You gather yourself to venture out to find it.
Early afternoon,
Harris tweed jacket,
Walking stick in hand,
Cap at the ready.
Accepting at length the loss of aestival days,
Today is the day when you finally forsake them,
As you do the Old Scotch glass,
Still lingering there,
on the table next to your chair,
like an unwelcome guest from the night before.
It’s done.
Shelby looks up and twitches one ear.
And with that look,
You know that she knows.
She scrambles as you head towards the back door.
The sound of panicked excitement on tiled kitchen floor.
You open the door
to a sky filled with grey pillow cloud,
Grey layered to the North,
Moving West to East,
Like reading the words on a page,
Or reading the face of a loved one.
So much is left unsaid,
So much is as plain as day.
The mood is clear enough.
Air piquant, crisp, chilled.
Like biting into an apple dusted of snow.
The fields are yellow now,
You can’t take your eyes off of them,
They promise a homecoming of sorts,
To the quiet of winter,
To the sound of a hearth bound fire.
And then it happens.
The sun shows itself out.
And you are left there in the field,
bathed in the sunlight of a falling star.
And now we mount our horses...
we gather our steeds...
We bring in the sherry and dawn red, red coats.
And where is that ole brown fox,
Now that you mention it?
Somewhere you will find him in the tales of yore,
A sly one, and all the foxier, he is,
having long made his escape.
We are good sports we are.
We do no fox wrong.
We only find him now in stories told.
It is but a myth that we chase.
And what have we, then, been looking for,
for such a long, long time?
We search for quintessential Autumn days,
For sly myth-bound foxes,
For golden fields and yellow pasture lanes.
And yet, in all of this searching,
We dream still more of coming home.
On October 14th, a RSE team enjoyed participating in a Hunter Pace arranged by the North Toronto Hunt Club.
Photo Credits in order of appearance:
Gravel roadway early autumn - Colts Neck - CC BY-SA 2.0
Riverina Golden Harvest - Tim J Keegan - CC BY-SA 2.0
Golden Fields - Ozzy Delany - CC BY 2.0
Fox in Grass 1 - Jeffrey Kontur - CC BY-ND 2.0
WHO IS DOUGLAS ALLEN?
Douglas Allen is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Toronto. His historical studies are of late medieval and Renaissance Europe. He is interested in using the lens of identity to explore and understand history, human motivation and action. Douglas is also a writer who is currently writing a novel set in the City of Winnipeg in the 1980’s, which explores the nature of indigenous and non-indigenous relations.
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