MEMOIRS OF A FOX
My year of graduate work in Cambridge, England was a somewhat bleak and desperate affair, coinciding with a bout of depression that could perhaps have been shortened or ameliorated if I had been assigned hard agricultural labor, a daily column of local news to fill, or double shifts as a postal carrier, rather than being given an apartment and a library card and complete freedom from all responsibility. I was in my then-usual attire and position—smelly pajamas, blanket over shoulders, cold oatmeal managed with the left hand and laptop managed with the right—when a mass email came over the university transom. The Cambridge Drag Hounds Club was looking for a “fox.”
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania surrounded by deer hunters. Our yard, a former apple orchard with trees in variously picturesque or grotesque decline, was perennially attractive to wild animals. In consequence, my mother was continually shooing away hunters building surreptitious tree stands at the bounds of our property, where they’d wait in silence and camo facepaint for a deer to step into their crosshairs after glutting on half-rotten windfall fruit. Hunters were silent, spooky presences, like green plastic GI figures blown up to life size. They did not seem to move, unless it was to fall out of trees, as my sister’s friend’s father did, breaking his neck.
British fox hunting is another matter, loud, kinetic, and vicious. The medieval sport was rendered more humane, if more bizarrely abstracted, in 2004, when Parliament passed the Hunting Act, which banned using more than two dogs to hunt a live mammal. (Until Theresa May’s government hit a new low in popularity last year and mere survival became the imperative, she had kept a repeal of the Hunting Act prominently on the Tory to-do list, citing the usual “way-of-life”/“values”-y rhetorical readymades.) Drag hunting—chasing after animal scent in lieu of actually fleeing animals—arose to fill the void. This Drag Hounds club was apparently in search of a human who could run ten miles on a Saturday morning such that a subsequent pack of dogs could, at some point later in the day, follow their nose and lead their brightly clad masters on a pastoral romp. Runner gets forty pounds sterling.
From where I sit today, this looks like one of the more heartbreakingly clownish manifestations of the so-called gig economy. At the time, though,
