Fox Tracks (26 page)

He and the boss texted in code for pickups and deliveries so Art knew the call would provide more information.

“Hey, boss.”

“Art, can you go up next Tuesday?”

“Sure can.”

“Donny?”

“He’s a good hand.”

“That’s what you said about Carter. I trusted you and I’m still trusting you, but if Donny proves shaky, we got a problem.”

“He’s solid,” said Art. “Also, he doesn’t drink. I didn’t know Carter fell off the wagon.”

“For good.”

That was the end of the conversation. When the sheriff had questioned Art, he told Ben some of what he knew about Carter. Not all, of course. He was afraid to ask the boss about the journeyman’s end. Now his fears were confirmed. He sat there wondering if he could get off the merry-go-round. As long as he did his job, kept his mouth shut, asked no questions at pickups or deliveries, he thought he’d be okay. But what if something went wrong?

“I
apologize for citing Tariq Al McMillan as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Congressman Rickman, looking utterly distressed. “In my zeal to root out terrorists, I have done a disservice to fellow Christians. As a born-again Christian, I was not aware of the Coptic Sect. Although their religion is in many ways unlike Western Christianity, they are still Christians, and are under assault. The Coptic Christians comprise about 10 percent of Egypt’s population but the official figure given is 8.6 million. I apologize for being unaware of the scale of persecution.

“As a member of the United States Congress, I will use my office to do what I can to help besieged Christians everywhere.”

On network TV, Congressman Dave Rickman ate a large portion of crow but did his best to make it look like pheasant.

Sister, Gray, and Tootie watched the news report Wednesday morning.

“I’ll be damned.” Sister clapped her hands, which made the dogs bark.

“I’m eating,”
Golly complained.
“Let’s be civilized.”

“I wonder who got to him?” Gray said.

“Crawford,” Sister answered. “I don’t know how he did it, but he did it. True to his word. At our emergency board meeting, he said he’d take care of it.”

This in-studio report was followed by a news correspondent in Cairo reporting on riots on the streets of Egypt.

Tootie watched in horror. “When I talked to Tariq the last time he hunted with Jefferson, he said he was going to try and get his parents and sisters out of there. I can see why.”

After Gray left for a meeting in Charlottesville, the two women finished the outside chores, then drove to Mill Ruins. Sister had asked Walter if she could feed the foxes on his property, and he’d agreed.

With the truck bed carrying twenty-five-pound bags of kibble, the first stop was in front of the old mill. Tootie hoisted the bag on her shoulder and they walked behind the mill, where a large wooden feeder box was tucked under heavy brush.

Sister fought the branches and creeper, lifting up the large door on top. “I make this hard for myself.”

Tootie set the bag down, sliced off a corner with her pocket-knife, then lifted it up, pouring the kibble into the feeder box.

“They cleaned this out, didn’t they?” Tootie could smell fox.

“It’s been a month. If the weather is bad, with nothing left out there—which is usually the case in February, early March—I step it up to every three weeks. But it’s been such a warm winter until now.”

They walked back to the truck, crunching little ice crystals below in the mud. The low farm road ruts were half filled with melted snow, a skim of thick ice on top.

The second stop was way back at the edge of the property’s pastures. Sister crawled over a coop and took the bag from Tootie,
who then lifted herself over. Then they filled another big box in the woods.

Walking back, both women breathed a little heavier than when they started.

“I thought I was in good shape.” Tootie smiled.

“Two legs. You’re usually up on four when you’re covering distance,” Sister said. “Okay. Two more buckets at Mill Ruins, then we’d better drop some food at Tattenhall Station.”

The thick mud made getting back to the big shed difficult: The bed of the truck fishtailed, but that four-wheel-drive did the trick. Finally, they made it. The door to the shed was not locked.

“No feeder.” Sister got up on the back of the truck to hand down two five-gallon buckets with lids. A small hole was drilled at the edge, two inches from the bottom.

She handed these to Tootie, then jumped down to pull off a bag of food.

“I thought you put food a ways from the den. Make them travel for it,” Tootie said once they were in the dimly lit shed.

“I do, but I think we’ll have babies here come early April,” explained Sister. “So I’m going to put one bucket by the two openings and we can walk another one to the woods’ edge. When we hunted here we jumped a dog fox I didn’t know. He’s here with our vixen. Oh, hey, will you go get me baling twine? There’s a roll on the floor on your side of the truck.”

“Right. Along with the hair dryer.” Tootie left quickly, returning with the twine.

Sister tied the bucket through the handle to an old nail sticking out of a support post. This way the foxes could fish out the food but not overturn the bucket.

“Ready?” Tootie then poured part of the feed bag into the five-gallon buckets.

Sister clamped the lid on top.

As they drove out after taking the other bucket to the woods, they again fishtailed left and right. A quarter of a mile from the turnoff, Art DuCharme was driving straight for them. Surprised at seeing them, he backed out—no easy task.

Sister waved as she reached the paved road. He waved back while trying to appear nonchalant.

“Wonder what Art’s doing back here on Walter’s land?”

After driving down the much better farm roads and filling up four huge feeders at Tattenhall Station, they returned to Roughneck Farm. She needed to make her draw list, the list of hounds to hunt, and give it to Shaker to compare. Tomorrow they’d hunt at Little Darby.

Before that, she phoned Ben Sidell. “Ben, I was at Mill Ruins filling up feeders. I ran into Art DuCharme on the road to the shed, the one that was locked up.”

“I thought I told you not to go back there or to the abandoned road at the Lorillard place.”

“You did, but time has passed and I need to feed the foxes. I’m sorry, I should have called you first.”

“You should.” He waited. “Art?”

“Right.”

“Was he surprised to see you?”

“I’d say so. Probably as surprised as I was to see him.”

“Well, thank you for calling me.”

“Is Art a person of interest? Isn’t that what you say now?”

“He is. Not for murder, but he did work with the victim, and he’s had run-ins with the law before. Always for the same offense. Moonshine.”

“He might have a new one.”

T
he four-horse trailer swayed slightly as the road curved. Well accustomed to riding in the horse trailer, Rickyroo, Outlaw, Hojo, and Iota paid it no mind and continued pulling bits of hay from their feed bags. Due to the cold, the windows for each trailer berth were closed, but each horse could see outside well enough. An overhead vent provided some air circulation.

“It’s those high thin clouds,”
Rickyroo noted.

“Supposed to snow Saturday.”
Outlaw always listened closely to the barn radio, as did all the horses.

“Bitsy predicts snow, too,”
said Hojo. He found the small owl amusing.

“Bitsy may be the nosiest animal ever,”
declared Outlaw.
“She’s not content with reporting on the living, she has to bring reports from the dead.”

“I tell her to stop flying around the Hangman’s Tree, but she perches, hears the spirits, and then scares herself,”
said Hojo.
“Live humans are bad enough. Why does she want to listen to dead ones?”

“Maybe she’s trying to scare you,”
Rickyroo teased.

“Nothing scares me,”
Hojo bragged.

“Me neither.”
Outlaw exhaled loudly.
“But I am cautious when approaching the Ha-Ha fence at Little Dalby.”

A Ha-Ha is often made of brush, often American boxwoods, and beyond it lies a ditch. If the animal did not clear it, he could push through. In general, Americans shied away from using brush as fencing, but it could work as a barrier. Ha-Ha fences were often one or two hundred years old, the hedgerow clipped, the ditches cleaned out. There was room to get your footing if you jumped the ditch, then faced the fence. If coming from the other direction, a horse could pause, then take the ditch. A few, full of themselves, took the whole obstacle. Some made it, some didn’t. Being stuck down in the ditch invariably caused a scramble among riders.

“What you have to do is ignore your human,”
said Hojo.
“Pace yourself. Of course, if they’re seesawing at your mouth and pulling your head up, there’s not but so much you can do. However, the smart ones eventually learn to trust you to take the fence and to sit there quietly.”

“That’s why it’s called a Ha-Ha fence,”
Outlaw replied to Rickyroo’s advice.

At this, they all laughed.

“So what’s Bitsy’s latest news from the beyond?”
Iota asked.
“I haven’t talked to her lately.”

“Okay. Now I am only repeating what she said. I’m not saying I believe it.”
Outlaw began with that precautionary preamble.
“Bitsy says the twelfth person hung there, Quincy Deyle—hung for rape—anyway, he told her there’s a killer in the hunt field.”

Hojo was highly skeptical.
“How would he know if he’s hanging on the tree? Or whatever he’s doing?”

“Takes a crook to know a crook,”
Outlaw said.
“He raped a lady in 1778 and then strangled her.”

“Doesn’t make any sense. Why would you mate with a mare and then
kill her?”
Rickyroo, although gelded, as were all the boys, couldn’t understand such destructiveness.

“It’s a human thing,”
said Iota.

The four companions babbled all the way to Little Dalby. When heading west, the crossroads at Chapel Cross was a key geographic spot in the Jefferson Hunt territory. Straight west once past Tattenhall Station, you passed Orchard Hill, then the Chapel itself. Going west, the Gulf Station was on your right, and then Old Paradise covered both sides of the tertiary road. Of course, the Jefferson Hunt could no longer hunt there.

Turning left at the crossroads, you came across some of Kasmir’s land. The mountains were close here. Then you passed Beveridge Hundred, still in good shape after all these years, and finally Little Dalby. No fixture was all that distant from any other, but the road left a lot to be desired. In a car, you might go thirty-five miles an hour. Hauling horses or hounds, that speed dropped to twenty-five, maybe thirty on a straightaway.

Passing through the gates to Little Dalby, the horses lifted their heads, a current of excitement running through them, as well as Betty and Sister in the truck cab. The modest old gates, so unlike Crawford’s estate, consisted of two fieldstone pillars, set wide apart. On top were brass crosses, for back in the eighteenth century, Little Dalby provided a refuge for Catholics. Even though Virginia’s James Madison was the first to write about separation of church and state, religious prejudice still existed.

As she pulled in to park on the well-drained flat field, Betty said, “I wish I knew the foxes better at Little Dalby.”

“No matter. They know us.” Sister smiled.

“I guess they do.” Betty checked out the trailers. “Don’t you like seeing people already here when we pull in?”

“I do. We’ve got a small contingent of Custis Hall girls. The
afternoon classes girls. Donny’s here with one of Sybil’s horses, I see. How many do you count?”

“Nineteen. Not bad for a February sixteenth—cold, too.”

“Yeah, but everyone knows the season is closing in fast. We have one month left. Gotta get those hunts in.”

“And a lot know the foxes are mating, which makes for great runs.” Betty put on the emergency brake, even though the field was level. In a minute, the two women were out, wearing heavy bye-day tweed coats, a warm tie at their throats and each with a faded brown hunt cap—tails down, for they were staff—and brown field boots, a size too big, so they could wear extra socks.

Thin layers kept them warm more than one heavy layer. Keeping the torso warm wasn’t as difficult as those toes and fingers. Eventually, cold won out.

Moving off promptly at ten, the pack headed north, pale sunlight dispelling some of winter’s gloom. A northerly cast was a good choice because most of Little Dalby’s land ran from the house northward.

They jumped over coops, and had crossed two tidy pastures when the hounds feathered. Moving their tails vigorously, they surrounded a long row of large rolled hay bales. Mice like to make nests in the hay bales and foxes like to eat mice. A fox had hunted there, and not too long ago.

The pack, eighteen couples, opened all at once. They trotted, continuing north. They moved in a single line over the next fenced pasture, then took the coop before the mounted folks. Finally, as they crossed over a farm road they began running. The hounds blew through three fenced-in pastures, the fox scent sticking nicely to the slightly warming frosted earth. As the sun hit those fields, the temperature rose just enough for the scent to lift off the pastures, the fragrance burst full up in those magical hound noses.

By now, everyone was glad they’d put borium on the horses’
shoes or even screwed in studs. That helped horses grip in slippery footing, which it certainly was. Mud on top of frozen ground is worse, but a slowly thawing frozen field taught you to sit deep in that saddle.

The blinding pace already claimed some victims. Two riders couldn’t keep up, dropping back with Second Flight, who were running pretty hard as well. One of the Custis Hall girls, Emily Rogers, parted company with her horse at the last coop in the fence line.

The Custis Hall girls could ride, but most generally rode on flat surfaces. For a young person new to hunting, the big test was balance. Compared to what they faced now, it’s easy to be balanced on the flat.