All of my loyal reader recalls the famous "Gayest Lurchers EVAR!!!1! day. Here is its sequel.
This week end, out with the New Flat Hunt. A crisp, cool day with a clear sky that so often means a scentless day. Less than a dozen followers and staff. The secretary of my Home Hunt was riding, I think his first day here. I like these intimate little fields!
Among the group were the Gayest Lurchers EVAR!!!1!. They were still in the same little truck/launcher, with their same explosive little owner/crew.
I rode with a local farmer. As we pulled away from the meet I realised that my camera had been left behind, and told my pilot that we'd have a good day because there seems to be a relationship there.
Hounds moved toward the first wood to draw. Before they could be leud in, out of the other end crept a coyote! No need to draw, our Huntsman carried them to the line and they were off, screaming.
The coyote ran across plough and into the next covert, and hounds held on. Along through a big s curve shaped wood, and out the other side. He shed some pursuit in the process, passing two or three couple on to another coyote who smelled better to them and ran a different way out of this covert. He also shed all but two of the mounted field, who followed that smaller group.
On over another field, then into another covert. Rinse, repeat. Typical of this country, he decided to run and did. Not straight though, and not really taking to open country. He seemed to think his salvation was in the twists and turns he could make in the woods, those crack-the-whip turns which slow hounds and stretch out the distance from his pursuers.
It wasn't happening for him today though. Hounds stayed right on through every evasive twist and turn.
We pulled up in a field as we saw him run into a V shaped covert. Here's a diagram:
.
x < *-
,
The < symbol represents the covert. We were at the comma, about 60 yards below the covert near the point. Mr. Coyote came in at the asterisk, followed by the hyphen marked hounds. The period? About 60 yards up, that was the location of the GLE!!!!!1!
He was dragging. Hounds had been absolutely on him for twenty minutes or so, and you could see that he was not coping. He came out at the point of the covert, heading across an open field- toward the x on the diagram.
He wasn't going to make it. His distress was plain to see. The field was a big one, rolling uphill. The next covert was three or four furlongs off.
And hounds were screaming maybe 100 yards behind him. That undergrowth was barely slowing them down.
He was going to lose his last race.
A few years ago I was out with a pack of foxhounds in the south of England, riding with the Terrierman. They drew a small patch of rough ground, and from our vantage point we could see a fox in the middle of it.
He waited too long to get a move on, and hounds chopped him. As we checked the ragged remains over for disease, my pilot muttered, "Sometimes I see why the antis get the hump."
Me too.
At this point, my eye was attracted to a flurry of activity at the GLE!!!!1! truck.
Lock on, launch!
Those hairy demons hit that coyote like a Predator strike and rolled him over. Absolutely classic.
And up he jumped, whirling to face them, snapping defiance. As sight hounds will, the GLE!!!!1! stood there staring. "Oh noes! He's not running away! What do we do?"
He snarled again and turned to leave, and the hounds hit him in a body. The end.
This was, I think, only the second time this season these hounds had caught one. The Huntsman and staff were very pleased, as they should have been. On what was actually a poor scenting day, hounds had fairly and honestly run down a fit coyote. The lurchers' owner was ECSTATIC, she was jumping and yipping like a terrier being held back at a rat hole. I was afraid- no hopeful- she would run in to assist in the worry herself.
Alas our Secretary and most of the mounted field missed it.
And then off to find another one. Which they did, but just could not hold. I managed to retrieve the camera for an end of day picture.
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