Riding Shotgun (45 page)

He squinted up at her. “You’ll just take Harley’s part.”

“No, I won’t just take Harley’s part”—Cig’s voice was even—“but we’ve got a hunter pace to ride. You’re not helping our club.”

He wiped his hands on his jacket flaps. “Jesus, Cig,
there’s more fornication, drinking, and carrying on in this hunt club than anywhere else in the country.”

“Must be why we like it so much,” David flatly said.

Binky reached inside his own coat pocket, pulled out a flask and took a long pull. “Hunter, you were right to hit me. No hard feelings.”

“No hard feelings,” Hunter said. The glances of the group subtly shifted to the boy, who became a man in their eyes.

“What about you, Grace?” He offered her his flask.

Grace waved it off. “I’m not overfond of being called a slut.” She looked at the group. The pit dropped out of her stomach. She knew she had to do this. “But since you brought it up, I’ll answer the charge. I was wrong, dead wrong. I publicly apologize. I hope you all will forgive me and help Cig, Hunter, Laura, Will, and me through this rough time.”

“Takes two to tango.” Cig defended her sister, which further astonished the club members who thought they’d seen and heard everything. Nothing like this had ever happened at a hunter pace.

Tears sprang to Grace’s eyes. No one knew what to do until Cig spoke again. “God only knows what the rest of today will bring.” That made people laugh. “Come on, teams, let’s get ready.”

By now the spectators spilled down the country lane onto the cut hay fields. Every hillock was dotted with clumps of people, many with binoculars. One hundred or more were inside the oval of the Oak Ridge racetrack, which was part of the course.

The hunter pace was divided into two divisions, optimum time, which was the time it would take to complete the course if hunting, and fastest time. Teams ran over obstacles such as one might encounter in the hunt field. Teams of riders selected which division in which to compete. Fastest time meant riders would go flat-out, usually over a shortened course. Most teams picked optimum time because members had to think a bit more while on the course, it was more challenging than running hard. Horses must negotiate stone walls, coops, post and rails, drop fences, water, and in-and-outs; usually one obstacle forced a team member to dismount, open a gate, let the others pass, then close the gate and mount up again. The bigger hunts might even put jump judges at the various obstacles.

The Oak Ridge hunter pace, held at the Oak Ridge Estate
near the town of Shipman, had been steadily growing in popularity. Hundreds of people turned out. The weather was perfection and this contest was a preliminary to the granddaddy of hunter paces, the Orange County hunter pace near the Plains, Virginia. Teams from Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and of course, Virginia, waited patiently for the starter to set them off, at five-minute intervals.

Grace, Agnes, and Carol were the first team to leave in the optimum time division. Cig, Hunter, and Laura followed at eight. Harleyetta, Bill, and David soon followed.

Cig figured the optimum time ought to be somewhere between one hour and one hour two minutes for the eight-mile course. She always gave her team time for mistakes.

People did pitch headfirst over jumps, the turf in front of the jumps could get mucky, and more than one horse refused to go through the swift running stream. A horse could throw a fit when threading through a herd of cattle. Sometimes the tension of competition unraveled even seasoned hunters. Like humans, some could take it and some couldn’t.

Halfway through the course, as the Blackwood family trotted up a hill, they stopped for a moment to enjoy the panoramic view. The Blue Ridge Mountains lay west of them, rolling hills of golden oats lay to the east.

“My God, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” Cig exclaimed.

“Remember what Dad used to say?” Hunter smiled as he sniffed the odor of rich earth and turning leaves. “All foxhunters go to hell because we’ve had our heaven on earth.”

“Hey, there’s the flag over there.” Laura, the navigator of the group, had been checking her map. “Come on, gang.”

They headed toward the red flag. Cig led, setting the pace, a brisk trot, and keeping time. Laura, in the middle position, kept charge of the maps and direction—she had a terrific sense of direction—and Hunter brought up the rear. He also kept a lookout to see if anyone was gaining on them. He was the anchor.

A triple combination lay dead ahead. The first jump was a tiger trap, one stride to a coop in a fence line, and then a solid railroad tie jump in yet another fence line. If you hit the first jump right the other two were a snap. Get your distance wrong and you could wind up stuck between jumps, trying to figure out how to get your horse up and over.

One, two, three, Full Throttle arched over with ease. He could pick his distances better than Cig, and she had the sense to stay out of his way. As soon as they were on the other side of the triple they moved into dense woods, single file.

“I reckon about a mile of this. How are we doing for time, Mom?”

“So far so good, but all these offshoot trails are confusing.”

“I’ll tell you when to turn,” Laura confidently said.

Cig fought back her nervousness when a patch of ground fog rising off the fast-running Rucker’s Run floated over the path. Once through that they were at the end of the woods and burst out into a big hay field.

“Okay, let’s gallop to the top,” she called back.

The three let their horses go, thundered up the hill where a copse of hardwoods burst into flames of orange, yellow, and red.

In the far distance they could see another team, too far away to identify their hunt colors, struggling with an in-and-out. Beyond that a crowd waited at the finish line.

Cig checked her watch. “I think we’d better keep up a trot here just in case there’s a screw-up ahead. I mean, those guys could be at that in-and-out for days, you know what I mean?”

They turned hard right at the bottom of the field onto a rutted wagon lane, cleared a ditch and a bank jump, not often seen in these parts.

Heading for home, they easily threaded the in-and-out as the team that had been struggling far ahead of them crossed the finish line.

The finish involved circling the beautiful race track,
jumping a small run-off ditch, then thundering along oat fields into hay meadows over the final obstacle, which was a thirty-six-foot-long coop in an old fence line. This was one of the reasons such a big crowd was gathered at the spot. It always provided moments some competitors would like to forget and no spectator ever would as the teams paced their horses to hit that long jump at exactly the same time. The finish line was fifty yards beyond the jump.

Cig checked her watch. If they stayed on pace they’d finish in one hour, one minute, and fifteen seconds.

They cantered across the hay fields checking their horses to keep them abreast. Laura adjusted her horse’s stride about six strides from the coop. In a horizontal line they cleared the obstacle as one. The crowd hurrahed. As they crossed the finish line, Cig checked her watch. One hour, one minute, and sixteen seconds.

They patted one another on the back and accepted the cheers and calls from the crowd, many of whom they knew. Life may be chaos but this is perfect, Cig thought to herself.

Back at the trailer they checked the horses’ legs, took off the tack and threw sweat sheets over their horses.

“How’d you do?” Cig asked as Grace came to the trailer.

“One hour two minutes flat.”

Roaring around the race track was a team from Rose Tree Hunt in York County, Pennsylvania. The lead rider caught Cig’s eye. There was something oddly familiar about him even at that distance. He plunged across the run-off ditch, his big gray snorting then shooting off. He called, laughing to his teammates, all men, as they synched up for the long coop. When they cleared the coop they doffed their silk toppers to the crowd, which applauded the elegant gesture.

“Fitz,” Cig whispered.

“What, Mom?” Hunter watched the Rose Tree team.

“Nothing.” Her face paled.

“Are you all right?” Grace noticed.

“Yes.” Cig felt dizzy.

The handsome fellow, about forty, his red-golden curls shining in the October light, walked his gray over to his trailer, a green-and-gold rig. The lapels of his scarlet tailcoat
bore the seal brown collar with gold piping of Rose Tree. He was laughing and joking with his teammates.

“Who is that?” Cig nodded in the direction of the man who looked like Fitz.

“I don’t know,” Grace replied.

“Carol,” Cig called to Grace’s teammate, “you know everyone. Who is that fellow with the blond curly hair?”

“Alex Maher. Widowed two years ago. Really a tragic thing. His wife and daughter were killed in a car wreck. A drunken driver ran a stoplight. Poor man, he nearly died himself of grief.”

“Does he have—anyone?”

“Not that I know of, but then I’m not up on the Pennsylvania news. Would you like to meet him?”

“I expect I will,” Cig half-whispered. Out of the corner of her eye she saw sauntering across the long coop a big red fox. Fattail.

Appearing to enjoy the tributes paid to him by the cheering crowd, he stared straight at Cig, sat down, and waited a moment, while flicking his tail. Then, as if satisfied, he got up, casually walking along the fence line before melting into the woods. Cig could have sworn he winked.