BRITAIN: Rural England has declared war on Tony Blair. Lynne O'Donnell joined a country hunt to savour the atmosphere.
As driving horizontal hail gives way to watery sunshine, huntsman Douglas Summerkill knocks back his whisky, brushes the crumbs of a homemade vol-au-vent from the lapels of his red wool coat and sounds a long, flat note on his brass horn. His hounds raise their tails in excited anticipation of the day's chase.
The Devon and Somerset Stag Hounds (DSSH) move off from their midweek meet at Headgate across the North Molton Ridge and on to the rolling, gorse-pocked hillsides of the Exmoor Valley in search of a hind, a female deer.
Hundreds of cars, four-wheel-drives and horse trailers line the roads that snake along the hilltops, their drivers and passengers training binoculars on the horizon to spot the hounds as they chase their quarry in a white, baying blur across the manicured fields of local farms, over hedges, into and out of the valleys of the moor.
With a few weeks to go before hunting with hounds is due to be banned in England and Wales, the hunters of Exmoor are enjoying the dog days of a pastime they believe is not only central to their way of life, but vital to the preservation of the wild red deer native to their part of the world.
On a recent Thursday more than 150 riders, and twice as many car followers, turned out for a full day's hunting across Lower Sherdon and Great Ferny Ball, over the Kingsland Pits and Hawkridge Common, through the Old Barrow Plantation and Hill Farm to East Hollowcombe.
Here, just outside Hawkridge village, with just five riders, including the Labour peer, Baroness Mallalieu, keeping up, the hind stops, turns and stares down the hounds surrounding it in a wide circle. The hounds cry but stand their ground, trained, Lady Mallalieu said, to hold the deer but not attack as they wait for a hunt official to arrive with his specially shortened shotgun.
With one clear shot to the side of the hind's head, the huntsmen fells the deer and the carcass is divided and distributed, according to tradition, among the people living nearby.
For days to come, the only talk across the valley is of the exhilaration of the chase, as here in far south-west England, as in many English and Welsh rural communities, the hunt is woven tightly into the fabric of society.
With little else in the way of entertainment or community support, even detractors concede that the majority of people on Exmoor rely on the local hunt for their social and economic well-being.
"It's a two-sided coin, because hunting and shooting support pubs, restaurants, shops, hotels, stables, so even people who don't like hunting rely on it to a great extent," said a Devon woman who refused to be named for fear of reprisals from hunters.
"I know of people who have been attacked, and so anti-hunting people in the area are afraid to speak out." "It's the minority against the majority in the countryside," she said.
According to a study commissioned by the West Somerset District Council (WSDC), the region stands to lose up to £9.5 million a year from the loss of its three stag hunts, the last in the country. The loss of the half-dozen fox hunts was not calculated.
From farriers, livery stables and the huntsmen who raise the hounds to B&Bs, hotels, pubs, garages and shops selling imported trinkets, businesses on the moor expect to suffer from a ban on hunting.
Anti-hunt activists, such as the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS), say the people directly employed by the more than 350 hunts in England and Wales can find new jobs, and wonder why local tourism and government authorities have not explored alternative sources of income in the years that a ban has been pending.
An LACS spokeswoman, Ms Wanda Wyporska, criticised the employment of hunt staff with tied accommodation as "very feudal," and described hunting as "a squirearchy in which everyone knows their place, everyone fits in and everyone feels they belong."
With up to 1,000 people following the hunt, most of them local farmers and workers who have participated all their lives, it is difficult to find the truth in her assertion that hunting is the preserve of "upper-class toffs", and LACS staff in Somerset said such claims were damaging to the league's animal welfare cause.
"It just ordinary people," said Mr Graham Floyd, an officer at the LACS Somerset deer sanctuary who hunted from childhood but gave it up after the use of mobile phones by hunters "took any fairness out of the chase."
Ms Wyporska estimates that 800 to 1,000 jobs are directly tied to hunting. The WSDC study found the ban would lead to the loss of "584 full-time equivalent jobs" in an area with a population around 10,000.
The word most frequently invoked when hunters are asked what impact the ban will have on their lives is: "Devastating." "We've already had a sample of what will happen here when the ban comes in, because the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2001 curtailed hunting for a year and the economy was devastated," said Baroness Mallalieu, who owns a property near Exford.
Hunts provide full-time employment and accommodation for people who raise and train hounds, and run hunt stables. Mr John Kent, whose family has shod horses on Exmoor for almost 300 years, said most of his business was hunt-related.
Ms Janet Akner runs the DSSH stables with her three full-time stablehands, cares for 18 horses and lives at the stables on the edge of Exford.
"I've been told my job is safe until May 1st, and we have been told to keep everything for 12 months because if you get rid of things it's much more difficult to start it up again," Ms Akner said.
"I've no idea what would happen to me. I'd lose my livery business and my job as secretary of the hunt, and I would have to move house. They would be removing my entire existence," she said.
The stag is the symbol of Exmoor, and the wild red deer herd numbers up to 6,250 in spring. About 160 are killed each year by the three packs of staghounds, and another 1,200 are culled by professional deer managers to maintain numbers at a sustainable 5,000, according to deer management and research consultant, Dr Jochen Langbein.
Some experts say the welfare of the deer could be compromised by a ban as farmers who now rely on hunters to disperse the animals across the moor are likely to shoot the animals in large numbers to keep them off their land.
Baroness Mallalieu said local authorities have received a number of firearm licence applications in anticipation of the ban and recalled the decimation of the herd in the mid-19th century to as low as 50 during a lapse in hunting with hounds. "Hunting is a method of conservation, but I doubt many people who support the ban see it quite like that," she said.