Nov 24 2011
Happy Thanksgiving!
We are thankful for a beautiful day of hunting. Today was perfect hunting weather. Cool, brisk and dry (despite the wet weather yesterday).
Thank you to Marjorie Franko for leading the first field and Dennis Kelley for leading the second field. Thank you, too, for the stirrup cups and the warm welcome.
Here’s Rhonda’s hunt report which gives a flavor of the day and the special event at the end!
We had our own excitement at our Thanksgiving meet, which ran along both sides of Monument Street. (Well, OK, so there was *lots* of excitement–we’d had a cold wet day before–several inches of snow, in my case–so many of us hadn’t ridden; it was very cold, and a good many horses threw in uncharacteristic bucks, bolts, and strathspeys, resulting in several additions to the Dump Club…)
Our last piece ran more-or-less parallel to Monument Street, with the Concord River on our right, a swamp on our left, and Monument Street itself beyond the swamp. The hounds suddenly swung in a direction that our two-legged foxes surely would not have taken and yet the voice didn’t sound as if the hounds were rioting on deer. Ginny still had one or two apparently following the actual drag, so I went back to see what I could see about the others. I had to backtrack to where the trails split, taking the fork leading to the other side of the swamp. Hounds seemed to be between Ginny and me, getting further ahead, so Cricket lit the afterburners (didn’t need much urging from me).
We all find the trails past the wooded backyards past the swamp a bit confusing, but by dint of dead reckoning and luck I ended up where I hoped to be, near the final check. Hounds, and Ginny, sounded as if they’d gone further, so I scooted up the driveway back to Monument Street, in case hounds headed for the road (since I’d end up well uphill, with a good line of sight across Water’s Edge Farm, I figured maybe I could see and hear better from there, too). Sounded like hounds had turned, coming closer to me and back towards the planned check. I had just called Ginny to let her know…
Just then, something loped out of the woods and over the wall at the corner of one of the fields… My first thought was fox when I saw the brush, then changed my mind to coyote because of long legs, then back to red fox when it came into the sun and glinted dark reddish, but if it was a fox it was the biggest darned thing I’d ever seen… It loped across the fields, crossed the driveway I’d just come up, and disappeared into the brush only a few hundred yards below where a landowner was already waiting with his highly-anticipated Thanksgiving stirrup-cup.
OK, at that point I couldn’t resist… My only *real* chance to give a real Tally-ho! And then the hounds appeared, over the wall on the corner, *right* on the track of Wile E. (or Reynard, but we’re now pretty sure the former). Yikes… Afterburners lit again, Cricket and I tore back around the road and down the driveway to block the hounds from continuing. The hounds slowed, stayed in the field, decided maybe the water hole was a good way to end… And at just the right moment, Sue and Lori appeared, so we could escort those hounds back to Ginny (and the hound truck).
Of course, there were still two couple missing… So once again staff missed out on the stirrup cup and sausages! But after a bit of fruitless searching on our parts, our hound truck driver, Jen, followed a hunch and was hero of the day upon locating them all!
And sausages notwithstanding, I wouldn’t have missed that view for anything… Nor could we really be cross about hounds deciding live quarry was more fun than anise!
Rhonda
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