Next morning, Mitty sent Arie southward with two couple of beagles in the back of his car. Unbeknownst to him, she called ahead to Charlottesville acquaintances with a simple request: “Keep your eyes on him.” The neighbors were impressed. Within a few months, the remainder of the Waldingfield pack arrived at their new home, Ridge Lee, Arie’s 120-acre farm in Central Virginia. In 1970, Mitty named Arie joint master of the Waldingfield, beginning a new joint mastership shared between one Appleton descendant and one “outsider.” Today, Susan is joint master of beagles along with Arie, and her son, James Bayard Tuckerman Dickey, is heir apparent to assume joint mastery.

“One thing Mitty pressed is the perpetuity of the pack,” Arie says. “Maintaining beagles is not a passing fancy, it’s a lifetime commitment.” Arie is confident that the plans he, Susan, and the Waldingfield board have made over the past five years are sound, including making the pack into a nonprofit organization and placing Ridge Lee Farm on a conservation easement. These measures are the best hope for the pack’s survival, fulfilling Mitty’s wish.

Sitting back on the farmhouse porch at Ridge Lee, Arie regales us with stories of past hunts. There’s the time one winter when the chase led him and the pack to a frozen creek, but the ice was too thin for a man to cross on foot.  He wound up belly-crawling across, spread eagle, while the beagles shimmied and squirted their way, legs flailing wildly every which way. At last year’s Western Challenge in Arizona, the country was so broad that the beagles, traditionally hunted on foot, had to be followed on horseback across barren, scrubby ground. The Waldingfield wound up taking first place after giving chase over a mind-boggling eleven miles. “The country is covered with prickly pear,” Arie explains in his jovial Dutch accent. “Thorns got stuck in a hound’s paw, but he’d just stop, pull at it with his teeth until he managed to extract it, and keep on going. Only two beagles fell out of the hunt that day.” The distance covered during this feat of endurance is so legendary that back in Virginia the mounted fox hunters in their pink coats still haven’t recovered from when they first got wind of it. “Some of them still give me ugly stares when I run into them,” Arie laughs.

Arie and his wife, Suzanne, have hunted with self-described aristocrats in Virginia and bona fide aristocrats in England, before the sport there sadly fell prey to a hunting ban several years back. Arie recalls a dinner in England the evening before a hunt, when the host, a legendary British sporting aristocrat, asked Suzanne, “Do you hunt?” “Not really,” she said. “Well, then, do you shoot?” “No,” she said. The host, face contorted, gave a “Hrumph!” and turned to his guests on the other side. But not forgetting his form, he  interrupted his conversation by looking over his shoulder at Suzanne and blurting out, “Well, but you do look most lovely this evening.” I glance at Suzanne and ask, “Did you think to ask him if he’d yet made plans for the Fourth of July?”

The bottle of port makes another round, and Arie shifts the conversation to the future of beagling. Its continuity in Virginia depends on attracting new enthusiasts, which in theory shouldn’t be difficult. The sport requires no guns and no expenditure of a small fortune on fancy equipment. All it demands is a pair of willing legs, a generous amount of enthusiasm, and, at most, a sturdy walking stick. “Can you imagine a better way to breathe clean country air and stretch your legs while enjoying the company of your neighbors, friends, and these eager pups?” Arie asks. As dusk descends, I survey the sweeping landscape that is Ridge Lee Farm, and it seems that God surely created it for the sport of beagling. And somehow, I can’t imagine it without the chorus of these remarkable hounds.