Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke

wind.
    This buoyed everyone’s spirits. The British manner of cheerfully not complaining can’t be maintained when there’s nothing to cheerfully not complain about. Forty horses ran across the moor. Stag hunting is not as show-offy as fox-hunting. There’s no jumping of ditches, hedges, and gates. Exmoor is wet through like a bath sponge; no use ditching it for drainage. The hedges are as high as tennis backboards and grow from stone heaps piled up since Roman times. And the farmers leave the gates open because some things are more important than keeping sheep in. I witnessed none of the hat-losing, horse-flipping spectacles seen in engravings on the walls of steak houses. And to be truthful, my entire knowledge of hunting on horseback has been gained by staring at such decor between courses. What sort of engravings will steak houses hang on the paneling 100 years hence? Pictures of people in Pilates classes?
    The excitement in stag hunting comes from the treacherous footing on the soaked, peat-slick moors and from the great length of the stag chase and the great speed of the stag’s run. It can also be dangerous just sitting on a horse. A young woman fell off while the hunt was gathered by the riverbank. A medical evacuation helicopter was called. The hunt was uninterrupted.
    The Exmoor stag hunters distribute a brochure, in Q&A form, arguing that stag hunting is not particularly inhumane. “Hunters” might well be substituted for “deer.”
    Q. But deer must be terrified by stag hunting!
    A. . . . Deer pay no more heed . . . than a grazing wildebeest (so often seen on TV) does to a pride of lions lunching off a mate nearby.
    I had been offered a tame mount on which to follow the hunt.
    â€œHow tame?” I asked.
    â€œVery tame.”
    â€œThere was,” I said, “a man who used to come through my neighborhood in the 1950s with a pony and a camera . . .”
    â€œNot that tame.”
    But I was inspired, watching the hunters dash around on the moor. The horses were beautiful, as tall as those that pull wagons in beer commercials but as gracefully made as what I’d lost fifty dollars on in last year’s Kentucky Derby. I vowed to learn to ride—as soon as they got the middle part of horses to be lower to the ground and had the saddles made by BarcaLounger.
    Wind, rain, and temperature grew worse. The hunt descended into a precipitous dell where I’d have thought the riders would have to walk their mounts. They didn’t. But I couldn’t even walk myself. I returned to where the hunt followers were gathered by the side of a road. The followers were disturbed. A pale and agitated young couple were walking down the road. Surely these were “antis.” They were dressed head to toe in black.
    But the boy and the girl were just lost backpackers who’d made the mistake of going out into nature for fun. The entertainments of nature are of a sterner kind. They were wet and miserable. The hunters were not, or didn’t feel that they were. But the stag and every trace of it had vanished, and the hunters decided to “pack it in, to spare the horses.”
    Michael, Adrian, and I headed back to Michael’s farm in his horse van, a bit disappointed. And then through the van windows came that music I’d been told about: the full cry of a pack. It is a bouillabaisse of a noise, with something in it of happy kids on a playground, honking geese headed for your decoys, and the
wheee
of a deep-sea fishing reel when you’ve hooked something huge. This particular music was being sung soprano. A beagle pack, thirty-some strong, was bounding across a pasture. We got out and hurried in the direction of the chase. Beagling is like foxhunting or stag hunting except that the quarry is hare, and it’s done without benefit of horses. Beaglers follow the pack—at a very brisk pace—on foot. Hunting hares with beagles is banned by the Hunting