Wednesday, September 7 huntt

DelMarVa was spared the torrential  rains that western Maryland , D.C.and PA experienced on Wednesday and when I checked the radar @ 4am  it looked like we would have no problem getting our hunt in. But when I stepped out the door to head to the kennel- holy cow! The atmosphere was saturated, and the temp was 74 degrees .And although the wind was forecast to be out of the S/SE at 10-15mph, at 5am it was dead calm.

I grabbed rain gear, but the thought of having to put it on overtop of long pants and  a longsleeved shirt was not appealing.


We drew Burleighs cornfield @ 5:15 am., Freddie walking his hounds in from Janes back lane while Bobby and I walked ours down the lane that leads to the irrigation pump.  The corn around us was flattened by Hurricane Irene  making it slow going for us and the hounds.  Freddie fared better than we, and @ 5:20am, we heard two of his hounds tonguing in the distance .  We  were upwind and it was hard to hear them. They were headed towards Baker rd, so we turned around and started out of the corn.  Our hounds stopped dead and listened,trying to figure out how best to hark. Some chose to work their way through the downed corn, while most decided it was faster to run out the irrigation lane to the road and run down the road to cry. In the dark, I hoped there were no cars coming down Baker rd.

By the time we got to the road, hounds were in full cry and running the cornfields behind Black Bills. My clothes were soaked , and the humidity was stifling.  I thought about Sara, and wondered if I should have left her home. (She supposedly has a heart defect, and she does tend to run out of gas during long chases.)

Our fox made a couple tight swings in the corn behind Black Bills and then we could hear the pack headed towards a small woods that borders Baker rd. Across that road lies chicken houses and  "Georges' little branch".  We did NOT want the pack getting over into that country this morning.  We all got to the road before the hounds, and probably turned our fox back. (It was  still too dark to tell if Charlie had made it across the road, yet   it sounded as if the hounds were coming right to us).  We didnt wait to find out, and broke the pack before they got within 100 feet of the road. Right in front of someones house -our hollering probably didnt wake them up, since the pack had to have run right behind the house only minutes earlier.

All hounds were there , except for my Sara and Bobby's Shamrock, but  Sara popped out of the woods only a couple minutes later ( BIG sigh of relief!), and Shammy turned up  in an unexpected location shortly thereafter.

The time was only 5:50am!!  It was unspokenly agreed to that we were done.  Not a long chase, but given the forecast, and the actual horrible weather conditions, it was enough.

Later that  morning, the wind did pick up, and the humidity dropped considerably. Enough so that I got home and loaded a horse for a very pleasant hack @Redden SF for almost 2 hours.  Returned  home by 10:30am, and heard that DCwas getting hammered with torrential rains from TS Lee.  Alex called  me from PA and told me his barn  was flooding and at mid-day had already received more rain than they did during Irene.

6:38am, on the way home from the hunt. Ominous looking wall cloud that amounted to nothing!

We never did get any of the remants of  TS Lee until later that night.