The Fox Hunt

by Bonnie Bryant

  Read all the Saddle Club books!

  Horse Crazy

  Horse Shy

  Horse Sense

  Horse Power

  Trail Mates

  Dude Ranch

  Horse Play

  Horse Show

  Hoof Beat

  Riding Camp

  Horse Wise

  Rodeo Rider

  Starlight Christmas

  Sea Horse

  Team Play

  Horse Games

  Horsenapped

  Pack Trip

  Star Rider

  Snow Ride

  Racehorse

  Fox Hunt

  Horse Trouble

  Ghost Rider

  Copyright © 1992 by Bonnie Bryant Hiller

  Cover art copyright © 1992 by George Tsui

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  “The Saddle Club” is a registered trademark of Bonnie Bryant Hiller.

  “USPC” and “Pony Club” are registered trademarks of the United States Pony Clubs, Inc., at The Kentucky Horse Park, 4071 Iron Works Pike, Lexington, KY 40511-8462.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82503-2

  Originally published by Bantam Skylark in June 1992

  First Delacorte Ebook Edition 2012

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  TROUBLE’S BREWING BEFORE THE FOX HUNT!

  Carole felt a terrible cringing sensation when she thought about what it was Stevie had done. Stevie’s brothers would certainly try to get back at her. It would be one thing if they put up notes in the boys’ room at school or if they short-sheeted her bed or replaced her lunch sandwich with dog food. It would be another thing altogether, however, if Stevie’s brothers decided to aim their revenge at what Stevie loved best: horseback riding. There were all kinds of things they could do that could jeopardize Stevie’s riding. The boys would know that and it would most certainly be their target. That was something Carole couldn’t let happen.

  It was time for The Saddle Club to come to the rescue, even if Stevie didn’t know it.…

  STEVIE LAKE PASTED a smile on her face. It wasn’t easy to do under the circumstances. There she was at the dinner table, surrounded by her three brothers. They were giving her a hard time. Normally she would have given back equally, but tonight was different. Tonight her boyfriend, Phil Marston, was a dinner guest. Stevie didn’t like it when Phil saw her nastier side, though it was quite a temptation considering the ribbing the two of them were getting.

  Chad, her eldest brother, had started it all.

  “So, tell me, Stevie,” he’d said. “Just where are you and Phil going tonight after dinner?”

  “We’re going to an organizing meeting for the mock hunt,” she’d said evenly.

  “Oh, you hunt mocks?” her twin brother, Alex, had asked. “They’ve certainly been a menace to the local farmers.”

  “Alex!” Stevie had said between her teeth.

  Phil had just smiled. “Not exactly, Alex,” he’d said patiently, acting as if he thought Alex really didn’t know what it meant. “It’s mock—as in pretend. It’s a pretend fox hunt being sponsored by Stevie’s Pony Club. It’s to prepare all of us for the real fox hunt that is taking place at my Pony Club.”

  “Oh, right,” Chad had piped in. “That’s when everybody dresses up in red jackets and chases after foxes while yelling unintelligible things and drinking brandy from flasks, right?”

  “Tallyho!” her youngest brother, Michael, contributed.

  Now Stevie was fuming. There were many times in her life when she’d wished she were an only child. This was one of those times. She imagined what it would be like to have a calm, intelligent discussion of fox hunting with her parents and Phil.

  “I mean, is fox meat really all that good?” Alex asked.

  “Aw come on,” Chad said to him. “Haven’t you ever heard the famous description of fox hunting by Oscar Wilde, the English playwright?” Chad was in ninth grade and enjoyed showing off his superior knowledge to everybody else in the family. Alex and Michael waited for him to continue. “He called it ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.’ ”

  Michael and Alex howled with laughter.

  Stevie grimaced. “Shows how much you know,” she said. “Fox hunting is an old and honorable sport. In England, where there are a lot of foxes, they’re viewed as a pest and the farmers often really do want them to be caught as long as it’s humane. Here in America, where there are just a few foxes, they are rarely caught and even more rarely killed. In fact, most hunters would be disappointed if the hounds were to catch the fox. See, we want that same fox to be available to lead us on a merry chase the next time we go fox hunting.” The instant the phrase “merry chase” left her lips, she was sorry.

  “A merry chase!” Chad howled. Alex and Michael joined in. Even Stevie’s parents seemed to be having trouble keeping their faces straight. Stevie blushed, and that made her all the angrier.

  It just wasn’t easy living with three brothers. That was one reason why Stevie loved horseback riding so much. She was the only one in her family who rode horses. It was a place she could be alone—or at least without her obnoxious brothers. Of course, she wasn’t completely alone on horseback. When she went riding at her nearby stable, Pine Hollow, she was usually with her best friends, Carole Hanson and Lisa Atwood, and sometimes she was with Phil. This time, on the mock hunt and the real fox hunt, she was going to be with all of them, and she couldn’t wait.

  Stevie, Lisa, and Carole were three very different girls, but they had one big thing in common: horses. In fact, they loved horses and riding so much that they had formed a club. They called it The Saddle Club. Members had to be horse crazy and they had to be willing to help one another out of all kinds of jams. Phil, who lived a few towns away and belonged to a different Pony Club, was an out-of-town member of The Saddle Club. There were a few other riders they’d met who were out-of-town members, too. There were no other riders who were horse crazy enough in Willow Creek, Virginia, where the girls lived, but that was fine with Stevie, Lisa, and Carole. The three of them had plenty of fun on their own.

  “Actually, there’s a lot of misinformation around about fox hunting,” Phil said, once the laughter had quieted down. “We’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject at Cross County—that’s my Pony Club—and one thing I thought was interesting was that only the huntsman, the Master of the Hounds, and the whippers-in are doing any actual hunting. The rest of us are just along for the ride.”

  “You mean you’re not armed?” Chad asked sarcastically.

  “Nobody on a fox hunt is armed,” Stevie said, regaining her composure. “See, it’s just a really good excuse for a cross-country ride with your friends over fences and through fields.”

  “Right,” Phil added. “The exciting part is that you never know where the hunt is going to go. It’s not like going on a trail ride.”

  Stevie couldn’t believe how polite Phil was being to her brothers. It was much
more than they deserved.

  “It sounds very exciting to me,” Alex said. He turned to his father. “I don’t know that we should allow Stevie to go on this thing. She’s so excitable.…”

  “Ahem,” Mrs. Lake said. That was a subtle signal that Alex was pushing the boundaries. The subtlety was lost on Michael. He plowed right on ahead, turning to Alex.

  “But didn’t you say that the only reason Stevie wanted to do this thing was because Phil was doing it?”

  After the angry flash of red cleared through Stevie’s head, she kept herself from leaping for her little brother’s throat by imagining how much fun it would be to torture him to death. Nothing fast, just slow and really painful—in full view of all of his stuffed animals. And then, for Chad and Alex—

  “Ahem!” Mr. Lake said. “I think it’s time to change the subject. In fact, if we don’t change the subject, I think I may disinvite some of my family members to the circus, which is coming to town in two weeks.” The subtlety of that remark was not lost on anybody. There was a traveling circus that did a few days of shows in all the nearby towns every year, and it was a particular favorite of the Lake family. Stevie’s brothers were silenced quickly.

  “Oh, right, the Emerson Circus,” Phil said. “It’s coming to Cross County soon, too. It’s a great circus. My favorite part is always the clowns.”

  “Not me. I like the trained animals,” Stevie said. “Especially the horses.”

  “Anyone for dessert?” Mrs. Lake asked brightly.

  “I’ll help clear,” Stevie said.

  “My, she’s being domestic!” Chad teased. “Looks like she wants to show off for somebody. I wonder who?”

  When Stevie was pretty sure Phil couldn’t see, she gave Chad her nastiest look. “I’m just going to help Mom because it’s your night to do it, and last time you cleared, you broke a glass. Remember?”

  Before he could answer, she was at the sink and had the water turned on. That made enough noise so that she could grumble and nobody could hear her. At least Phil couldn’t hear her.

  The rest of dinner was relatively uneventful, primarily because Chad got three phone calls from girls in his class and spent most of dessert promising to call them back later. He gobbled down his pudding, then dashed for the phone to make good on his promises.

  Stevie sighed with relief. He was always the ring leader of her brothers. As long as he wasn’t around, things might be a little bit quiet.

  After she and Phil cleared the table, Mrs. Lake excused them and told them to be on their way to Pine Hollow. After all, she didn’t want the two of them to be late for the meeting.

  Stevie couldn’t get out of the door fast enough.

  It was a cool evening. Pine Hollow was a ten-minute walk from Stevie’s house, and both of them were glad nobody had offered to drive them over. They would get to be alone for a few minutes.

  “I’m sorry about that—” Stevie began, slipping her hand into Phil’s.

  He squeezed her hand affectionately. “Always remember, Stevie, I’ve got sisters where you’ve got brothers. Sisters can be just as mean and vindictive as brothers. Chad, Alex, and Michael don’t bother me at all.”

  “Well, they bother me a lot and you can bet I’m going to get even with them for that! I mean the teasing is one thing and is usually fair, but they were being downright rude. Imagine making such fun of fox hunting!”

  “A lot of people do,” Phil reminded her. “A lot of people think it’s an odd sport.”

  “Then they just don’t understand it, do they?”

  “Nope, they don’t understand it at all,” Phil agreed.

  “So I suppose we just better keep it a secret to ourselves, right?”

  He winked at her. “Sure thing,” he said. “Only it’s going to be hard when we’re riding across people’s fields and backyards in hot pursuit of a fox, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll do it on tiptoe,” Stevie suggested. “They’ll never know we’re there.”

  Phil laughed. Stevie liked it better when the two of them laughed about fox hunting together than when other people, like her brothers, were laughing at them.

  It was exciting to see the crowd in Max Regnery’s office. Max and his mother, Mrs. Reg, ran Pine Hollow and the Pony Club, Horse Wise. It seemed that all of Horse Wise was there, but all of Cross County was there, too, along with Phil’s instructor, Mr. Baker. Stevie and Phil waved to Carole and Lisa and grabbed spots near them on the floor. Everybody was jammed and crammed into Max’s office. Nobody wanted to miss a word.

  Mr. Baker spoke first. He explained that the two main purposes of a mock hunt were to have fun and to learn about hunting. Riders would be assigned jobs. One would be the fox, another rider would be the Master of the Hounds, one would be the huntsman, several would be whippers-in, quite a few would be hounds. The rest would be what he called “the field.” Then Mr. Baker took a few minutes to explain what the Master, the huntsman, and the whippers-in were supposed to do. Stevie listened intently as the instructor told them that in a real hunt, the person who was totally in charge of everything except the actual tracking of the fox was the Master. The huntsman was in charge of tracking. The whippers-in were there to help the huntsman and help keep the hounds on the track. The best way to learn about how the real hunt was going to work was to have the mock hunt be as real as possible.

  “And now Max has a few words for you,” Mr. Baker said, turning the meeting over to Max.

  Max explained to the riders that they were expected to be at Pine Hollow by seven-thirty on Saturday morning, that the hunt would take place beginning at eight-thirty and they would need every minute of that hour for tacking up and final organizing. He went over the dress requirements and the equipment everybody should have with them. He also explained that he and Mr. Baker would assign the roles of hounds for the hunt. “We’ll appoint a Master, and that job will go to the person who has shown the most work on learning about fox hunts. We’ll also choose a huntsman, a few of the whippers-in, and someone devious to be the fox,” he said.

  Max continued. “Now, there’s one final thing I can’t say too often, so I’m going to say it now, and I’m going to say it again and again until I’m sure all of you know it. A fox hunt—even a mock one—is something we can do only with the permission of the landowners around Pine Hollow and Cross County. Mr. Baker and I have spent some time making arrangements with the farmers around Pine Hollow and his stable so that our hunts aren’t confined to our own land. We will be riding on other people’s property with their specific permission, and we must never forget that we are their guests. We will ride only where we are permitted, when we are permitted. We will leave all gates exactly as we found them; we will leave the land exactly as we found it. Anyone who violates these rules of conduct, who goes on land where we are not welcome, who leaves gates open or trash behind, will be dismissed from these hunts immediately. There will be no exceptions. Am I making myself clear?”

  All around the room, the young riders nodded. One of the first things young riders had to learn was where they could ride and where they couldn’t. If a farmer or landowner permitted riding on his or her property, it was always essential to be a courteous and considerate guest.

  “Any questions?” Max asked.

  Veronica diAngelo raised her hand. Stevie grimaced, wondering what she was going to say. Veronica was just about her least-favorite person at Pine Hollow. She was a rich girl who was very selfish and much more concerned with how she was dressed than how she was riding.

  “Yes, Veronica?”

  “Isn’t there traditionally a party after a hunt?” she asked. It was typical of Veronica to be thinking about a party instead of about the hunt.

  “I was just getting to that,” Max said. “Horse Wise will be hosting a hunt breakfast following the mock hunt on Saturday. We’ll have our organizing meeting for that on Tuesday after riding class. Please plan to be here. That’s all for now. I’ll see my riders on Tuesday, and we’ll welcome everybody
back here on Saturday for the mock hunt. Until then, well, tallyho!”

  Just hearing the word, silly as it sounded, made Stevie feel the excitement of the upcoming hunt. She was thrilled by the idea of the chase—the ultimate game of hide-and-seek—riding wildly across the rolling Virginia countryside, under branches, over streams and obstacles, free of paths, accompanied by friends. It was going to be wonderful and exciting, and she could hardly wait.

  First, however, there was something else she had to take care of. When she’d said good night to Phil, Lisa, and Carole, she set her mind to her next task: revenge.

  STEVIE HARDLY SLEPT a wink that night or the next. Her mind was so filled with wonderful ideas of things to do to her brothers that she simply didn’t have time for sleep. By the time Monday morning came, her plan was complete. Her goal was to humiliate her brothers totally without letting them know—for sure—who was responsible. The only way to do that was to do it where they would never find out. For that, Stevie chose the girls’ room at her school.

  Stevie and her brothers all went to a private school in Willow Creek called Fenton Hall. A lot of the girls who rode at Pine Hollow also went to Fenton Hall, including Veronica diAngelo, a fact Stevie preferred to ignore most of the time. That Monday morning as she walked to school, putting the finishing touches on her plot, she particularly tried to ignore it. It wasn’t easy, though, since Veronica was walking right next to her, talking a mile a minute about something Stevie was sure she didn’t care the slightest bit about.

  “All the best people do it, you know,” Veronica said. “I mean, I’ve been trying to convince Max to do this for years.”

  “What are you talking about?” Stevie asked.

  “Why, the fox hunt, of course. I mean, it’s been a tradition among the finest families in Virginia since colonial days.…” Veronica let the thought hang.

  Stevie groaned inwardly. Veronica was actually a pretty good rider, but her interest in riding ran much more toward what “the finest families” did than toward the hard work and fun involved. She cared more that her outfit matched the saddle pad worn by her purebred Arabian mare, Garnet, than she did that Garnet was comfortable with the bit she’d chosen for her. She cared a lot more about her horse’s pedigree, which was considerable, than she did about her own performance. As Stevie considered these facts about Veronica, she once again concluded that she really despised Veronica.