Like a Fox on the Run

Last week Richard Rankin visited our Rural South class at Wofford. Richard's a headmaster of a private school up in Gastonia, but much of his passion and pleasure is found in the subject of hunting in the South. He's got a PhD from the University of North Carolina in history, has edited an anthology of North Carolina nature writers, and compiled a history of a vast hunt club on Hilton Head Island that survived until vacation development became the chief industry of the island and sport hunting was pushed elsewhere. He's probably thought longer and deeper about hunting than anyone I know.

Richard grew up in once-rural Gaston County, the descendant of an early settler. His family still owns land there, so it's not a surprise that his interest in hunting and local hunting culture would find object in one of the remaining traditional fox hunts. He got involved when the beloved, 80-year-old maintenance man at his school invited the headmaster to come out one Friday night and join the old hunt.

Get that image of what you think a typical fox hunt is like out of your mind. Richard isn't compiling a study of wealthy people in red coats and funny helmets blowing horns and riding horses as the hounds take off through the gentrified countryside. He's interested in one particular group of old Gaston County farmers who sit around a fire, tell stories, and listen as their hound dogs chase a fox. "The dogs hardly ever catch the fox," Richard told our class. "But the old men still hunt every Friday and Saturday, and I've taken to sitting with them and listening, taking notes."

The old men know their dogs by the individual voices. "There goes Old Blue," one will say as the pack of hounds circles in the distance. "And there's Old Sure Foot. He's running hard!" The men don't use guns. In the old days when this activity was still multi-generational, Richard says the young men would actually get out and run with the dogs like some hunting ritual right out of the late Paleolithic.

All indications are that this type of hunting persisted everywhere throughout the rural South from about 1900 until 1960. Back then, there wasn't any large game to hunt except foxes. Most of the large wild mammals and birds had been wiped out-deer, turkey, ducks, geese, bear. The foxes survived in the farm country that made up most of the South and the farmers turn their dogs out to chase them. There were advantages: the hunting kept down the fox population (fewer chickens lost to predation), but most of all, the neighborhood fox hunts created community among the farmers. Now this type of fox hunting has become a rare and endangered experience, perfect territory for Richard to bring his history training to bear.

So why is the activity so rare today? The return of deer to the piedmont in the 1960s and 1970s diverted everyone's attention to that type of hunting we're more familiar with. Men left the comfort of the fire, bought high-powered weapons, and climbed alone into tree stands. Even the dogs became confused. At the few remaining fox hunts when the men set the hounds loose, they were just as likely to pick up the scent of a deer (now numerous) as that of a fox.

There were property rights issues as well. As the rural South became the suburban, "bedroom community" South, fewer people enjoyed the idea of a pack of dogs running all night through their acre in the country in pursuit of game. It became harder and harder to find large tracts of rural land. Good roads bisected the old farm country, and the farmers lost their dogs to high-speed modern traffic.

And so the old fox hunting culture changed and vanished in most places, but the idea persisted. Compounds of 200 to 1,000 acres were fenced in some places, and a new generation of sportsmen took their fox hunting "inside," running expensive pedigree hounds after foxes and coyotes in enclosed field trials. Folkways became sport. Traditions became leisure activity. Local culture was lost and left to historians to document.

After Richard left I listened to that traditional bluegrass song "Like a Fox on the Run"-"She walks through the corn leadin' down to the river/Her hair shone like gold in the hot mornin' sun/She took all the love that a poor boy could give her/And left me to die like a fox on the run/Like a fox, like a fox, like a fox on the run."

Maybe the ole boy who wrote it had been out with his uncles and neighbors on a fox hunt and found the inspiration for his lyrics sitting around their fire, listening to their stories of love and loss, the fox and the hounds running in the distance. So many of the lyrics of good bluegrass songs came straight out of that vanishing rural culture.

Where will future Southern songwriters find their lyrics of wildness and love and loss now that the farms and dairies are vanishing and the suburbs are filling in the spaces between the cities? It's hard to imagine writing a song about chasing a coyote inside a fenced enclosure and Old Blue's owner getting points in a trial every time the dog passes a judging stand.