a welcome envelopment of warmth. Betty sat perched on a chair.

  “Coffee?” she offered. “I made a big pot. You’ve got to be frozen.”

  Sister poured herself a cup. “Last winter was so mild and the start of this one was, too. Making up for it, now, but I sure hope this isn’t our only snow. We need moisture.”

  “Yes, we do,” Betty then agreed. “But did you hear those leaves crunching yesterday in some places in the thick woods? We usually don’t hear a thing this time of year when we hunt. Not that sound anyway.”

  “Yeah. Every time I think I know what the weather will do next, I don’t.” Sister sat down, the dogs plopping at her feet. “I could have done all this.”

  “Wednesdays are my day in the stable,” said Betty. “You need your shopping day and the roads aren’t bad. If you’re going into Charlottesville, Garth Road is a holy horror, but everything else is okay.”

  “Not plowed?”

  “No. People fly up and down those curves. Idiots.”

  “Betty, speaking of idiots, have you seen Crawford since the Ball?”

  “No. Nor Marty either. Sam Lorillard told me he’s been lining up his hay purchases early, giving people half the money before their first cutting.”

  “Smart. I think we’ll get enough hay off our land and the Lorillard place.”

  “That’s rich soil over there.” She polished a horse’s bit with a clean soft cloth. “Not one little pit. Tell you what, there’s nothing like English steel. This bit has to be seventy years old if it’s a day.”

  “Good luck finding an English bit these days. Nothing like their leather either.” Sister admired quality.

  “Forgot. Brought you your paper. Haven’t looked at the headlines yet.”

  Sister picked up the paper from the coffee table, an old door affixed to four heavy wooden legs. She read silently, flipping through until she reached page three of the first section.

  “What? Tariq Al McMillan is being accused by some parents at Custis Hall of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood!”

  “Anyone making accusations like that is pretty stupid.” Betty smacked her knee. “If he were a member of that organization, he wouldn’t be teaching at an exclusive girls’ school.”

  “Listen to this. One of our congressmen is expressing concern for our security and will investigate.”

  “Don’t people have anything better to do?” Betty raised her eyebrows.

  Sister read more. “Congressman David Rickman fears Mr. McMillan might be spying for the Brotherhood or planning harm in D.C. ‘Charlottesville is so close and filled with former officials, military people. He could insinuate himself with those people who have security clearance.’ ” She shook her head. “Remember when Rickman accused the president of being un-American because he owned a Mercedes in 1985? And he still gets reelected!”

  Betty nodded. “Rickman has a lot to answer for.”

  Sister read aloud. “Mr. McMillan categorically denies the charge. Headmistress Charlotte Norton responded that such unfounded attacks on any staff member of Custis Hall will be met with legal redress.” She snapped the paper closed and put it back on the table. “Well, all I can say is if Tariq Al McMillan is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and they all can ride like he does, they’re welcome in my hunt field.”

  “Big problem,” Betty deadpanned.

  “You mean the Feds will come down on me, too?”

  “No. I don’t think the Brotherhood would accept a woman as their leader.”

  “I could wear a black bushy beard,” Sister replied with solemnity.

  “Silver. You aren’t as young as you used to be, Babydoll. And we’d have to strap down your girls, but that might do it.”

  They laughed.

  “I’ll call Tedi and Edward later.” Sister was back to hunting. “They’ve read the paper, the Bancrofts know everyone in politics. They’ll have more insight about this than I do.”

  Betty paused for a moment. “Age is starting to tell on Tedi and Edward. They stoop a little now or maybe I’m just noticing it. I always thought the Bancrofts were indestructible.”

  “None of us are, but we have to live as though we are. What’s the point of going through life worrying about everything? Just go. Just do it.” Sister’s philosophy was simple, but it served her well.

  “Yep.” Betty hung the bridle pack up on the small wooden half-moon nailed to the wall, upon which Aztec’s name was neatly painted.

  “Come on up for lunch,” said Sister. “We could all use hot soup. You go tell Shaker to come up and I’ll go and get started. Give the three of us a chance to talk about the hound breedings I planned. I am not having much luck this year. Only one of my girls caught. Driving me crazy.”

  When she pushed open the door to the kitchen, Sister found every dishtowel on the floor. Her cookbooks had been expertly thrown off the shelves, too.

  “I will kill that cat.”

  “No, let me,” Raleigh begged.

  By the time her huntsman and best friend came up, the chicken corn soup was bubbling, the spoon bread ready.

  As they sat to eat, the phone in Sister’s pocket rang.

  She looked at the screen. “Gray. He rarely calls at this time. Will you two excuse me?”

  She punched the “talk” square. “Hello. What’s up?”

  Betty and Shaker watched as her face changed, her cheeks reddened.

  When the call ended, she growled, “That son of a bitch. Crawford has bought hay in advance just like you said, Betty, but according to Gray, he has also offered to put up new gates at Old Paradise, replace all the fences and to buy a new furnace for the abandoned big house.”

  “What the hell?” Shaker was dumbfounded.

  “Crawford says he’ll do all that, but only if Old Paradise will no longer allow us to hunt their place. He wants all the rights to hunt there.”

  “He can’t do that.” Shaker exploded. “He’s an outlaw pack and the DuCharmes know it.”

  “Yes, they do know it, but there’s nothing the Masters of Foxhounds Association can do to landowners. Their only weapon is to deny anyone who hunts with an outlaw pack the ability to hunt with a recognized pack. Crawford couldn’t give a shit. No one hunts with him anyway, unless they work for him. Damn. This is my fault. I should have kept my mouth shut at the Ball.”

  “Perhaps,” Betty said, not lying to her. “But Crawford has been laying for us for some time. The only thing I can think of is that you and Walter”—she said—“pay the DuCharmes a visit.”

  Sister placed her hands on the table palms down, then folded them in her lap. “We will, and you know what we’ll have to say? That we understand. No hard feelings. They haven’t got a pot to piss in. Those two brothers have been fighting about that property for decades. The result is nothing gets done, especially to the main house. There is no way we can solve this problem. We haven’t the funds to make those repairs, to replace their fences. Also, if we did it for them, we’d have to do it for every fixture we are allowed to hunt. We’d be bankrupt in a skinny minute.”

  The land on which a hunt is allowed for their sport is called a fixture.

  “Plus it violates a central tenet of hunting,” Betty coolly added.

  Shaker nodded, his dark red, closely cropped hair reflecting the kitchen light. “Funny, isn’t it? When the Masters of Foxhounds Association came into being in 1907, one of the rules they formulated was th
at no hunt pay for the use of territory. The land must be freely given to hunt over. Those men knew what they were about.”

  “Yes, they did, and they were all men of great wealth,” Sister agreed. “They knew if a master could pay, then any poor hunt, even a farmer pack, would be out of business. It was a most farsighted idea.”

  “What does Crawford think he can do?” As upset as Shaker was, he could still eat, and he reached for more spoon bread. “He can’t ride but so much. He can’t hunt his own hounds and he can’t hire a good huntsman because no one wants to be tainted by his brush. Who would hire them if and when they left Crawford?”

  “Money,” said Betty. “He’ll throw so much money at someone that he’ll get a decent huntsman. Maybe even a good one.”

  A long silence followed, then Sister said what the other two had been thinking. “We need to go through our landowners. Let’s determine who is solid and who is having financial problems. We’d better get to them before Crawford does.”

  “Janie,” Betty called her by her Christian name, “we still can’t pay them.”

  “No, we can’t, but we can appeal to their sense of fairness, and we might be able to offer labor. There’s no reason we can’t rouse our club members. We go to these fixtures to clear paths and build jumps. There is no stricture from our national organization that prevents us from offering services.”

  “Like what?” Shaker said, knowing he’d be on the chain gang.

  “They will have to tell us,” said Sister.

  CHAPTER 9

  After Shaker and Betty left, Sister checked the big old wall clock. It was two-thirty. Walter Lungrun, her joint-master, was a physician. No matter how bad the roads, he made it every workday to the hospital using his teeth-rattling Wrangler. The Jeep could go through most anything, plus it looked so cool that Sister broke down last summer and bought one herself, black with a gold pinstripe.