MY first view of a hunted coyote was one of those vivid, heart-stopping moments that will be with me always. Yellow-grey, wolf-like, he was bounding across the wind-bleached grassland of the Shenandoah Valley like he owned it all, with his mask set for the rearing bulk of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east.

The sixth Lord Fairfax made the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia his home and introduced the first organised fox hunting to North America in 1747, with the importation of a pack of English foxhounds. Fairfax hunted well into his 70s and instilled his love of the chase in his young protege, George Washington.