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“You live with the hounds, you hunt with them, it gets in your blood. . . Fox hunting is a disease. Once you get it, you never get over it. You can quit but you never get over it.”
Jack Bruce has lived and hunted with fox hounds for more than a half-century. He has the disease. "There’s no sport in the world like it. There just isn’t any sport that can compare with it. But only a fox hunter will say that!” he acknowledged, chuckling.
At 74 years old, he still looks like he can ride a horse for eight hours over Rappahannock’s mountains, down into the hollows and back up again on the trail of a crafty fox. Compact and wiry, he has the suntanned, weathered complexion of an outdoorsman and the rolling, rhythmic walk of a horseman.
■Jack Bruce is a dog man, a master of hounds who has spent most of his life tearing hell bent for leather after a singing pack. For all except a few years of that time he hasn’t belonged to the pink coat-ratcatchervelvet hard-hat school of fox hunting. There was no Rappahannock Hunt when Jack first hit the trail of the fox. Fox hunting was sport and recreation for anyone who had a horse good enough to follow the hounds.
“Everybody around here owned a hound or two. I’d take my two, go to any mountain and start blowing my horn. A couple of hounds would come this way, a couple would come that way and before you knew it, you’d have a pack with you.”
And they weren’t mixed breed mutts. They were American fox hounds. Back in the 1920s and ’80s, “a real good fox hound could be had in Rappahannock County for $10, $15," Jack said. “Burrell Frank Bywaters, near Amissville, he was one of the best breeders in the world. He furnished hounds for all parts of America."
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