Big Sky Hounds is now celebrating our tenth year as a foxhunt in Montana. As I sat down to put together the schedule and start the new monthly newsletter, I ran across this entry from an old journal. It was written just after the close of our first season. I thought I’d share it with you. Deep down, my feelings haven’t changed. As we open for the tenth time this fall, it’s good to remember where we started, and resurrect the spirit of Big Sky Hounds.
BECOMING BIG SKY HOUNDS
The Very Best of Hounds, Horses, People, Country…and Scotch.
I believe that experiences had by our ancestors somehow, occasionally, find a way of leaving a smudge or two on a person’s makeup, traveling down through the generations to create a memory in us that affects not just our lifetime, but numerous lifetimes.
This might explain the feeling of rightness that hunting a pack of foxhounds and having a foxhunting club on our ranch solicits in me. Despite this being my very first experience with such a thing, it feels like home. It is somehow what I am meant to do and who I am meant to be. I don’t know where it came from, but suspect it is entrenched in my lineage. At least, I would like to think it is.
If only one could summon the knowledge (or channel that past entity with the experience) to stave off the myriad of mistakes and mishaps that have taken place over this, our first season as a bona fide foxhunt, we could have gotten a little more sleep, put on a few less miles, and possibly saved a few chickens. However; “learning by doing” is our motto here. Though there are some things that one would rather not learn the hard way, in the end we did in fact learn. We continue to learn every single moment.
One year ago, after the third and final day of the Annual Red Rock Hounds Three Forks Hunt, I sat with Huntsman and Master Lynn Lloyd at a dinner and drank too much scotch. I could probably blame some not-so-distant ancestor for my taste for scotch too, because it is certainly not one shared by many in Montana, except my father. He sat to my right and together we polished off the better part of a bottle of Balvenie by night’s end.
Sometime during the evening’s festivities, it became a good idea to keep two hounds from the notorious Reno pack and begin hunting them myself, here in Montana. For the next year, I questioned my judgment (and blamed the scotch) a thousand times. In the end, it was the best idea I ever had.
Last weekend was the Closing Hunt and Celebration of the first full season of what has come to be known as Big Sky Hounds. We spectacularly hunted our pack of now eight walker hounds on that final beautiful spring day with 48 people in the field, including 13 juniors, the youngest of whom was four years old. We had a glorious hunt for three hours, punctuated by a rousing tally ho on one of our resident coyotes, who dutifully let our tiring horses and hounds chase her quickly into her den after pausing to be sure even the hilltoppers viewed her parting salute. The ensuing celebration was shared by over 80 people, many of whom admirably drank scotch to excess.
At the party, we reflected on epic chases over breathtaking country that happened every Sunday of the winter, attended religiously by dozens and dozens of the most fun and good people one could hope to know. Each weekend also brought new people, even to the Closing Hunt. We all grew to love the sport, the hounds, our horses, each other, and this amazing country. We were drawn to it, and to each other, as if by some magnet, the force of which we were powerless to resist. We made friends, true friends, like a family, like a club. Now, we all show our allegiance to our friends and our passion for this sport by proudly wearing our big sky blue neck scarves, our colors.
Today, a week into the off season, I am still reeling. I suspect the rest are as well. We are changed. Somehow, the first season of Big Sky Hounds, the creation of a foxhunt, has altered us. It has left an impression in our very physical makeup, the kind that lasts and gets passed down to the next generation and the next, like a propensity for a disease. It is what we are meant to do, and who we are meant to be. It is just…right. I raise a glass of scotch, of course, to my destiny.
We are Big Sky Hounds.
~Renée