A mixture of French and English hunting cries will echo through the lush hills and rolling Gascony countryside this season in the Mid-Pyrenees setting of Pau, France. The 30th master of the Pau Hunt, Georges Moutet, is welcoming disaf-fected British foxhunters, now banned from foxhunting in their own country.

“We owe our existence to the English,” he explained. “We are doing all we can to help and have re-organized the Pau Hunt into two branches, one our traditional drag hunt and the other a live foxhunt.”

Gently swaying palm trees and distant snow-peaked mountains provide an idyllic setting for the Pau Hunt, founded in 1840. Its first master, Lord Henry Oxenden, a Napoleonic War veteran who, as part of The Duke of Wellington’s army, discovered the area of Bearn when crossing through from Spain 26 years earlier. He returned to the area and established the Pau Hunt as a British foxhunt.

While the French have traditionally taken their hunting seriously, it was only in Pau that horses and hounds hunted fox.

In the years that followed, Pau became an elegant Victorian resort and a hotbed for socially well connected British and American expatriates and guests.

During its 165-year existence, two Americans have served as masters: James Gordon Bennett (1880-1882), owner of the New York Herald-Tribune, and Frederic Prince (1910-1940), an industrial tycoon from Boston whose grandson, Frederic Prince, has been a member of the Orange County Hunt (Va.).

Illustrious guests of the Pau Hunt have included Sir Winton Churchill, King Edward VII, King Alphonse XIII of Spain, and the future President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who enjoyed a riding holiday in Pau as a child. World War II brought about the departure of the Anglo-American community, and the hunt became a drag hunt, with membership dwindling to its current 21.

But all that is about to change.

Moving Horses, Hounds And Humans

One historic English hunt, the Puck-eridge in Hertfordshire, is in the process of purchasing land and arranging relocation to Pau. Joint masters Luke Neale and Diana Pyper will be moving 40 couple of hounds to Pau this fall.

“The hounds have been in my family for more than 100 years, and their pedigrees go back to the 17th century,” said Pyper proudly.

The kennel huntsman and terrierman will move with the hounds and live on the grounds of the new kennels and stables, to be built in Basous, near Pau’s eastern hunting border.

The enthusiasm for foxhunting the Gascony countryside is not just limited to the Pau and Puckeridge Hunts. La Federation du Chasse, which controls game sports, has given its authorization for large tracts of land to be hunted. Approximately 12,000 acres of new territory have recently been opened to the Pau Hunt, thanks in large part to the tireless effort of Jeffrey Quirk, MFH, an English Majorca-based tax accountant operating a bed and breakfast with stables at his Châ´¥au de Sombrun near Maubourguet, about 45 minutes northeast of Pau.

“It’s perfect hunting country around here. The climate is more temperate than England, and the land is a mixture of southern Ireland and Leicestershire,” he said. “We have a lot of ditches and banks, but they’re not as life-threatening as in Ireland. And there are copses everywhere, which are full of fox and haven’t been hunted in 65 years.”

Jane Hanslip runs a business organizing riding holidays near Dordogne. “We’re going to be seeing an influx of Brits coming over,” she said. “I’ll be running two hunting weekends a year from my property and welcome the live hunt to our area.”

Considered A Constitutional Right

But, can la chasse à £ourre (foxhunting) survive in France while fighting for its life on the other side of the English Channel?

Most likely. La chasse (the hunt) is steeped in French tradition. In fact, the French have a long and ardent relationship with hunting. Approximately 1.5 million people follow mounted hunts, most not on horseback. The numbers appear to be increasing annually and have more than doubled over the last 20 years.

Hunting is often referred to as the l’art de v鮥rie (the art of hunting) and is widely considered to be a more cerebral pursuit than the British approach.

Hunting is so ingrained in the fabric of French life that it’s both a constitutional right and a deeply traditional way of life for a population that is more rural than the majority in England. The anti-blood sport protesters do not appear to have a presence in France, and most doubt that they could ever gain a foothold.

Sen. Andre Labarriere, the Socialist mayor of Pau, has enthusiastically supported the hunt. He even said that he was “thrilled that the English are coming back to hunt in the Bearn.”

Labarriere obtained European Union subsidies of $434,000 to rebuild the Pau Hunt’s kennels, stables and clubhouse.

“The conditions and attitudes about hunting are like they were in England 50 years ago,” quipped Quirk.

“French law says that if your hounds are hunting vermin, you can all but go in someone’s front door and out the back,” he added, referring to an old French law obliging small landowners–those with less than 60 acres of land–to allow hunters to enter and hunt through their property.

A Ride Through The Country

Riding the newly opened Pau Hunt territory from the Châ´¥au de Sombrun evokes a mixture of awe and familiarity. The smell of lavender on the light breeze follows us as we leave the stables and make our way through the village.

The scene turns surreal as we trot down one-lane roads closely bordered on both sides by 400-year-old stone buildings: The reverberating clip clop of our mounts’ hooves overwhelms the senses.

“We’re bringing in eight more Irish horses for hirelings,” said Quirk. “Most of the field horses in the area are Irish, draft crosses, Anglo-Arabs or Thoroughbreds.”

The opening meet on live fox will be at Châ´¥au de Sombrun, after the mayor’s breakfast reception there.

Quirk explained that it’s customary for the mayor of each village to offer refreshments and breakfast hors d’oeuvres before the meet, with a “proper hunt breakfast” following. Often, the meal following the hunt occurs in a nearby restaurant to support the local economy.

“Do you mind jumping wire?” Quirk asked as we turned up a long hill to begin a gallop. “I train all my field horses to jump wire; they can see it better than we can, so just trust your horse.”

I’m riding Friendly, a lovely bay, Irish gelding who’s adjustable and soft as butter in my hands. For the next three hours, we ride terrain displaying spectacular vistas of mature vineyards, maize fields, and villages of stone and tile dating back to Henry IV.

As we rounded a turn on the back side of Sombrun and into a small estate overflowing with flowering gardens, Quirk shouted, Auntie, auntie, could we have four beers, please?”

Quirk’s aunt and uncle provided us with much-needed refreshment and a small glimpse into what hunting with the Pau Hunt would be like later this season.

French Hunting Facts

– There are 450 registered mounted hunts in France.
– Registered hunts account for 10,000 hunt members and 100,000 followers.
– There are 17,000 hounds, followed on foot or horseback.
– Some 24,000 people work in hunting-related jobs.
– Twice as many mounted hunts are registered now as 25 years ago.
– Ten new mounted hunts are registered annually.
– Some 70,000 hunting associations of all types are registered in France.
– A 1993 breakdown of hunters by occupation showed that hunting is practiced by a wide range of French society, with 70 percent being waged workers, retired people, salaried employees and farmers.

If You’re Looking For The Pau Hunt

The territory of the Pau Hunt is approximately 42,500 acres, in the southwestern corner of France, just north of the Pyrenees Mountains. The rolling Gascony countryside is part of the foothills of the Pyrenees. Pau is an hour east of the Atlantic Ocean resort of Biarritz and one hour north of several French ski resorts.

The original kennels, located at the edge of the city of Pau, houses 20 couple of hounds that are the product of crossbreeding English and Irish foxhounds with “Anglo-Franç¡©s” (deer) hounds, producing a notably larger hound.

The territory sports a combination of ditches, banks, drops, water obstacles, hedges, walls and “fences.”

Currently, the drag hunt goes out every Saturday from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. from Nov. 1 to March 31. At the end of the drag, a fox is released to allow the hounds a run on a live animal. It’s usually cornered and killed. This follows the French belief that the hounds need “une recompense” to reinforce their interest in the artificial chase.

With the opening of this fall’s hunting season, MFH Georges Moutet expects to double the field for the drag hunts to 40 each weekend, while opening the field to 50 for the “live” foxhunts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The date for the opening live hunt will be sometime in January 2006 to allow sufficient time to properly prepare the new territory near Basous and Sombrun.