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Updated: May 16, 2025
If you could get a place with plenty of it, and a fox-covert or two on the estate, I'm perfectly certain we should be all right." Mr. Bullsom looked still a little doubtful. "That's all very well," he said, "but I don't want to bribe people into my house with shooting and good cooking, and nursing their blooming foxes. That ain't my idea of making friends."
I narrowly escaped taking this "society" for a band of poachers; for when out shooting the other day, somebody remarked, "Look at all those fellows climbing over the wall of the fox-covert."
Seen in the distance, amid a setting of green wheatfields and verdant pastures, it ripples in the garish light of the summer sun like a lake of rubies. "Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity; And with the heart of May Doth every beast keep holiday." Ah! there will be lots of foxes when the hounds come to the fox-covert next October.
Now the fox-covert is a very sacred institution in these parts; for it is a place of only four acres, standing isolated in the midst of a fine, open country so that no human being is allowed to enter therein save to "stop the earth" the night before hunting.
Very seldom am I there at this period of the year; but before going away for several months, I bethought me that I would go and inspect the improvements at the fox-covert, stopping on my way at the "Jubilee" gorse covert we lately planted, to see if there is a litter of cubs there this year.
He would have suited Sir Roger capitally for a chaplain, I often tell him; and though he hasn't a notion who Sir Roger may be, he thoroughly enjoys the joke. The fox-covert presents a strange appearance. It is full of young spruce trees, and the lower branches have been lopped down, but not cut through or killed.
We rushed up in great haste, fully prepared for mortal combat with this gang of ruffians, until, when within a hundred yards, the thought crossed us that we had given leave to the Cotswold Naturalist Society to make a tour of inspection, and that one of the barrows was in our fox-covert.
Before the hunting season had commenced we had received claims of nineteen and fourteen pounds from neighbouring farmers for poultry and turkeys destroyed. One bailiff declared that the foxes were so bold they had fetched a young heifer that had died from the "bowssen" into the fox-covert.
His associations had been with the aristocracy, and most of his friendships and sympathies contracted at the fox-covert, or on the "Stand House." This is mentioned, not in disparagement of the man, but for the purpose of rescuing his Order from imputations attaching to his conduct alone.
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