Running with the hunt

An ancient woodland fable

Feb 12, 2025

In the forest the clumps of moss glisten on the trees on those days when the soft rains come. Raindrop drips drop constant and unregarded from leafless branches and no birds sing. The birds have taken themselves to some dry refuge, some nest built in the hollow fork of a tree, and they huddle silent and they shiver up in their warm feathers.

My family go about their work and forage, heads bent down toward the damp scruffle of the wet leaves. We never stop working as long as there is daylight. If there comes some noise, a crackle of twigs or a stranger's step, we pause and look over to this disruption. Then we look towards each other for signs of panic. If we sense no alarm from all our collective dreads, we go on foraging, again bending down to the work.

When we gather together at night and huddle, we consult with each other about all such events. Each one of us gives a version of what had passed earlier and listens to those of the others. “It was a gust of wind”. “It was a jackrabbit.” And if at first we are not in agreement about what we've seen, we talk it over doggedly until we are in agreement. A different version of our danger, some dissident accounting, would be a terrible infraction. We must be in accord on all things, but above all we must agree on the meanings of these small sudden events that intrude upon us.

I kept secret from my family my desire to become part of The Great Wild Hunt. I'd heard about it from them, of course - who else? - but the excitement I felt at hearing about Herne the Hunter, the great antlered lord of the Hunt, was obscurely felt as a violation of their trust. They feared Herne, they feared the unleashed ferocity of The Great Wild Hunt, its abandon. I did not, and that mark of difference was in itself a covert rebellion and a stern sentence of self-exile.

So it was that one morning in the gloaming before daybreak, that false dawn which sees us arise to undertake our equivocal quests, I picked my way quietly through the forest to seek out Herne the Hunter. My family slept on and dreamed of nothing, their breaths silently misting the gray air. I was the only dreamer and I was full awake.

There are invisible paths that lead to destinations of danger and satisfaction. Your eyes may not mark them; only your deepest desires, if you let them tell you where to step. I now followed one of these. From time to time I stopped and listened, turning my head around, casting about for traces of something following. There was never anything, so I kept walking on in the rising morning.

All day I picked through the forest following the invisible path by its feel and its scent. Both feel and scent became stronger in the afternoon and I knew I was getting closer. Broken showers, dark bruised sky and radiant sun at once, drops that were momentary prisms on low branches. Out to the east a rainbow standing strong between the trees just where the Hunt would be gathering.

My family lay to the west, where the sun was descending, and they most likely had already given up their searching for me. This evening they would discuss my disappearance in low voices in a huddle and probably decide that I had been taken by hungry beasts. In the next day after that, they would have forgotten my existence, even my mother, because forgetting is the one great strength of my family.

To the east, as the sky darkens and the rainbow fades away, the forest becomes more sparse, like a moorland. There are copses and clumps of trees, but the greater part of it is open heather where jackrabbits skedaddle at my passing. Now the clouds are broken and the moon rises full and heavy between the scudding fragments. Wolves or wild dogs howl over on the northern highlands and I turn my ears to capture them but they are still far away.

There is a drumming where the moon rises in the east. Very low, very deep. A subterranean throb, a substantial pulsing. Without seeing, I see the scene. The Great Wild Hunt is gathering its hunters to itself. Herne with his antlers is standing in the middle of them as they cluster and swirl. He is tall and broad with a raw deerskin about his shoulders and a great white horn which he brings up to his lips.

There. It's the blast that starts the Hunt. They are coursing now, they are running towards me as I step through the heathland. My heart drums fast as their sprinting feet, my skin shivers like the twitching nose of a quavering hare. I'll see the hunters soon enough.

Clouds open and the moon's scaled countenance is revealed, full and unbearable. She climbs in the night, the silhouettes of the running dogs and the hunters make quick black imprints on her fat face. There is the shadow of Herne himself, the Huntsman, enormous and antlered, gesturing to the hunters and the hounds to run faster. I call out to him, my brother, but he doesn't hear my little voice.

Now the moon is above them all, now they are advancing faster and faster, now the space between them and me is closing. I came here to run with them, run with my antlered brother, but in a moment my courage fails me. I turn, and now I am running from them.

Blast of horn, yaps and snarls of hounds, feet trampling, the harsh air whistling up to the moon, and behind all of it a hissing, or a laughing catch in the throat like a gargle. My heart throbs with effort, my breath is rags, my shanks ripped by whipcrack thornbushes. Blood scents the air and the hounds closing ground commence howling like lost demons, close, close up in my ear.

I'm running, I'm running, but I'm lost. I see the teeth. Soon my legs will fail, or I will trip, and what will come then will come to lost me.

"My lord Herne! The quarry is run to ground!"
"Where?"
"Over by yonder copse, my lord. The hounds tore out its throat and we're skinning its pelt for you to wear."
"Let me see."

Herne was a massive man, if indeed he even was a man. With his sharp doglike reek and his hot panting misty breath he resembled a kind of man, but then there were the stag antlers growing from his forehead that would tend to belie that assumption. There was the reddish-purple light in his eyes on the darkest nights. There was his tendency to move between points in space without occupying the spaces in between, moving in the blink of a crow’s eye in impossible increments.

"A fawn. A little deer."
"Yes, my lord."
"And yet I saw it striding straight toward us before it turned and tried to get away."
"Maybe brain-fevered, or confused by the noise, sir."
"Didn't make for much of a chase."
"Not this time, but we've sent the bloodhounds out to track us a more worthy prey."

Herne squatted his monstrous bulk down next to the small body being stripped of its skin. His giant neck was threaded with roots like an oaktree gripping a mountain slope. The moon scudded bright through dark rips in the sky, making him alternately glow and lurk in shadow. His teeth when he grinned were gratuitous and mossy. He made a little laugh and a sign with his fingers.

"Well, little brother, we thank you for your gift. Too bad you made it so easy for us."

He was about to say something more, but the horns were sounded of the bloodhound handlers. Another quarry, another hunt. He stood up and started running over a rise in the ground to where the hounds were barking.