THE complicated, close and much-misunderstood relationship between fox and huntsman is adroitly captured in fiction by David Rook in his 1970 novel The Belstone Fox. An abandoned cub, Tag, is brought up in hunt kennels before being released into the wild, where his cleverness in evading hounds engenders affection and respect from the huntsman who reared him. After many runs: ‘Tag had the devil in him—the game had slowed down to the point where it had become boring, so now he was going to liven it up a little’ and the fox leads the pack across a railway track with tragic, bloody results.
The huntsman, maddened by grief at the loss of his hounds, obsessively determines to catch Tag and, some members of the anti-hunting fraternity may be is a Disneyfied version of the tale, with Tag renamed Tod.)
