trouble
generally is that hunters make too much noise, thus scaring the fox so
that he tries to get away from them. This necessitates hard riding and
great activity on the part of the whippers-in. Frightening a fox almost
always results in sending him out of the road and compelling horsemen to
stop in order to take down a panel of fence every little while that they
may follow the animal, and before you can get the fence put up again the
owner is on the ground, and after you have made change with him and
mounted again the fox may be nine miles away. Try by all means to keep
your fox in the road!

It makes a great difference what kind of fox you use, however. I once
had a fox on my Pumpkin Butte estates that lasted me three years, and I
never knew him to shy or turn out of the road for anything but a loaded
team. He was the best fox for hunting purposes that I ever had. Every
spring I would sprinkle him with Scotch snuff and put him away in the
bureau till fall. He would then come out bright and chipper. He was
always ready to enter into the chase with all the chic and embonpoint of
a regular Kenosha, and nothing pleased him better than to be about eight
miles in advance of my thoroughbred pack in full cry, scampering 'cross
country, while stretching back a few miles behind the dogs followed a
pale young man and his financier, each riding a horse that had sat down
too hard on its tail some time and driven it into his system about six
joints.

Some hunters, who are madly and passionately devoted to the sport, leap
their horses over fences, moats, donjon keeps, hedges and currant bushes
with utter sang froid and the wild, unfettered toot ongsomble of a brass
band. It is one of the most spirited and touchful of sights to see a
young fox-hunter going home through the gloaming with a full cry in
one hand and his pancreas in the other.

Some like to be in at the death, as it is called, and it is certainly a
laudable ambition. To see 120 dogs hold out against a ferocious fox
weighing nine pounds; to watch the brave little band of dogs and
whippers-in and horses with sawed-off tails, making up in heroism what
they lack in numbers, succeeding at last in ridding the country of the
ferocious brute which has long been the acknowledged foe of the human
race, is indeed a fine sight.

We are too apt to regard fox-hunting merely as a relaxation, a source of
pleasure, and the result of a desire to do the way people do in the
novels