Fantastic Mr Fox

1. The hunters and the hunted

On Saturday February 19, 2005, a day after the Hunting Act came into force, I was standing beside a man named Aubrey Thomas looking over a wall at some of the 14,000 acres of land that form the Englefield estate in Berkshire, fifty miles west of London. Aubrey Thomas had been waiting thirty-two years to be here this particular misty morning. While he had been waiting he had been arrested more than a hundred times, he had been shot at, run over, beaten up, chased through a forest by a man with a chainsaw, and, once, thrown off a bridge at Dartmouth in Devon. He used to wonder how he would feel on the first day of a legal ban against hunting foxes with dogs. Sometimes he had imagined himself sitting on a hedge somewhere, swigging champagne, toasting frustrated crimson-faced huntsmen, but now this morning had come around, he did not feel any of that, really. Instead he was doing what he had done just about every hunting season Saturday for the whole of his adult life. He was chasing men, who were chasing foxhounds, who were, maybe, chasing foxes.

Can you run? Aubrey asked me, looking me up and down somewhat doubtfully.

I thought so. Though certainly it was dependent on how far.

Sometimes we do about fifteen miles, he suggested, brightly. Often around ten. He kept in shape, he explained, running marathons. They took him three hours. But a marathon was nothing really to chasing a mounted fox-hunt on foot all day, because it was often over ploughed fields and through hedges, among big horses, your feet clogged in mud, starting and stopping, sprinting and jogging.

I looked out across the open country all around us, the weak sun casting oblongs of light over distant copses, and briefly regretted my lapsed membership at the gym. Right, I said.

Aubrey is a tall man, shaven-headed with small pointed features, shoulders bunched forward as if for confrontation, long-limbed. Unlike most hunt saboteurs, who wore combat clothes and camouflage and balaclavas, he was wearing a sweatshirt and loose canvas trousers and running shoes. He set off at a loping jog across the rough field, without another soul in sight, on a hunch that the hounds were not far away. And I ran after him, stumbling in big boots on the pitted ground, asking breathless questions. I wanted to know what might become of the saboteurs now they had nothing, theoretically, to sabotage. Aubrey, who had done this longer than anyone, was best placed to tell me. All I had to do was keep up.

This chase started for him when he was seventeen years old, he explained, and only today did it look like stopping. In common with most of the saboteurs I had spoken to, Aubrey went out the first time for a laugh. A friend of his had an idea that it might be fun to go and disrupt a hunt, but the friend could not drive. Aubrey had just got his licence. They were the only two protestors that day and the hunt, in Surrey, was one of the most formidable in the country. On the journey down, a fox had run in front of Aubrey's car, which he thought at the time was odd, and which he has since come to think of as fate. They ran all day, and eventually they caught up with the men who had caught up with the hounds who had caught up with a fox that had disappeared into a drainage ditch at the side of the main A23.

Aubrey and his friend stood by while the terrier-men, the farmhands and village men with dogs who accompanied the hunt, dug down for an hour to trap the fox. All the time the men were digging, and sending in their dogs to engage with the fox underground, Aubrey was suggesting to them that they did not have to do this, that they should stop, that this wasn't any fun for anyone. Eventually, the terrier-men got to the fox and caught it in a net. 'We then watched,' Aubrey said, 'as one of them killed it with a garden fork. It did not die straight "away, of course. It wriggled on the fork like a worm. I looked at this bloke, and said: "You have made a big mistake there. I will make it my business to make sure you never do that again."'

Every Saturday during the hunting seasons for the next three years, Aubrey went down to Surrey, often alone, and did everything he could think of to save foxes. He signed himself up to work part-time as a whipper-in, a dog-handler at a local beagle pack, so he could learn to control hounds with a hunting horn. He can remember well the thrill of bringing the pack of hounds for the first time away from the huntsmen and across the field towards him, a skinhead Pied Piper, with mounted hunters and terrier-men on quad bikes and hangers-on in Range Rovers in distant, outraged, comical pursuit. Once, with a basset-hound pack, he ran alone with the dogs for sixteen miles, over the hills and far away, stopping only when it was dark, when he got a friend to tell the huntsman where his hounds were so he could collect them in his van.

Aubrey widened his territory from Surrey to include most of the hunts in the south of England, from Kent to the West Country, and helped to put together a tactical manual—of laying false scents, of horn blowing and havoc—for other saboteur groups. He made forays into the devout hunting country of Wales and the north of England—the places, he says, where you went in a car and thought you would come back in a coffin. He went alone to the Lake District, where the legendary John Peel, huntsman of Helvellyn and Blencathra in the first half of the nineteenth century, had exemplified the dedication of the Cumbrian packs, remembered in the lines of the ballad 'D'ye ken John Peel'. On arrival, he was held over a mountainside with a sheer 300-foot-drop, as it was suggested to him that he should not bother coming up again.

The more often he went out, the more his strategies evolved. Aubrey got a pilot's licence and, on occasion, took a plane and followed hunts from the air, radioing down to his fellow saboteurs the exact location of hunters and hounds and fox. Mostly though, he relied on a mixture of instinct and absolute stubbornness. And, as I was beginning to understand, stamina.

I had met up with Aubrey that morning, along with the rest of the dozen or so saboteurs, at a business park, just off the motorway near Reading, in Berkshire. Like the hunts they follow, the saboteurs had, over the years, developed their own rituals. They had grown up with all this, and they arrived in ones and twos from different parts of the county, and exchanged stories about nights before and the day ahead, and got changed out of the back of cars.

They made a curious group. Pulling on their paramilitary jackets were a couple of care workers and university students, a lecturer and a doctor. There were nearly as many women as men, in a range of ages from twenty to seventy. The eldest, Jerry Esterly, a deep-voiced jovial man, with a bald head and a white moustache, had flown in from Seattle, where he worked as a private detective, preparing defence mitigation for people on death row.

'I see it as part of the same thing,' he explained to me, 'valuing life, and the right of any individual being to live out his life as well as the universe deems he can do.' I nodded. Jerry had been coming over here for years to secure the fulfilled existence of foxes and had been held for breaches of the peace in British jails in places that he had never heard of. He would not have missed this 'last go round' for anything.

When they had their clothes sorted, all the saboteurs piled into a couple of four-wheel drives, one of them a camouflaged Land-Rover. For this, the first day of the rest of their lives—when they had, theoretically, stopped being vilified 'antis' and started being respectable 'monitors', collecting evidence of illegal fox hunting—Aubrey had chosen their hunts carefully. They would look in at the beagle pack at Sandhurst, the military academy, but first of all he wanted to see what was happening at the Vale of Aylesbury with Garth and South Berks Hunt, one of their regulars. Aubrey had dropped off the main group of saboteurs at the back of the Englefield estate, given by Queen Elizabeth I to her favourite Lord Walsingham for his support in persecuting Catholics in 1589, and now owned by his descendant Richard Benyon, who was standing as a Conservative candidate in the forthcoming election. Aubrey watched as the saboteurs wandered into the woods not far from Benyon's vast manor house in single file, as if on a school trip, and then drove around the estate trying to work out which way the hunt was headed.

When he was not trying to save foxes, Aubrey ran two businesses: a vegan chocolate factory, which supplied major supermarkets, and an international freight company. The latter, he explained, was problematic because he tried to run it ethically: he wouldn't deal with America, for a start, 'because of Guantánamo Bay'.

Aubrey would interrupt his talk from time to time to pull over into a lay-by or a farm track and set off at a run across the fields, with me in pursuit. What he noticed most of all was the quiet. On a proper hunting day there would be the cry of the hounds. But today all you could hear was birdsong and the distant hum of cars. From time to time we ran into hunt supporters, and terrier-men—the traditional enemy. 'Having a good day?' Aubrey enquired. And then, to me: 'He and I have battered each other horribly in the past, but what's the point now?'