Fox on the run, but Kentucky’s big dog has gone to ground

There is a richness to life in Central Appalachia which explains why anybody who has lived here a few seasons never wants to leave, and why those who did want to come back.

That thought came to me in a tool shed, near the mouth of Marrowbone, on the side of a mountain above the C & O. They changed the name of that railroad, but I didn’t. There are beautiful night lights along the railroad that cast a golden glow like Jimmy Durante used to stand in.

At this time of the year, when the leaves are off and you are playing music and go out to pee off the porch of the tool shed, you can look at both the railroad and the Russell Fork, or sparkling glimpses of it going by below and it is nice.

To me a great deal of the luxury of living in the mountains is that the old music has not died. You can play it with others in tool sheds.

Inside, my friend Eddie is playing “D’ye Ken John Peel,” thereby being the last Scotch-Irish Appalachian fiddler to play that song. Eddie got somebody else’s liver and new life with it and, to pay the guy back, became a first rate player of the old music.

“John Peel” is an English fox hunting song closing in on 300 years old and any song that old has something timeless about it. What would be the relevance today of a hunt song with a bold hunter leading a pack of hounds in chase of a sly, orange-haired creature?

In the old ballad, the baying of the hounds is the voice of death to the fox, which has been lured from its lair. With his dying breath the defiant fox could but curse the hounds.

From a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a death — that’s the sequence of a fox hunt, even as practiced by all those fake English people in scarlet who hunt fake foxes in Clark County after blessing a bunch of dogs. Nobody blesses the fox.

It seems that in the great hunt of our times, the dogs have picked up a strong scent of the orange-haired fox, who is fleeing the sound of the hunter’s horn. An even older Englishman than John Peel, named Bill, wrote that the guilty fleeth when no one pursueth.

Oftentimes a fox who is being outrun will take refuge in a drain or other hole rather than being cut up and given to the dogs. That is called “going to earth” and involves hiding and subterfuge rather than combat. Once an orange-haired creature has gone to earth, he can only be ousted by a fox terrier. Somebody has to stop up the hole.

Kentucky has a big dog of its own, but who is unwilling to perform terrierism or to dig fearlessly to expose the fox, for fear that the fox will get him.

When a person spots a fox on a hunt, he shouts “View Halloa!!” and the other hunters gather in for the kill.

We wait and listen for that shout. When will the big hunt be over?