The Perfect Day

The arrival of autumn brings no gloom for Richard Hardy, for it heralds the start of the hunting season.

The dog days of summer are filled with afternoons of barking roe bucks and dusks of brown trout absentmindedly sipping at nearly invisible morsels, but those days are now long gone.

Autumn has arrived with chill wind and needed but thankless rain, hedge and copse are starting to thin and the damp morning air is thick with lungfuls of earthy scent.

Sunset is now barely 6pm and the nights are suddenly longer than the days. However, for me the month of October is never an unwelcome house guest; the wild pheasants may well be best left until November but the mallard and teal are certainly sporting and the beagles will be racing towards the opening meet after their long break in kennels. Any day offering hounds on the trail or Beagling and duck flighting-flighting ducks on a wild pond is there to be cherished, a day offering both is frankly the perfect tonic to banish any autumnal blues.

I loaded up the truck with a knot of excited terriers and sped south out of the village, off over the edge of the chalk plateau where a single arable field can be 100 acres, before turning right and dropping into the muddier vale, where 100 acres is half of a farm and the dairy cow is queen.

Another 10 miles and we were in the appointed yard, hounds already centre of attention amongst the 60-odd hardy sporting souls who were busy fortifying themselves with generous measures of port as bowls of stupendous honey-and-mustard sausages were passed around by our hosts — held sensibly at a well practised height just above the reach of an airborne beagle.

Speeches made and instructions given and then we were off, hounds held for the briefest of seconds and then away, a surging mass streaming into the first field like water from a massive hose spreading wide.

Exuberance