In rolling wooded hills near Chequers, the country retreat for British prime ministers, blood hounds howled as they picked up the scent of an English red fox.
A horn blared, a whip cracked and horses' hooves pounded the muddy underbrush in the chill morning air in the Chiltern Hills.
PHOTO:: AFP
A herd of deer, their ears pricked up and antlers high, bounded through the autumn gold of beechnut trees before a blur of galloping horses carried a dozen men and women toward their quarry.
Somewhere among the fern and thorn bushes a hound sunk his teeth into the neck of a fox before the rest of the pack tore him apart.
But these days it is the people in the tweed, scarlet and mustard jackets who fear they are an endangered breed -- the governing Labour Party has set its sights on outlawing the blood sport for good.
"Sadly, it's on all our minds," said Clive Gough, who was one of the hunting party in the Chilterns last week.
But the hunters have also become increasingly defiant about preserving what they say is not just a sport but a quintessential English way of life that dates back to period following the restoration of King Charles II in 1660.
Thousands of hunt supporters converged on the House of Commons in the moments before lawmakers voted for the ban on September 15. Several forced their way into the debating chambers as others battled with the police outside.
If the House of Lords, rooted in the land-owning aristocracy, blocks the ban, as it has in the past, Prime Minister Tony Blair has vowed to resort to the Parliament Act to overrule the upper house and outlaw the sport anyway.
Five days before the Commons protest, some 150 people who hunt in the Chilterns north of London surprised Blair while he was at Chequers estate for his wife Cherie's 50th birthday party.
"Chequers is our domain," said Emma Pearse, the joint Master of the Vale of Aylesbury with Garth and South Berkshire Hunt, a wavy auburn haired woman who rode a dapple grey horse during a hunt recently.
It would have been easy, she said, to have stormed Chequers during the party because so many protesters had caught so few guards there by surprise; the protesters had mobilized using mobile telephone text messages.
Instead, the group decided to keep their protest peaceful and eventually Blair, dressed casually in a denim shirt, invited Pearse and a colleague into his home so that they could discuss one of the year's hottest political topics.
The pair were ushered in through a modern rear annex before taking their seats with Blair in what Pearse said looked a "bit like a doctor's waiting room," where they all talked over a glass of white wine.
A bodyguard stood discreetly outside.
"He's a very affable man, very approachable ..." Pearse said. "But he's got himself in a muddle."
In Pearse's account of the meeting, Blair told the two of them he had not expected his Labour back bench to push so vigorously for an outright ban, nor had he thought hunt supporters would counter-attack so vehemently.
Blair, who had made clear he wanted the meeting to wrap up quickly, promised he would try hard to find a compromise.
Pearse and her friend left on a polite but defiant note, telling Blair that if a ban were adopted, "we're just going to carry on hunting. We'll get arrested."
The stakes are high not just in emotional but also in economic terms for the hundreds of thousands of people who not only hunt foxes in England and Wales, but those who care for, feed and equip the horses and hounds.
Pearse's family has hunted foxes for at least 170 years. She cherishes an 1831 map of Colney Heath, now part of north London, that shows the railway stations where the trains brought in the horses used in hunts.
Pearse and her partner Jonathan Dick also depend on hunting for a living; they own a business that supplies food for the 60 of the 320 packs of hounds in England and Wales.
Hunters deny charges from critics who say they form an anachronistic elite, saying the landowners who once dominated fox hunting are now a minority and the pastime is organized much like a fee-paying golf club open to everyone.
And if animal rights groups lobbying for a ban claim they are protecting the foxes, they are actually doing more harm than good, the hunters claim.
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