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who has thrust all day—these are real: and the physical experience of these is all the intenser because of their symbolism which every hard-bitten hunting man feels.
    To be mounted is already to be a master, a knight. To represent the noble (in the ethical as well as the social sense). To vanquish. To feature, however modestly, in the annals of battle. Honour begins with a man and a horse.
    To get well away with the hounds is to be intrepid. To be ingenious. To be the respecter of nothing but the pace.
    To hunt is the opposite of to own. It is to ride over. To dart in the open. To be as men as free as the straight-necked dog-fox is as fox.
    To meet is to ride with others, who whatever their character know something of these values and help to preserve them. All that is opposed to these values appears to be represented by the invention of barbed wire. (The wire that, later, millions of infantrymen will die against on the orders of their mounted generals.)
    Jocelyn is riding home early one December evening. The horse is caked with mud. He slips from the saddle and, although at first he is so stiff that he cannot stand upright but is bent like a man with a stick, he walks beside the horse’s head. Its ears are cocked well forward. Just two more miles old fellow, he says. The two proceed side by side. The man runs over in his mind the main incidents of the day. What happened to him and what his friends had recounted of their day. In the marrow of his tiredness is a sense of well-being, even of modest virtue. He is convinced that just as the consequences of a crime—an act of treachery, for example, or a theft—often spread outwards to involve more people and further actions, so, too, within a medium of cause and effect which he cannot name or quite visualize, the consequences of an act of honourable horsemanship must emanate outwards with tiny but endless effect. He looks up at the sky. A few stars. And in that vast space he feels the absence of gigantic horses that once darted through it.

    The boy listens on the stairs to their talking in the bedroom. Later he will realize that the cadence of their two voices is like that of a couple talking in bed: not amorously but calmly, reflectively, with pauses and ease. (Some evenings his uncle goes to bed early, and on these evenings his aunt takes a hot drink up to his rooms. She calls it—with a laugh—a nightcap.) Their words are not decipherable to the boy on the stairs. But the manner in which the male voice and the feminine voice overlap, provoke and receive each other, the two complementary substances of their voices, as distinct from one another as metal and stone, or as wood and leather, yet combining by rubbing together or chipping or scraping to make the noise of their dialogue—this is more eloquent than precise overheard words could ever be, eloquent of the power of the decisions being taken. Against these decisions no third person, no listener, can appeal.

    In the summer of 1893 there was a drought for three months. When at last it rains in a great storm, he runs out and the earth smells of meat.
    On his hands is the smell of horse and harness. Its components derive from leather, saddle soap, sweat, hooves, horsehair, horse breath, grass, oats, mud, blankets, saliva, dung and the smell of various metals when moisture has condensed upon them.
    He brings one of his hands to his face to savour the smell. He has noticed that sometimes a trace of it lingers until the evening—even when he hasn’t ridden since early morning.
    The horse and harness smell is the antithesis of the cowshed smell. Each can only be properly defined by reference to the other. Theshed smell means milk, cloth, figures of women squatting hunched up and small against the cow flank, liquid shit, mulch, warmth, pink hands and udders almost the same colour, the absolute absence of secrecy and the names of the cows: Fancy, Pretty, Lofty, Cloud, Pie, Little-eyes.
    The horse and harness smell is