Where's the Vicar?

Rico's lengthy absence has me pondering the tradition of the hunting vicar. "While many see the chase as their ‘religion’, the hunting vicar will always have a special place in the hunting field." I couldn't agree more; and I'm sure the grousers will all agree that our very own hunting vicar will always have a special place in our hearts.

heh heh

So I decided to do a quick search on "hunting vicars," and one of the interesting things that turns up is the following description of an H. G. Wells novel titled The Wonderful Visit. Here's a brief recap for your vicarious pleasure:

The Wonderful Visit. 1895. (155p). The first book-length story in which Wells uses the method that predominates in his short stories, "the method of bringing some fantastically possible or impossible thing into a commonplace group of people, and working out their reactions with the comple test gravity and reasonableness" . . . . An angel falls from his world (our land of dreams) through the fourth dimension to our world (his land of dreams), where he is immediately shot down by a bird hunting vicar, who then takes him home to nurse, for until his wounds heal he will not be able to fly again. The townspeople refuse to believe that he is anything other than some queer kind of hunchback. Although a pure creature when he arrives, he gradually deteriorates as he breathes our "poisonous air" . . . , so that when his wounds heal, he finds himself not only unable to fly but also suffering from all the human passions . . . .

Get that: an angel is shot down by a "bird hunting vicar." You know what that means, Rich . . . "What with your ethics."

ba-da-da-boom!

Historians of the hunt will also realize that the Jack Russell terrier owes its very moniker to the origin of its breeding by, you guessed it, Parson Jack Russell, the hunting vicar of Swimbridge.

Rich, if you're alive out there . . . nod yer head.