Foxhunting Life with Horse and Hound

Marge Warder and Monty, Opening Meet, Tryon Hounds, 2005  /  Erik Olsen photoMarge Warder has had a lifelong love affair with horses. As a child, riding was her favorite activity.

She traveled the world as a stewardess with Pan American Airways and lived the big-city life in New York.

After retirement, she moved to North Carolina, resumed her life with horses, and joined the Tryon Hounds and the Green Creek Hounds.

Last year, at the age of seventy, Marge Warder fell off her horse Monty. Something was wrong. A few months later she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotropic lateral sclerosis, ALS). She moved into an assisted living home near her sister Carrie Bartlett in Louisiana. She decorated her room with horse stuff and told stories of her foxhunting adventures. She shared one heartfelt wish with a social worker visiting the home. She wanted to ride a horse one last time.

Karen Myers photo

Foxhunting songs with a purely American accent! Would you like to hear a sample? Download lyrics and the MP3 audio file and listen to Coyote Line by Edwin Hall—authentic Americana. If you have the lyrics in your hand and the music playing, you won’t be able to resist joining in on the chorus! Coyote Line is just one of ten songs in Ed Hall's CD, Meeting in the Morning, available now in our Bookstore.

Also available as promised is a new CD production of Alexander Mackay-Smith's The Songs of Foxhunting---a collection of twenty traditional songs, including John Peel; Here’s a Health to Every Sportsman; Drink Puppy, Drink; The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night; and many more favorites. There’s too much joy in singing to let those old songs fade away. Not only have they been sung for hundreds of years, but most of them are based on lyrics from the hunting field put to even older English and Irish music. In short, they’re ancient. But let's go back to Ed Hall and his country music.

Erik Olsen Photo

Lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled all through the night. With the dawn a quiet reverence prevailed. Horses and riders filed silently through a North Carolina pine forest. An occasional "Hound, please" was heard.

It was August and the beginning of Tot Goodwin’s and Green Creek Hounds’ summer hunt week. Scent was quickly diminishing with the rising heat and humidity.

Leica eventing at age 24. She placed third because she was too fast cross country.

Leica was a remarkable horse whose career took her from incorrigible youngster with a vicious buck to an impressive third-place finish at age twenty-four in the grueling MFHA Centennial Field Hunter Championship. She was still hunting and showing at age twenty-seven, when she had to be humanely euthanized as the result of a pasture injury.

With her bloodlines and dazzling good looks, Leica was primed to be an outstanding dressage horse. An imported bay with touches of white, she was registered Hanoverian (by Lindberg, out of St. Pr. Kari) who was also entered in the main stud book of the RPSI (Rheinland Pfalz Saar International) and Holsteiner registries.

But after abuse from trainers who pushed her too far too fast, Leica had other ideas, says owner Julie Whitlock McKee of Grantville, Georgia. McKee acquired the hard-headed mare at age four after the trainers gave up on her. The pair did not get off to an auspicious start, with Leica rearing the first time McKee threw a leg over her. Rearing and bucking would become a regular occurrence.