Riding Shotgun (10 page)

Cig never minded if her field took their own line over an obstacle like this. That meant the riders could jump the fence line anywhere they wanted. The one forbidden thing was for you to pass the Master. This is akin to peeing on the President.

At coops or on narrow trails Cig wanted the field to queue before the jumps. Otherwise she liked giving her people the opportunity to exercise their own judgment.

She picked a spot she figured had good footing and felt Full Throttle lift up, a mighty jet. She put her hands forward as he stretched out his dark bay neck. Landing on the other side, she searched for a decent trail through the woods, which also had many rock outcrops. Billygoat land.

Roberta, stuck on the other side of the post and rail, shivered with terror. Laura jumped back over the fence as soon as she realized Roberta hadn’t cleared it. Binky, too thrilled by the pace, never looked back so he lost his chance to “attend” to Roberta.

“Miss Ericson, I’ll give you a lead. Reebok can do it.”

“I know Reebok can,” Roberta wailed. “It’s me I’m worried about.”

Laura heard the hounds’ voices moving farther and farther away. Finding the field while picking one’s way through heavy woods was a Kit Carson job and Laura didn’t want to be separated from them. Also, she knew that on a flaming scent like this her mother would fly like a bat out of hell. Ask no questions, take no prisoners.

“Miss Ericson, climb the fence and hold my horse. I’ll get Reebok over. This is the only really hard jump we’ve got in this territory so there’s nothing to worry about after this.”

“No,” came the quavering voice. “You give me a lead. I’ve got to learn.”

“Reebok’s push-button.” Laura plucked her up, jumping back over the fence. “Just point him at the fence, keep your hands low, grab mane—I always do—and squeeze.”

“You do not grab mane, Laura. Don’t lie to make me feel better.”

“I do. Hunter does. Mom does. Sometimes you just have to. Ready?”

“Yes.” The pale voice was now almost colorless.

Laura took Go To in a slow circle. “Fall in.”

Roberta did. As Laura approached the post and rail, she deliberately kept Go To from speeding up because that would scare Roberta half to death, and Reebok would do whatever he saw Go To do. Up and over the Laura/Go To team sailed, two creatures, one mind. Reebok cleared it with Roberta, stiff-armed, clutching mane, her knuckles white. Her eyes widened, her toes pointed down but she hung on.

“You okay, Miss Ericson?”

“Yes, thanks to you.”

“You did it. Take a deep breath and drop your weight into your heels.”

“Oh dear, did my leg come up?”

“Hey, that’s what jockeys do. Flap your arms like a chicken for a second. Okay, we’d better boogie.”

Laura squeezed the gray flanks and plunged into the sweet-smelling woods, sunlight dropping through the leaves like powdered gold through gauze.

“I can’t hear the hounds, Laura.”

“I think they’ll head down to the river. If not, we’ll pick up tracks once we get to the old canal road.”

As the two hurried along, Cig was indeed on the old canal road, which needed to be cleared each summer by the club lest it become a tangled mess. The James wasn’t the easiest river to cross even this far north in Nelson County, Buckingham County being on the other side of the water. As the James rolled on, growing and widening down through other hunt territories, it became a huge river, enriching the very land it cleft in two. The whole United States could be viewed as not only an aggregate of states but as a patchwork of hunting territories carved out over the centuries with rivers, mountains, and deserts as natural boundaries.

The canal road, a little slippery, proved trickier than Cig had anticipated. For one thing, the mist that usually lifted
off the river hung thick and moist. A silver fog enshrouded the riders as they followed the hounds, their voices ghostly and muffled. Cig slowed to a trot.

She motioned for Grace to come alongside her. “What do you think?”

“He can’t get across the river at this point but if he makes it back to Tinker’s Creek he’ll go right up the middle of the creek and run upland—if it’s the fox I think it is. Fattail.”

“Yeah, he’s smarter than the rest of them put together. I’m going to cut up on the other side of the creek. Let’s see if we can stay clear of his line but still get out of here fast.”

“Okay.”

At Tinker’s Creek, Cig held up her arm for the field to halt. She strained to hear the hounds. She heard hoofbeats. Laura and Roberta pulled up at the rear of the field. Hunter turned and winked at his sister, put his fingers to his lips. They all strained to hear a twig snap, a hound call, anything.

Cig turned to Grace and shrugged. The fox must have leaped the creek and continued on. They picked their way over the creek and just when the entire field was on the other side, Caruso burst out of the woods, followed within minutes by the rest of the pack.

“Staff!” Cig yelled.

Everyone crowded to the side of the road, horses’ tails turned away from the oncoming hounds as the pack splashed into the creek, which fed the James, then scrambled up the opposing bank. Roger and Sidekick cleared it in one huge arc. Carol, Jane, and Agnes were nowhere to be seen.

“Reverse field,” Laura called from the back just as her mother soared over the creek.

They turned around in the order in which they had been moving and blasted out of there. At least they hadn’t lost the hounds. The pace accelerated. By now they’d been running, with the exception of the cornfield check, for a solid forty-five minutes.

Harleyetta, next to Hunter, was gasping. “If this keeps up we’ll be in Richmond for lunch.”

A tree blocked their path looming dangerously in the
mist. It must have come down in the previous week’s high winds. Cig reacted instantly. She slowed up, warned the field, then adroitly picked her way around the outstretched branches and continued on.

Finally they curved to the left, away from the river, out of the fog and back through the woods into a very small clearing. Not a sound could be heard other than people and horses trying to catch their breath. Cig halted in the clearing.

“We’re over to Jace Goodling’s place,” she said to Grace.

“Damn. I didn’t think we’d gone that far.”

They sat quietly for a bit. A red-tailed hawk, gazing down at them, decided they weren’t worth squat and flew on.

As they strained for an echo, a reverberation, the mist from the river crept into the clearing. Cig rode to the edge and, scarcely breathing, sat still. She glanced back to look at the field. Roberta, worn out, pulled on her flask filled with a concoction of orange juice, bourbon, and many tablespoons of sugar. Binky sidled up to her, checking to see where the dreaded Harleyetta was, and gratefully knocked back a swig when it was offered to him. Grace, face flushed, chatted with Bill, a colleague of her husband’s, an OB/GYN man. As it was a small hospital, everyone knew everybody.

For an instant Cig felt as though time were frozen. She was in a tableau painted by Sir Alfred Munnings, George Stubbs, or Ben Marshall. Here at the close of the twentieth century, the most murderous era of all human history, here for this brief moment, she and this intrepid band belonged to something ancient, something Homer wrote about, something great Elizabeth I enjoyed, something so deep in human bones that no amount of technology or “progress” could change it: the chase.

The horses, nostrils flaring, large kind eyes looking about, pink tongues playing with bits, could be horses that Achilles would have admired, or Balzac, that passionate fox-hunter. Century after century, the bond between human and horse held them together in a ballet of use and love, a negotiation between need and service. The horse submitted to domestication, the human to providing food and training,
until a time came when one couldn’t quite live without the other. Not even the advent of the automobile could dissolve this bargain of friendship.

The scarlet coats of the gentlemen answering the flaming red of the turning maples, the shining black patent leather boot tops of the ladies who had earned their colors, the white saddle pads and the rich Havana brown of the well-oiled tack, the vibrancy of the scene filled her with a sense of fragile holiness.

And for a flash, a fleeting screech of time, she could see how truly beautiful her sister was. The high peach shine in Grace’s cheeks, the dancing eyes, the hard-won and bought perfection of her body, the light touch of her hands, the perfect pitch of her voice. Yes, her sister was Aphrodite and for that split second she forgot decades of suppressed jealousy, the pain of not being the beautiful one, and she just drank in her sister’s beauty as though Grace had stepped, laughing, from a sensuous canvas by John Singer Sargent.

Hunter, tall, the black shadow of his shaved whiskers barely visible beneath his square jaw, his curly black hair peeking out from under his old hunt cap, so worn the black was now faded to brown, could have stepped off a canvas as well. His lips glistened red. His teeth were as straight and white as the orthodontist could make them. Hunter didn’t realize he was irresistible. For that his mother thanked God.

Laura was a template of Grace, her beauty unripened whereas Grace’s was in full flower. In a culture that worshiped surfaces, Cig knew beauty would help her daughter survive. Laura, without ever consciously knowing it, had learned a woman’s watchfulness. Her brother was far more trusting and innocent. Laura listened, weighed, and then acted. As for last night’s declaration, Cig couldn’t make head or tail of it. She stared at Laura, straining to remember how it felt to teeter on the edge of womanhood.

And she thought of Blackie. How he would have loved today’s hunt. No fence was too high. No run too hard. He delighted in putting the pedal to the metal. His rider’s ego was out of proportion to his accomplishment, but no one had much seemed to mind.

The funny thing was, even though he was never a true partner, a mature man, she had loved him longer than was reasonable because he was all she knew. His sheer physical intensity overwhelmed her. She could never detach herself from how gorgeous he was, and he became more handsome with age.

She put him out of her mind as she listened for the hounds. What was there about physical exhilaration, about the fluid beauty of foxhunting, that could open her soul? She searched the woods then glanced back at the people. In her own way, she loved them, even the ones who drove her crazy.

A lone howl alerted her—Ramey, the basso profundo of the pack. Not a fast hound but as steady as a rock, Ramey never bayed falsely. Closer came the magical voice. Then she heard Lily Pons, a funny little bitch with pop eyes who straggled behind but somehow managed to keep in the hunt. Lily had an uncanny ability to stay on the scent no matter how rough the terrain and to stick to a cooling scent until it warmed again.

Cig held up her hand for silence since the group had begun to gossip. They quieted.

Fattail himself burst into the clearing, stopped in his tracks right in front of Cig. He had the audacity, the sheer gall to bark right in the Master’s face. If the field hadn’t seen it they wouldn’t have believed it. Then Fattail, flicking the mighty crimson plume for which he was named, trotted around the group, downshifting to a walk out the west side of the small meadow and back into the woods. Within seconds, the pack dashed into the field only to run around the horses who naturally began moving about a bit, thereby disturbing the scent. Everyone in the field turned his horse’s nose and held his hat in the direction of Fattail’s imperious exit so that when Carol first rode by on the right, then Jane on the left, at least they knew where the fox had gone. It was a rare sight indeed to see the entire field indicating the direction of a fox’s path, but Fattail’s display was so blatant, even the least observant couldn’t miss it. Roger, followed by
Agnes, emerged, appraised the situation and dove back into the woods, Cig hot on his heels.

They cantered through the trees, praying their knees would survive it, headed up a steep, rocky incline, and came out in Bob Maki’s hay field, the hay bales in rows, a flat hay wagon standing between the rows. The sun glittered on the hay, squares of gold. The fox shot through the hay field, leaving the hounds and the field a torturous path to follow. Cig, impatient, did something she would chide a member for doing. She set her course straight for the other side of the field, soaring over the hay wagon.

At the fence line into the next field she cleared a coop, the field following behind her. She ran hell-for-leather through that field, downhill most of it, taking a coop at the other fence line. Into the woods again but only for an instant because Fattail scooted through a huge tree trunk just to drive the hounds nuts and get a few stuck behind him. Then Fattail charged into a herd of sheep. That trick slowed the hounds for some time. Roger could have lifted them and brought them to the other side of the herd but Fattail, a genius at dumping hounds, had vanished. Roger let his hounds work while the field checked for a moment, grateful for the rest.

Ramey stopped and lifted his nose, then put it back to the ground. Caruso and Pavarotti, far in the front, began to whine. They lost the line.

“How does he do it!” Cig slapped her hand on her thigh.

Grace joined her as did Hunter and Laura.

“Mom, he’s got some mojo working in this field.” Hunter lifted his cap off his head and ran a hand through his pasted down curls. “He always disappears in the same place.”

“Into thin air.” Grace found need of her flask, full of Harvey’s Hunting port, which she offered her sister who took a big swig and handed it back.

Then Cig pulled on her own flask, straight scotch, and offered it to Grace.

“God, no. I’d die.”

“Wimp.” Cig smiled.

“Mom?”

“Hunter, I’ll avert my eyes since you aren’t of age.” Cig passed him the flask, and when he returned it, offered it to Laura. “A sip?”

Laura shook her head. “No.”

“What I don’t understand is he has no den here. If he went to ground—well, it’s just too weird.” Grace accepted a drink from Harleyetta’s flask. It brought tears to Grace’s eyes.