To Carry the Horn

Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Weapons-master Hadyn greeted George at the afternoon session. “I hear it’s well you did with a saber yesterday.”

George snorted. Was it only yesterday? “My blood was up, so I didn’t stop and think how lucky I was until afterward.”

More seriously, he said, “Since it looks like I’ll be here a couple of weeks, I’d like to come whenever I can to improve, with your permission. I’ll try for every afternoon, though I’m sure that won’t always work.”

“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” He outlined a set of activities and partners to take George through an abbreviated education in saber, mounted and afoot, small-sword, knife-fighting, and defense against the more common weapons.

“My size should be an advantage in unarmed combat, but I don’t know how to use it. Could we include that as well?”

“Yes, and you’ll need archery, at least the basics. Might as well pull a bow with those muscles.”

They walked over to the other end where the trainees were already practicing. George was startled to see Rhian among them, but glad to see she was taking it seriously. Hadyn interrupted the training session for a moment to make general introductions while George stripped down for sparring.

“It’s stale you’ll get fighting each other. This one,” hooking a thumb at George, “will be a challenge, being neither a cadet nor a professional. He hasn’t trained with you yet, so you don’t know what he’ll do.” He paused. “Neither does he.” This generated some suppressed laughter. He looked up at the tall, broad man standing ready and taking this joshing in good humor. “Try not to hurt the wee man, now, or there’ll be no hunting for any of us.” That raised smiles all around.

After dinner, George hastened off to the huntsman’s office to look over the hunting territory for the next day. Rhian came with him, and they found Benitoe already waiting, with Ives.

“Thank you all for coming,” George said. “Let’s start with a hound lesson, and then let them get their sleep. I want to begin with the dog hounds, all of them, and those bitches we’ll be using tomorrow. I’d like your advice on which hounds to take out.” This last was directed at Ives.

“Iolo would draw up a list, and I’d tell him of any problems.”

“And I’ll do the same but I don’t know the hounds well enough yet, so let’s make that a gradual process. Let’s leave out any young entry for tomorrow, but otherwise which ones do you suggest?”

“Deer at Two Pines,” he considered. “Well, it’s not a big fixture, nor very far. There are deer in those woods who raid the cornfields, and the crops are high. I’ll show you who I think should go, and you can make the list as we go along.” They headed over to the hound pens, Rhian and Benitoe walking beside them.

“Will we have an audience tomorrow?” Rhian asked.

“Not officially, though I met Angharad this afternoon in the village and she asked if she could join us and watch. So we’ll have an extra reason to try and look professional.”

They pulled some chairs into the corridor outside the dog pen, and Rhian fetched hounds one at a time on a lead at Ives’s bidding, starting with Dando.

George and Benitoe looked him over carefully, trying to get his markings and bearing fixed in their mind. George held his head and opened his awareness to see the hound’s personality: there it was, calm, responsible, the captain of his team. “Can you sense their presence?” he asked Benitoe.

“I don’t think it’s the same way you do in the family, with each individual. But we lutins feel their pleasure and distress. That’s why we tend the hounds and horses. It makes hunting difficult for us, where we must take sides with the hounds and against the quarry, whom we can also feel. That’s why so few of us help with that directly.”

“Does this make a problem for you, with other lutins?”

“They don’t all approve, certainly. But horses are for work, not just grooming, hounds are for hunting, and death’s the fate of all.”

Ives added, “Benitoe’s not the only one. I’ve spread the word around, and you may have a few more recruits after they see how he does.”

“Well, I was pleased with his work today, you can tell them.” Benitoe colored faintly.

The next hound was Cythraul. Even here in kennels, George could feel his restless, probing nature. One by one they brought out about twenty dog hounds.

When the last one was returned to the pen, Ives invited them all to follow him in. There by lamplight he challenged them to name each individual hound as he pointed it out, and then gave them names and told them to find the owner. George found that matching the feel of the hound to its name and appearance helped cement its identity for him.

They moved the chairs to the door of the b***h pen and brought out those hounds that Ives recommended for the hunt tomorrow. George used the pocket notebook that Alun had found him and a fountain pen to record the names as they went along. He thought it might be too messy to use on horseback, but he’d yet to see any equivalent of a pencil here and made a note to bring along a bit of cloth or soft suede as a pen wiper.

After Ives had given them the same test with the b***h hounds, they returned to the huntsman’s office.

“Did Iolo keep a hunt journal? Where are his records?”

Ives indicated a leather-bound volume on the desk. “That’s current, and there are the older ones.” He pointed to a wall of similar notebooks.

“I’ll take a look at those later, then.”

He copied out the list from his notebook onto a clean sheet of paper and gave it to Ives. “This is what you recommended, yes?”

Ives checked it and nodded. “I’ll post this on the wall over my table across the way. The lads in the morning will use it to assemble the pack.”

“Let’s discuss staff, then. Any other volunteers yet?”

“There are some interested who want to wait a few days, till after the great hunt.” Ives paused. “I’ve heard there’s been some comment about this morning’s staff.”

George spoke carefully. “Gwyn mentioned as much. I asked him directly if there was a problem and his exact words were ‘not with me.’ I intend to do as I see fit about hunt staff and I believe I have his backing. I can’t make this less uncomfortable for any volunteers, but I can promise them support for as long as I’m here. Rhian? Benitoe?”

Rhian grinned. “I don’t care what anyone thinks. This is what I want to do and Gwyn said I could.”

Benitoe said, more seriously, “I do want to do this. I knew it might create a problem but that’s what it’s like for the first ones to make a change, isn’t it? I have friends who are watching to see what happens and I won’t be the first to back down.”

“Alright, then. Please let me know about anything you can’t handle, or anything that looks like it might cause a problem down the line. The hunt staff’s a family—we must trust and support each other.”

He continued, “Now, about mounts. I’ve spoken to Ifor Moel. Rhian, Iolo’s gray gelding Llwyd is now officially one of your mounts for hunting. Does that give you enough mounts?”

“Oh yes, I have two of my own. That’s perfect.”

Looking at Benitoe, “What about you? Tell me about your situation.”

“Few of us have horses of our own, but then few of us wish to ride. There are about a dozen like me here, and we have a group of three large ponies and four small horses among us, too few to even ride out on together, all at once. The roan I rode today is one of them.”

“For you to hunt and hound walk regularly, you’ll need at least two suitable mounts, and three would be better. Ifor Moel has given me the means to supply you, but how’s it done? Where do you get more?”

Benitoe turned a puzzled look to Ives. “I don’t know. Most of ours are cast off mounts for the children that we pick up one at a time.”

Ives rubbed his chin. “I can get word to Brittou, down valley. His mistress Iona raises ponies and small horses for the younglings.”

George said, “Let’s get three, then. If we get more volunteers among the lutins, that’ll give us some leeway to accommodate them quickly. How long will this take?”

“It would be fastest if you and Benitoe went together, you to meet Iona and him to try mounts with Brittou. You’ll want to found a good relationship with her, for next time.”

I’ll be gone by then, George thought, but let it pass. Meeting her would do no harm.

“Alright, we’ll make room for that this week. Not tomorrow, but maybe Wednesday, after the hound walk. How far is it?”

“Naught but an hour south of the bridge.”

To Benitoe he said, “Will you have enough to last you until then?”

“Yes, I’ll swap out among my friends.”

“Good. Next, I’d like to see all the staff in livery for their official duties, for hunting of course but also for hound walking. It shows respect for the office, it shows professionalism to outsiders, and it will help suppress any criticism if we present a united appearance. Rhys, of course, is already suited. I went today to Mostyn to arrange clothing for me. Rhian? I’m told that family can choose to dress differently.”

She protested. “I should be in livery like everyone else. I’m not playing at this.”

“Benitoe, what about you? It seems to me that all the lutins go around in red, even if it’s not quite a uniform.” George let the question about why they all wore red dangle unasked.

“Red’s our traditional color, but I’d be very pleased to be in livery with the rest of the hunt staff.”

George nodded decisively. “Then you must both go to Mostyn for suitable clothes. I’ll be going to the village after the hunt tomorrow. Please come with me, and I’ll tell Mostyn that you must be suited as soon as possible and in any case before the first official hunt next Tuesday.”

That was another item ticked off his agenda. Now he could concentrate on the upcoming hunt.

“Now let’s cover the plan for tomorrow. My only understanding of hunting deer par force du chien, with a pack, is what I’ve read in medieval hunting books, where gamekeepers look for specific stags the day before or morning of the hunt. Lots of discussion about whose fewmets are larger, and so forth. All very colorful, but is that what you do here?”

“I’ve heard about that from Iolo,” Ives said. “Too elaborate for us simple country folk.”

“So how does it work, then?” Benitoe and Ives were silent, and he looked over at Rhian, and she laid it out for him.

“You find the stag of the territory, here,” Rhian said, tapping her forehead. “You look for the lord in his domain. He’ll feel different from the lesser males, ’cause he’s the boss.”

“Explain to me again how the hounds are directed to a particular quarry.”

“You show them what you want. Not the scent, you can’t do that, but what it was like for them the last time they found that scent. They’ll understand, from that.”

“So I picture for them the excitement of following the particular quarry, or type of quarry, in this case the arrogant stag of the herd.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“And I can’t do that without having felt how they reacted last time. Therefore,” he said to the rest of the group, “since I wasn’t here last time, we’re going to rely on Rhian for this tomorrow, so I can learn. If she can put them to a buck that she and I find, then I’ll know what to do next time. We’ll have to feel our way with this, in these three private hunts we’ve been allotted.”

George asked Rhian, “Do you know how this territory’s hunted? Which coverts are drawn first?”

“It depends on the wind. If it’s from the west, Iolo took this sequence.” She demonstrated on the map. “But sometimes he reversed it, and I don’t know why.”

“Alright, we’ll hunt to that plan, if it seems to make sense when we see the spot. Of course, as soon as we find, the plan will go out the window, but we need to start somewhere.”

He looked around the room.

“Let’s try to meet like this the evening before each hunt for a while. I’ll pass the word along to Rhys. I’ll probably be spending my evenings in here anyway, going through Iolo’s materials.”

Turning to Ives, “What time do we start, on a hunting morning?”

“Hounds are released to their yards at dawn, and we assemble the pack in their pens shortly after. Everyone breakfasts early, and staff’s in the yard a half hour before departure, ready to go. Iolo was usually there an hour early.”

“And the departure time?”

“Right after the main breakfast. Most of the field eats early as well.”

“I’ll see you in the yard tomorrow, then, an hour beforehand,” George told Ives, “and the rest of you shortly thereafter.”

Thus dismissed, they rose and departed, leaving George alone in the office.

After they left, George thought about the carrying capacity of this territory for whitetail deer. If this hunt took a buck every time, hunting three times per week for a six month season, that would be about eighty deer. But roughly twenty square miles of mixed agriculture and woods, well watered and sheltered, could probably carry three hundred deer or more, from which such a harvest could easily be sustained. In fact, to keep the population in check they must allow some doe hunting, too, perhaps in other forms, unless of course there were deer predators about. I wonder if they still have wolves here. Has the coyote come east for them to take its place, if not? Mountain lions? How close is the congruence between the worlds?

The hunting logs should tell me quite a bit. He sat at the desk and drew Iolo’s current hunt journal in front of him, opening it up at the last non-blank page which was about half-filled. He admired the heavy rag paper, made to stand up to the ink without bleed-through.

The last entry read:

Friday, 16 Hydref

Hound walked to Daear Llosg. Young ones are sticking to their elders without couples. Keep an eye on Aeronwy, her packmates listen to her.

Owen the Leash continues to make trouble. Openly disputes me in public. Must speak about him again to Gwyn. Also, push for more staff of the right sort.

Well, now he knew how to spell that place where Iolo’s cremation took place.

The dates seemed to match up, which come to think of it was odd. Did they have their own Gregorian calendar reform, or did they just calibrate it to the human world, which probably cared more about it? He had a momentary vision of a brightly colored auto parts calendar hanging over Ives’s desk, and shook it off.

George sighed. He was seizing on distractions and putting this off. It was his duty to maintain a hunt log like this, but he didn’t relish his first entry. He thought for a moment, then added:

Saturday, 17 Hydref

On this day Iolo ap Huw hunted hounds at Thirty Acre Wood. There he was slain by person or persons unknown in the form of a whirlwind.

He paused, then decided he had better sign it to mark the transition and carried on.

George Talbot Traherne

Sunday, 18 Hydref

On this day Iolo ap Huw was sent to rest before his friends at the setting of the sun.

Monday, 19 Hydref

Hound walked with all hounds to (George stood up to look at the map and see if he could properly name it) Beaver Brook. Lost half the pack briefly in the front yard but all recovered and behaved properly for the remainder of the walk. Junior huntsman Rhian and first-time whipper-in Benitoe are shaping up well.

Holda’s rash and Anwyn’s sore are healing.

He laid his pen down and turned to the front of the journal. It used the English notation for weekdays and years, but kept what seemed like Welsh names for months. It wasn’t hard to translate them. “Hydref” was clearly October, and he saw from earlier years that the next month would be “Tachwedd.” The year was recorded ornamentally with a great flourish on Tachwedd (November) 1 each year, and there was a multi-page entry about the great hunt to accompany it.

He supposed he’d be writing that entry himself, this year, if nothing went wrong.

This volume had about four hundred pages, numbered by the writer as he went along. Most pages had three or four days recorded on them, so a full volume might hold a daily hunt log for three or four years. The spine was stamped with the opening year, with space left for the closing year, and a volume number. This was volume #498.

George put the journal down and walked over to the shelved books which held the matching volumes. The most recent were at head height, receding in time as they went down. Similar volumes with periodic minor variations in shape went back to 1410-1412 (#291), and then the size and shape changed drastically. He drew out volume #290 and discovered its pages were made of a thin parchment instead of paper. It contained many fewer pages, but they were much larger, so each volume held about the same information. The handwriting was recognizably the same as Iolo’s most recent records, though the shape of the letters were a bit different.

The earliest volume on the shelves in this series was marked 475-477 (#1). But there was an older series with a different shape shelved just beyond them which picked up at year 471-475 (#313). He picked up the #313 volume, the latest in its series and compared it to #1 in the newer series. #1 seemed to still be Iolo, but the last of the older series was clearly written by somebody else. Iolo’s predecessor?

The ink on the parchment was dark and the writing perfectly legible, but not the language.

The dates were clear, though the weekday names were different, and he could make out some names. He suspected this was an old form of Welsh.

He put them both back. Where he would have expected 312 more volumes in the older series, he only found about twenty bound in codex form, like books. Then the cases of scrolls began and continued to the bottom, closed up against the damp and rodents.

He straightened up and backed away from the shelves as his hair rose on the back of his neck. He could feel his ears moving back on his scalp with the frisson of the uncanny. Had one man been writing hunt logs for fifteen hundred years?

What a resource this was. Even if it was restricted only to hunting matters it would still mention in passing their arrival in the New World, their interactions with visitors, and who knew what else.

He moved to the next set of shelves. Here were the breeding records. He brought the most recent volume to the desk.

There were hound names he recognized from the current pack. He flipped through it quickly, trying to find evidence for outbreeding, any introduction of new bloodlines, but nothing obvious stood out. If these hounds have been inbred for centuries, they’d have all sorts of defects, he thought, and that’s not the case. They’d also be very similar, and that’s not entirely true, either. Look how different Cythraul’s personality is from Dando’s.

This gave him an idea. He went back from the present looking for Cythraul’s bloodline, and didn’t find it. That’s odd, he thought, here’s Dando, for example. Cythraul seemed to him to be about four years old, like Dando. Dando’s litter was whelped in Ebrill (April), so he looked at the corresponding period in Iolo’s journal (in the volume before the current one) and located the entry.

Thursday, Mawrth 28

This evening Holda whelped three dogs and two bitches without difficulty. This was her second litter.

A few days later, Iolo recorded the names and descriptions of each puppy, including Dando.

That didn’t answer the question of Cythraul’s origin, however. George idly turned the pages as he thought about it, and his eye was caught by another entry.

Sunday, Ebrill 30

On Nos Galan Mai, from the usual spot, I returned with two hound whelps, the dog to be named Cythraul, and the b***h Rhymi. I have put them to Holda to nurse, and she accepted them.

This raises more questions than it answers, thought George. There seems to be outcrossing coming into the bloodlines, but from where? And what is “the usual spot?”

Following a hunch, he went back to April 30 from the previous year.

Friday, Ebrill 30

This Nos Galan Mai I brought back from the usual spot the dog whelp Goronwy and the b***h whelp Elain. I put them to Briallen to nurse.

These hounds would now be five years old and may well have been bred. He went back to the recent breeding records, and there he found both Goronwy and Elain used as stud and dam with others in the pack. The record for their progeny showed the breeding for their partners back four generations, but on the side for Goronwy or Elain, it was bare where their ancestors would be listed.

So, thought George, it seems like the source that created the Cwn Annwn is still contributing to the bloodline. Let’s hope Iolo told someone else where these whelps come from, or this pack will be in trouble in a few generations.

Yawning, he checked his watch and decided the rest would have to wait for another evening. Tomorrow was a hunting day.