e foxes used to leave them and go right away
out of the county and they never returned. I think they went by night
and moved great distances. Well it was early April and we had drawn
blank all day, and at the last draw of all, the very last of the
season, we found a fox. He left the covert with his back to London and
its railways and villas and wire and slipped away towards the chalk
country and open Kent. I felt as I once felt as a child on one
summer's day when I found a door in a garden where I played left
luckily ajar, and I pushed it open and the wide lands were before me
and waving fields of corn.

We settled down into a steady gallop and the fields began to drift by
under us, and a great wind arose full of fresh breath. We left the
clay lands where the bracken grows and came to a valley at the edge of
the chalk. As we went down into it we saw the fox go up the other side
like a shadow that crosses the evening, and glide into a wood that
stood on the top. We saw a flash of primroses in the wood and we were
out the other side, hounds hunting perfectly and the fox still going
absolutely straight. It began to dawn on me then that we were in for a
great hunt, I took a deep breath when I thought of it; the taste of
the air of that perfect Spring afternoon as it came to one galloping,
and the thought of a great run, were together like some old rare wine.
Our faces now were to another valley, large fields led down to it,
with easy hedges, at the bottom of it a bright blue stream went
singing and a rambling village smoked, the sunlight on the opposite
slopes danced like a fairy; and all along the top old woods were
frowning, but they dreamed of Spring. The "field" had fallen of and
were far behind and my only human companion was James, my old first
whip, who had a hound's instinct, and a personal animosity against a
fox that even embittered his speech.

Across the valley the fox went as straight as a railway line, and
again we went without a check straight through the woods at the top. I
remember hearing men sing or shout as they walked home from work, and
sometimes children whistled; the sounds came up from the village to
the woods at the top of the valley. After that we saw no more
villages, but valley after valley arose and fell before us as though
we were voyaging some strange and stormy sea, and all the way before
us the fox went dead up-wind like the fabulous Flying Dutchman. There
was no one in sight now but my f