Princely Boar Hunt

It was late on a December day when my wife and I drove up to the shooting park of Prince Carl zu Loewenstein in western Germany for a boar hunt in the grand old manner. The prince's shooting lodge commands a sea of huge old beech trees in the Spessart Mountains just east of Frankfurt. The game of ancient Europe roams these carefully preserved 3,000 acres, and it is as abundant now as it ever was over the centuries. This was to be a hunt such as one seldom encounters in the mundane 20th Century, for the boar is still hunted with all the formality and observance of tradition practiced by an aristocracy which has almost vanished from the European scene.

TITLES AND NAMES

When we arrived, we found 22 other guests from half a dozen countries, with titles too long for my lame memory. I tried calling them by their last names and it sounded as though I were reciting a lesson in geography?counts and countesses, dukes and duchesses of Greece, Bavaria, Liechtenstein. There were nine different nationalities represented by the 11 ladies present.

Breakfast next morning was at 8 and by 9 the whole party had assembled on the steps of the lodge, the ladies bundled in long woolen Loden coats, the men in shooting jackets, breeches and stalking boots. Each of the men also had a cape thrown over his shoulder or tucked around his knapsack.

A dilapidated old barouche was pulled from the stable by a couple of strong farm horses. Several of the guests who'd either been maimed in one of Germany's wars or had merely sprained an ankle climbing a mountain got reluctantly into the carriage. Behind it was a long farm wagon for the lazy but more agile. A third, the game cart, with a butcher armed with cleavers and knives, brought up the rear. A slight fall of snow had left patches of white on the copper-colored leafy floor of the forest. All around us the sleek, gray-blue trunks of beech trees rose like pillars in an endless cathedral.

Half a mile from the lodge, the Jagerei, or hunting personnel, were drawn up in parade formation. In the rear rank, 30 rubber-aproned woodcutters, wearing a weird assortment of headgear, stood at attention. They were the beaters, the men who did the work of scrambling through the thickets, whooping and calling and banging their sticks against the trees to drive out the game. Between their legs a howling pack of dachshunds and terriers tugged at leashes. Before them stood the foresters in gray-green forest uniforms, each with a stiff-brimmed hat smartly cocked over one eye. They were the officers of the hunting army, who helped post the gunners, tracked down wounded game with specially trained bloodhounds and generally made themselves useful. In the front rank, also in forest uniforms, were the trumpeters, seven in all, their feet slightly apart.

SALUTE TO THE PRINCE

Before them all stood the Chief Forester, Herr Bichelmayer. As we approached, he raised his hat in greeting. We paused and removed ours. Everyone said, "Weidmann's Heil!" which is the traditional German hunter's greeting. The trumpeters lifted their horns to their lips and blared out a salute that echoed through the forest.

"They call this 'The Salute to the Prince,'" a redheaded Irish girl next to me whispered, "but I've never discovered what happens if there's no prince around."

"Hush," said her husband, a duke. "Don't be irreverent."