Fantastic Mr Fox

We drove on, and then, around a bend, suddenly found ourselves as scruffy extras in a scene that relatively few people in Britain have witnessed first-hand, but which nevertheless is profoundly familiar. The main field of maybe a hundred horses and riders, many in red coats, stood against the horizon, the horses snorting in the damp air. There are around 18,000 people actively involved in hunting foxes in Britain as compared with, say, 232,000 crown-green bowls players, but no one born in this country could fail to recognize this picture—if only from the huntsman's propaganda of place mats and pub signs and junk-shop prints. Aubrey wandered into mid-frame, incongruously, asking the whereabouts of the hounds.

'We sold 'em!' said a hunt supporter. 'You satisfied?' (There is something about sitting on a horse, in hunting pinks, that seems—as every huntsman's favourite author R. S. Surtees observed in his Jorrocks books—to require you to speak only in exclamations.)

'What are your lot going to do next, Aubrey?' shouted a large woman on a chestnut horse. 'We've seen you in your ABOLISH ANGLING T-shirts!'

'You haven't seen me in one,' Aubrey said.

This exclamatory impulse was further excited when, from across the road the pack of foxhounds appeared and the horses set off at a gallop, with a certain amount of restrained whooping, and we followed, occasionally sharing narrow paths with the riders, Aubrey in his easy stride, me running full tilt.

A good part of hunt sabbing involved being lost in wild places. The saboteurs had maps, but they were not much use. The roads around here were often estate tracks, and once you had followed a hunt for a short while it was easy to lose your bearings. Aubrey talked of a few occasions in the early days, before mobile phones, where he had been left on his own, in woods miles from any village, with dark coming down, and had to find his way home. Like the hunters he followed—and despite his protestations that it was just 'a job'—the hunt for him had been a weekly adventure, fuelled in part by such stories. On this occasion, though, and perhaps from now on, the stories looked like having no satisfactory ending. The Vale of Aylesbury with Garth and South Berks Hunt had no intention of breaking the new law visibly, and after an hour or so of chasing Aubrey—somewhat to my relief—made a call on his mobile: abandon this and do the beagles.

On the way to Sandhurst in my car, Jerry, the Seattle detective, and Aubrey told stories about foxes saved and foxes lost. They recalled a particular pacifist saboteur in Oxford who, in the event of violent confrontation, always rolled up in a ball in the woods and got beaten by terrier-men. This happened most weekends. Aubrey suggested it was all like that in the early days, when the saboteurs were mostly hippies. He remembered an otter hunt in the Seventies when a saboteur blew a hunting horn and it was taken off him by a huntsman who then broke his jaw with an otter pole. The rest of the saboteurs sat down in silent protest. Aubrey recalled evaluating that approach. 'Next season I chucked the hippy stuff out of the window. I would never start anything. But if you hit me from then on, I was going to hit you back.'

At Sandhurst, we drove around the kennels, in what felt to me like a debatably cavalier fashion, given that there were three of us, and this was private military land, full of angry huntsmen doubling as army officers. Fortunately there were no beagles or beaglers in evidence so we carried on to Hampshire, to a hunt that Aubrey had been sabotaging for nearly three decades.

The further we went the more this seemed like a typically English day out: muddy and frustrating and dogged. There are fox-hunts in many other countries—in most parts of the former British Empire, but also, notably, in France and the United States. In France the fox is just one of ninety species that are hunted, and though there are protests, they involve letter writing rather than running about in woods. In America, there were maybe 200 fox-hunts, Jerry told me, but things were a little different there: no terrier-men, for a start, so if the fox goes to ground it is left alone. Hunting with dogs has been banned in Germany and Switzerland, too, but Britain, Jerry suggested, led the world in its concern for the welfare of foxes.

'Excellent,' I said.

This sense of fair play did not, in his experience, always extend to the welfare of hunt saboteurs. He recalled the first time he was held in jail, not far from here, after being arrested. He told the police officer that he was a vegan and the next morning a little slit in the prison door opened, with his breakfast: a metal tray on which there were three frozen potatoes. 'I thought, Jesus, Jerry, maybe you should reassess your life. My girlfriend was in Hawaii at that time, on holiday, and here I was in prison in a wintry English village trying to defrost potatoes by rubbing them in my hands.'

As he and Aubrey laughed at this I tried to work out exactly why you would spend all your life trying to save animals from being killed by a pack of dogs rather than being killed by two dogs and a man with a gun. As a very crude shorthand for the explanations Aubrey and Jerry offered, I wrote the words Maoism and minkhounds, in my notebook at a set of traffic lights, but that did not really get it. 'It is part of a continuum,' Jerry said. 'If you start valuing foxes—or rats—then I believe you are going to start valuing children in Iraq more, too.'

Then Aubrey suggested we turn off the road. The afternoon was losing its shape and like any hunt leader it was his responsibility to give his followers the sense of an ending, to make the long day and the run and the hanging around in fields worthwhile. We ducked down a road near Moundsmere Manor, another monumental country house, this time designed on the principles of Hampton Court, which was home to several generations of the joint master of the Hampshire Hunt, Mark Andreae. There could, Aubrey suggested halfway down this single-track road, be an element of risk in this: there had been 'a bit of a scrap' with the terrier-men from this hunt a fortnight before. As Aubrey was describing this battle we drove into a farmyard full of farmhands and hunt supporters.

In this enclosed space, Aubrey was recognized immediately, and three men standing on a quad bike blocked our exit. A group of a dozen or so large men then gathered around the car. I had recently been reading my daughter Roald Dahl's book Fantastic Mr Fox, about terrier-men who fail to outwit a family of foxes. Looking at the three men in front of the car, standing on their bike, the words of a little rhyme my daughter had enjoyed chanting at bedtime came into my head, not entirely helpfully:

Boggis and Bunce and Bean

One fat, one short, one lean,

These horrible crooks

So different in looks

Were none the less equally mean.

Sitting next to me, Aubrey looked straight ahead. 'Open the windows,' he suggested, 'otherwise they will smash them.'

The real life Boggis and Bunce and Bean hadn't had a sniff of blood on the fox-hunt all day, and if the government had anything to do with it, they never would again. Who should now have arrived in their farmyard but the man who had for the last three decades made it his life's work to spoil their fun, the man who only two weeks ago had, apparently, been doing a little hunt-ban victory dance on the impossibly green grass outside Moundsmere Manor, home of their hunt master. A man who might well have helped to put half of them out of work.

I opened the windows and Boggis or Bean or Bunce reached in quickly and took my car keys. Then there was a short moment of calm when everyone in the farmyard considered his options. No one, not the terrier-men, not Aubrey, and not me, could quite believe his luck. In this moment of silence, I found myself getting out of the car and mumbling something about being a journalist.

He's not a journalist, someone said, pointing at Aubrey.

No, I said, but he is with me.

While the men considered the implications of this remark, and traded threats, and studied in somewhat bemused fashion the British Library readers' pass I had proffered in lieu of a press card, three things happened. An attempt was made to open Aubrey's door and pull him out. The camouflaged Land-Rover containing the rest of the saboteurs came crashing into the farmyard, the driver being pulled through its open door by a couple of hunt supporters and, out of nowhere, the police arrived.

Then, I had the sense, it was all just like old times. The saboteur women screamed murderous abuse at the terrier-men while the terrier-men tried to knock video cameras from the women's hands, there were scuffles and a good deal of debate about who started what, and vicious, well-rehearsed arguments about the bloody business of killing foxes. I wandered around asking if anyone happened to have seen my car keys.

Eventually the police sorted the two tribes into different parts of the yard: men in green waxed coats on one side, saboteurs in combat jackets on the other. My keys miraculously reappeared and, under Aubrey's instruction we set off, watching our mirrors, to meet up in a pre-arranged hotel car park, where everyone talked at once. There was a sense of occasion in the air as some of the saboteurs remembered the importance of the day, and realized how much they might miss all this, the crisp winter afternoon, the cross-country runs, the sense of purpose in saving foxes' lives, the self-righteous adrenalin of confrontation. Someone handed round a bag of home-made muffins.

A saboteur who had a hunting horn around his neck, which had been 'donated' to him by a huntsman at a neighbouring hunt, was looking somewhat mournful, knowing perhaps that things might never be quite as good again.

He must have been pleased that this was all over, though, that the ban was in place?

'In a way,' he said, 'but this has been my life. I'm not sure what happens next.'