A hunt reborn

Drawing inspiration from the British hunting community but with Pakistan's culture and traditions at the forefront, the renowned Peshawar Vale Hunt is being returned to its former glory

- Adrian Dangar

IT’S THE third week of January and I am galloping flat out across soggy fields behind a pack of foxhounds in full cry. Ditches, dykes and gutters flash up in rapid succession but my thoroughbred mount takes them in his stride as we strive to keep in touch with the flying pack. Flickers of maroon and beige through the trees ahead are all that can be seen of the huntsman, riding like a dervish behind glorious music drifting back in snatches across the low-lying plains. This is not the Meath in Ireland but 4,000 miles further east in Pakistan, a landscape of orange groves and sugar cane crisscrossed by irrigation channels. Our quarry is the golden jackal, and the hounds belong to a revitalised Peshawar Vale Hunt (PVH) under the Joint Mastership of Englishman Bertie Alexander and his Pakistani landowner friend from the Royal Agricultural University, Taimur Noon.

The most celebrated of all the many packs of hounds established by British regiments in India during the time of the Great Game was founded in 1860, but despite heavy military casualties suffered during skirmishes on the northwest frontier the PVH continued to thrive up until partition and Pakistan's independence in 1947. It is believed the Hunt limped on in some form or another until the 1970s when irreplaceable PVH records were destroyed, but George Hurst's 1934 book, History of the Peshawar Vale Hunt, endures as an accurate record of the Hunt's early history.