“Do ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay? Do ye ken John Peel at the break of day? Do ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away, With his hounds and his horn in the morning?”
According to this old English folk song, John Peel was a relentless pursuer of foxes, whose baying hounds and sounding horn were sure to get you out of bed before-times on frosty mornings.
Every fall, our county towns have their share of John Peels. For weeks they’ll be up before-time, and where foxes may not be their game, ring-neck pheasants will be in their blood and will draw them into the outdoors in countless numbers.
Most of these hunters have never seen a hunting horn, let along sent its shivering blasts echoing over hill and dale. Their shotguns will do to rend the airways and let us know where they are as they beat the brush, singly and en masse, in hopes of bagging a bird.
The John Peel celebrated in this song lived in England two centuries ago. He was master of hounds, and acknowledged as a hunting veteran who really understood the game. We can picture him in his “coat so gay,” astride his horse and tooting his reedy horn at Ruby and Ranter, Ring-wood, Bellman and True, his reliable hounds, lead checkers that soon had the fox out in the open.
Last fall, we were up in the public hunting grounds at Bennett Meadow. All the John Peels in western Massachusetts appeared to be there. Coats were standard, field dress hardly gay, but bright enough. Florescent orange stood out clearly against foliage, still bright and colorful in the swamp hedgerows next to the leased fields there given over to corn growing. John Peel’s gay coat was not worn against accidental shooting because, as we have been given to understand it, the hounds killed the foxes for Brother John.
Today’s Peels wisely advertise their whereabouts by wearing hats and coats whose colors are chemically induced and actually measured on a luminance scale to establish a fixed and known degree of light reflection.
We let our dog run in and around the legs of some of the good-natured fellows we met there. We stayed there just long enough to see that it was no place for us, then left.
One chap told us that on opening day, he had put his hound in the box of his pick-up truck, taken a moment to lift the hood and check his motor, then gone home. Arriving there, he discovered that his dog had gotten her fill of hunting. She had jumped out when our hunter had his head stuck under the hood and gone back into the brush. Sometime in the night, the dog returned to his home in Northfield, finally having had enough of chasing pheasants.
If you’ve ever seen a movie of an English fox hunt, with hounds streaming like a brown river over field and fen, you might wonder if all of them did make it back to their kennels at day’s end.
Peel, of course, never had to look under a truck’s hood to check a balky Bendix. We can assume he had no mechanical distractions to prevent his tallying the dogs — out and in.
Contemporary John Peels, perhaps even more than the creatures they hunt, are animals in jeopardy. We read of a Carolina hunter, aspiring to spend a few days afield in Maine, who never made it north past New Jersey. Somehow, despite his resident and nonresident licenses, the police found him in violation of their laws. He had not packaged his guns in transit, according to New Jersey’s tough firearms code. They took away his rifle and put him away, manacled behind bars, to spend a night waiting a judge’s decision whether to fine or free him in the question of his alleged crimes.
Here in Franklin County, whose 26 towns are comprised chiefly of fields and woods, every home still has some member or relative who can be called a modern-day John Peel.
Yet the encroaching sentiment against him and his hunting grows more pernicious, more insidious every fall. All tradition, lore, heritages are bound in time to atrophy and lose effect. With the shrinking of what once were manly virtues in the nature of woodcraft and hunting, John Peel, the family sportsman, packs his gear and disappears over the hills.
This British song records that, “Peel’s view hal-lo! would awaken the dead — or the fox from his lair in the morning.”
As I contemplated the composition of this piece, I reviewed the rather long train of John Peels I’ve known in my hunting and fishing lifetime, and it occurred to me that I would not be able to provide any suitable example of one of them sounding off at dawn to signal the appearance of a fox — or, for that matter, to wake up the dead.
Yet, I heard one of them sound off once, and while his bellowing didn’t conjure ghosts, it split the heavens and scared hell out of me.
The pair of us were bulling through wet brush soaked in a week-long rain. As we neared the road, we had to cross a wire fence. My friend incautiously grabbed it and was instantly jolted by the electricity pulsing through it from a battery set in a corner of the field. His cry of pain would have altered every fox in every town from here to Pittsfield.
Hurdles like this never confronted the original John Peel. His bay mare took stone walls in stride. Maybe with our electric fences and four-wheel-drive vehicles, we have finally gotten too far out in front of the hunt.
Paul Seamans of Greenfield has written for The Recorder for many years.