THE LAST HUNT

 

THE LAST HUNT

By Jack Ensoll (Elspeth Huxley and Jocelin Grant’s Pioneer Scrapbook)

We met at Marindas, 9000 feet up on the old Barnett place and I remembered how John Barnett had complained as reedbuck played hide-and-seek around a few acres below a copse. Always the same, this time of year, out of one wheat field and into another. Then the wheat was beginning to stand high and was the signal for the end of another Molo season. Now it was just a slight green bloom on the brown land under a leaden sky, and I leaned from the saddle and picked everlasting flowers as moved off to draw.

Kariuki put the hounds into covert beside a stream and before long we heard the brassy summons of the Gone Away, the music of a good pack running, the rumble of fast cantering horses and the crack as they took their fences. Our pilot took us straight uphill, up one of those labouring, high-altitude hills, and we checked in at the woodland at the top. Now and then the panting and rustle of a hound at work, and again a burst of music, as they broke covert,  and were down the far side of the Marindas and running fast towards Summerhills and all that magnificent galloping Molo country, was at our feet.

The sweet African wind whistled past our ears and the damp earth flew from the hooves of the horses ahead and the astounded sheep drew together and watched. Through a swamp and over a fence in the wire and at the far side of Summerhills I gave it best and watched them go, the hounds a swift-moving pattern of black, white and tan. Kariuki and the whips are diminutive galloping figures in red and the rest of the field is behind.