Tessa Waugh’s unsentimental nature is challenged as a faithful old steed looks to have reached the end of his hunting road — signalling the end of a charmed four seasons
It never rains but it pours, so the saying goes. In four seasons’ hunting the hounds here, my husband, Adam, has kept going with the same two horses and, in the main, they have stayed remarkably sound. In our two-day-a-week country, Adam hunts one horse one day and one the other, alternating between the two all season. He’s no featherweight, but at the same time he doesn’t cane his horses and they keep going remarkably well, barely missing a day.
We kept marvelling at their sustained run of soundness, but we were also conscious that two horses in their mid-teens wouldn’t do the work forever and had started a tentative search for replacements. Then, last Saturday, this run of luck came to a crushing end.