$5 A Pair Jack’s first hounds had some of

$5 A Pair

Jack’s first hounds had some of that By waters blue blood. “I bought two red female puppies — Virginia bred — from Oscar Payne. They were born the tenth day of March when I was 17 years old. Paid $5 for the pair at weaning time. Mr. Brooke Miller’s Hags was the sire — he was Bywaters’ stock — and Oscar Payne’s Brownie was the mother. .

Jack’s half century of fox hunting began before he carried those two little red puppies home. "I had hunted with Mr. Brooke Miller, Joe Johnson and Jack Sisk. My grandfather bought me a strawberry roan |)<>ny when I was eight years old. On Sunday, if my mother would let me slip away, if she didn’t make me go to Sunday School and church — and that didn’t happen to too often — I’d go fox huntin', riding that pony."

After a year or two of riding with his pair of red hounds and blowing his horn to call up a few more from neighboring farms. Jack stalled buying dogs to build a pack of his own.

“My father and my grandfather were great fox hunters. They knew hounds and it just came on down to me, I guess," Jack said, recalling his start as an owner-breeder. “I knew the breeding of hounds just as well as I know the way from Sperrvville to Washington. I’d lived with it all of my life.”

He hunted four, five, six days a week, sometimes alone but more often with his great friend and hunting buddy, B, Lyle Miller, Jr. “Where the hounds went, we went. Over fences, over ditches, up mountains, down mountains. That’s what it takes to make good fox hounds. You've got to follow them.” Not that they always caught foxes. "But we hunted so often, we’d catch quite a few,” Jack noted.

One dog in particular w orked wonders for Jack’s fox hunting fortunes. “That was the Countess. Now, there were quite a few hounds named Countess in these parts. They were descended from Charlie Eastham’s Countess, one of the first hounds ever bred. My Countess I bought from Roxie Clater in Sperrvville for $35 in 1926. She was seven years old and the best hound I ever saw in my life when a fox was broken down and tired so he just couldn’t run any more. He ducks and turns and twists, this way and that way. And wherever that fox put his foot, that’s where Countess went. She started me catching foxes.”

When word got around of the hunting sport a rider could find behind Bruce’s hounds, they started coming from the four corners of the county for the chases that began Sundav mornings from Gid Brown Hollow.

If Jack and Bee had denned a fox during the week, they’d dig him out, bag him and carry him back to Jack’s. Then on Sunday mornings, before the assembled crowd of riders from Washington, Woodville and Sperrvville, they’d loose the fox. He'd head up the mountain and the hunt would begin.

For those early years. Jack has no record but his memory. Later, in the 1944-45 hunting season, he began keeping a ledger. In neat and careful script, it tells the story of past hunts. It gives the date, who was riding, the path the hunt followed and if the hounds and riders got their quarry. Bee’s and Jack’s names figure in most, especially the hunts that ended with a kill. There were 28 of those in 1944, 15 in ’45, 18 in '46 and 16 in ’47.

Today’s organized hunts are lucky if they get one oi- two foxes in a season. It wasn't that Jack pushed his hounds. “I never shot at a fox in my life,” he swears. "I never tried to make the hounds catch a fox. It was the hounds that wouldn’t give up. Fox hunting was in their blood, too.”