A recent hunting experience brought to mind the huntsman in an 1830 Henry Alken Sr. print called “A Close Finish.” In it, a pack of hounds catches their prey right in the path of an oncoming steam locomotive, as the huntsman pulls up short and looks in horror as the fate of the hounds is left to the imagination.

Unlike the print, our experience would have left nothing to the imagination. It would have concluded in an obvious tragedy.

On Wednesday, Nov. 2, I cast my pack of 221³2 couple of Penn-Marydel blue-tick hounds into Callison’s woods. This resulted in a 20-minute, feverish chase of a gray fox. The fox ran well and was a good warm-up for what turned out to be the chase of the day. (According to Mrs. Macy Fox, a long-standing member, the next run lasted for 1 hour and 20 minutes.)

I won’t bore you with details of terrain or whose farms we crossed. Instead, I will tell you that on the next cast the hounds hit the line of a red fox. The woods came alive with glorious music that could only be appreciated by foxhunters. It was so loud that it might well have shaken the leaves from the trees, leaving no fall foliage for the tourists to see in the Shenandoah Valley this year.

The chase ensued. The pack crossed the stream twice, at full cry, and we knew they owned this fox. Their harmonious voices filled the woods as first whipper-in Mary Ann Getty radioed me that a red fox had just broken covert. As I approached the field, I saw Mary Ann’s hat held high in the direction of the fox, who’d crossed the field and was heading for the road.

The field and I watched as hounds followed his line. They worked as one so beautifully that you wouldn’t have even needed a blanket to cover them. A beach towel would have been enough.

As our pilot crossed the road, I caught sight of a fully loaded logging truck barreling down the road, putting me in the situation of the huntsman from the 1830 Alken print.

Mary Ann, pushing her horse Zorro as hard as she could, screamed at the driver, in vain, to stop. I’m sure he couldn’t hear her, because I only heard him shift to a higher gear.

At that moment, I remember thinking that I could lose my entire pack to the truck’s rear wheels.

So immediately I dug into my horse, urging him forward, and blew my horn as Mary Ann cut the pack off at the fence line. The distraction was enough to delay the pack’s impending demise. The truck just rolled on past, as the fox, I’m sure, trotted lazily home.

And now I have a sense of how that huntsman felt way back in 1830.