Photography by Ted Engler
Joint Master Lei Ruckle points the way.
A quick blare of the huntsman’s brass horn and the hounds gather, baying with—not quite bloodlust, because it’s been about four years since any of them actually killed a rabbit, but a trembling excitement. They are the Three Creek Bassets, descended from the renowned Strathalbyn Bassets and winners at the National Basset Trials.
In competition, this fierce sport is taken far more seriously than it is by some of today’s human participants, one of whom cheerfully describes it as “long-legged overbred humans chasing short-legged overbred hounds chasing bemused hares.”
In 8th-century France, though, basseting was a practical solution. Both foxes and rabbits were scourging the countryside. The rich leapt onto their steeds and made sport of controlling the fox population. As a diversion for the peasants, who couldn’t afford horses, Hubert, bishop of Liège, crossbred hounds with legs so short, people could scramble after them on foot. Later canonized, Hubert is now the patron saint of hunters.
And today, a warmish October Sunday, is the first hunt of the season.
The huntsman is Laura Carpenter Balding, the widow of Circus Flora founder David Balding and the daughter of St. Louis basseting's co-founder, Dorothy Carpenter Moore, who is still Joint Master at 96. Balding’s white polo shirt looks mud-spattered, but the “drops” are actually burrs; she ignores them. Balding’s been basseting since she was 14. Why? “Well, dogs! And being outside.”
She casts the hounds, releasing them for the hunt. Assisted by two whippers-in—who use voice, gesture, and the gentlest prods from the ends of their whips to keep the hounds from straying into the brush—Balding guides our procession down Three Creek Farm’s rocky lane and then uphill to a pasture dotted with white wildflowers. We see flashes of brown, black, and white as the dogs break into a rollicking gallop, heads then tails bobbing up and down in the tall grass.
Balding and Lei Ruckle are joint masters of hounds, meaning that they’re responsible for the dogs’ welfare. That, everybody does take seriously. The hounds are counted in couples—today there are five-and-a-half couples, 11 hounds—and recounted as often as kindergarten field-trippers. Ruckle tells me about the day that Einstein went missing. She found him whimpering on a narrow ledge of the Missouri River bluff. They rigged a stretcher, and she rappelled up the limestone, gently transferred him to the stretcher, and lowered him. They carried him back to the kennel, making frantic plans to transport him to a veterinary hospital—and he hopped off the stretcher, shook himself, and trotted toward his kibbles. Thanks for the ride.
The more hounds in the field, the tougher they are to control, but the better their chance of finding a scent line. They fan out, sniffing—it’s called “feathering”—then head for the pasture’s edge, shooting under the arch of gnarled honeysuckle just as St. Hubert intended. (The French word bas, or basse, from which the breed takes its name, means “low.”)
“We have some that are the real go-getters—we call it drive and thrusting,” says Ruckle. “When one thinks he’s found something, he’ll voice to the line. If those solid, in-the-middle dogs open voice to the original hound, it’s called honoring that hound.”
It’s also deafening. The bassets cross the road and bound uphill through the woods. We hear excited baying, a shout of “Tally ho!” and yelled commands. As the rabbit leaps for cover, a deer emerges from the brush, setting off an even louder baying.
The hounds choose the more exciting prey but wear out fast. Deer run in a straight line, not the circles that the bunnies prefer. The bassets’ ears are drooping even lower by the time they skid downhill again.
Field master Ted Atwood keeps the rest of us (we are “the field”) “close enough that we can see what’s happening but not so close that the dogs’ll want to turn around and play with us.” Lil Lewis, a secretary of the hunt, knows the rhythms of these expeditions as well as her own heartbeat. Formerly a master of foxhounds with the Bridlespur Hunt, she rode until age 87. “My horse died,” she explains with a shrug.
The horn blows again, this time not a quick “Pay attention!” but instead a long blare that signals the hounds to come together.
The humans cluster, too, the field staff clad in tattersall vests or white shirts beneath dark-green hunting jackets trimmed with mustard velvet collars and red piping. I did my best; I wore khakis. I also memorized the vocabulary, but I stop worrying about nomenclature when I hear Atwood ask, “Is that a wabbit?”
We stride along the Katy Trail, pause for a hound count, and panic until a small basset pops out of the woods. There’s some herding to this hunt. One day, I’m told, a rabbit managed to get trapped inside a fenced vegetable garden, and when they opened the gate to let him out, he had to run straight through the pack of bassets. The dogs did a double-take as he whizzed past them, fear’s resolve on his small face.
In two hours, the hunt’s over, and we’re back at the kennels with three basset puppies underfoot. The picnic’s spread: goat cheese rolled in herbs, spiced cider spiked with Fireball. None of the hounds was blooded today; all of the rabbits “will live to run another day,” one gentleman notes with a satisfied nod. “This way, it’s fun for everybody.”
