Hark Forward! An Exciting Season Is Ahead

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Norm Fine's Blog

By Norman Fine

MFHA President Tony Leahy, MFHIt was ten years ago, but MFHA President Tony Leahy yearns to recapture the fun and enthusiasm of the 2007 MFHA Centennial Season. We had Regional Joint Meets, Foxhound Performance Trials, and Field Hunter Trials all across North America, and Tony wants to do it again! Accordingly, the upcoming 2017/2018 season has been designated a season to Hark Forward!

All events are accompanied by dinners, parties, and the company of sporting cousins from all across the country. No one goes home hungry or thirsty! The MFHA is maintaining an up-to-date schedule of events on their website. Click for planning your own participation. Take note of the dates and geography. If you join the caravans for all or part of any of the event tours, you’ll find hunt clubs along the route that have scheduled Friendship Meets and more hospitality to break up your long drives.

Foxhunting Tips

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Norm Fine's Blog

By Norman Fine

Karen Myer photoYou just received the most beautiful fox head earrings last week for your birthday. Won’t they look smashing in the hunting field, worn with your new dark blue frock coat?

You just heard a staccato burst of perhaps ten rapid notes on the huntsman’s horn from inside the covert. What’s happening?

Your blood is up, hounds are racing in full cry, your horse is jumping every obstacle with enthusiasm, and it’s clearly the best run of the season. You gallop through an open gate and repeat the call you heard from riders ahead of you. “Gate, please!” Have you fulfilled your duty?

The whipper-in gallops by and advises the Field Master that a leash of foxes just left the covert. What?

Et Tu, New York Times?

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Norm Fine's Blog

By Norman Fine

Teddy, pawing the pavement  /  Sketch of New York TImes photo
Damon Winter, writing cut lines for a New York Times article about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempts to ban horse drawn carriages in New York City, got taken. In so doing, the Times published fake news.

Here's Winter's caption for the photo sketched above: “Teddy signaling his desire for more food by scraping his shoes on the sidewalk.”

Oh, we get it alright. We're supposed to believe that poor Teddy is being starved and abused by his carriage driver.

What happened to fact-checking here? Obviously, Winter knows nothing about horses, nor do the animal activists that fed him that line. And if they do know something about horses, that’s even worse. They would know there are many reasons for a horse to scratch the ground aside from hunger, and would be knowingly lying.

Foxhunters Speak: Meet Author at Virginia Foxhound Show

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Norm Fine's Blog

By Norman Fine

Mary Kalergis’s new book Foxhunters Speak was launched this spring. Mary will be in the Foxhunting Life stand at the Virginia Foxhound Show to greet readers and sign her books. Please stop by and say hello.

We’ve published two sneak previews of Mary’s book over the last couple of months in FHL WEEK. I hope you had a chance to read Melvin Poe’s story in March and Tot Goodwin’s story in April. It’s as if you had sat down with each of these respected huntsmen in their own dens, shared a tumbler, listened to the experiences that formed their personal hunting philosophies, and met the mentors who shaped them.

Melvin and Tot represent just two of fifty foxhunting personalities whom Mary sought out, sat with, and interviewed. Her experience in this genre shows. She’s published similar books on subjects from teenagers to adoption to childbirth. She’s traveled the country for her  interviews and edited them into coherent essays that are both personal and frank. Now she’s done it for the foxhunting world, and I heartily recommend it. Even the interview of ten-year-old Colin Smith, son of a professional huntsman, is charming.

Dartmoor and Doyle

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Norm Fine's Blog

By Norman Fine

Janet Ladner photo

Photographer Janet Ladner was out following the Mid-Devon Foxhounds when she came across these wild ponies taking shelter from the snow. I have hunted on Dartmoor, in England’s West Country, and found it to be a fascinating landscape of bleakness and beauty, with visible reminders of cultures that serially take one back in time all the way to prehistory. While hunting, one comes across ditches left by tin mining activity that began in pre-Roman times and continued to the twentieth century, evidence of farm tillage going back to the Bronze age in the parallel rows running across the slopes, and standing stones erected in prehistoric times. During quiet moments when hounds check, one can allow the imagination to soar.

For me, Dartmoor also conjures memories of cold winter boyhood days at home, reading the spooky mystery, Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was the third of his Sherlock Holmes novels to be published, and this Dartmoor mystery filled my young head with delicious terror.

By coincidence, Janet Ladner’s photos of the ponies on Dartmoor arrived just as writer/editor Steve Price sent me this foxhunting poem, written by Arthur Conan Doyle. A confluence of Dartmoor and Doyle. Who knew he wrote such poetry?