The Last English Poachers
Read The Last English Poachers Online
Authors: Bob and Brian Tovey
ENGLISH
POACHERS
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
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Copyright © 2015 by Bob and Brian Tovey
This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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The right of Bob and Brian Tovey to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988.
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Hardback: 978-1-47113-567-5
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To Robert Seward Tovey, who was a proper countryman, and Beatrice Frances Tovey, who died too young.
Also Francis George Neal, who died on HMS
Monmouth
at the naval battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914, and Jane Ellen Neal, who was a lovely woman.
10.
Bob – Lamping and Other Stories
12.
Brian – Poacher vs Landowner
20.
Brian – The Last English Poachers
1
A light March drizzle is sticking to the windscreen of the Austin A35 as we drive in the rare hours, without headlights, up to the high brick wall that marks the boundary of
the Berkeley Estate. We park the car in the narrow lane, under cover of some trees, and camouflage it with undergrowth that we’ve used before on many occasions. Then we scale the wall, with
me legging Brian up first and him fixing a rope round the overhanging branch of an oak tree. Even though he’s no more than seven years old, the boy knows what it’s all about. He’s
been coming out with me since he was four and he’s as good a watcher as any man I’ve known.
I picks this spot whenever we comes out here from our village because it’s easy to get over the wall. I pull myself up by the rope now and drop down the other side, into the estate. I
catch Brian when he jumps from the top and set him down, before we move off, after making sure the rope ain’t visible from either side of the wall. The ghost of a moon is shining through the
thin cloud as me and the boy makes our way across the fields to the edge of the woodland. It’s as quiet as a graveyard, with the scurrying of the night animals and the odd hoot of a tawny owl
the only sounds. And it’s times like this I loves the most, an hour before daylight, with my son on my heels and the feel of the land under my feet and the fresh breeze blowing agin’ my
face.
It’s darker once we gets inside the tree line and we need to take cover and wait for first light to break over the hills to the east. I has a flask of strong sweet tea and I gives the boy
a drink from the plastic cup first and then I takes myself a slug – just to keep out the chill that’s trying to creep in through our clothes and make us shiver and shake. I’m
carrying a .22 rifle and we waits for the sickly pale rays of sunlight to come shafting through the leaves.
Brian drinks the tea and grins back at me because I’m the man he looks up to most in the world. I gives him this – this freedom from all the other stuff – and it sometimes
feels like we’re part of each other. Every son is part of his father, but few of ’em feels it like Brian does.
I’m wearing my long army coat and boots and Brian has a thick corduroy jacket and trousers and a woolly hat on his head. The colours of our clothes being brown and green to blend in with
the woodland vegetation and keep us from getting spotted by some keen-eyed keeper with a pair of binoculars.
The light creeps up like a ghostly spectre in the distance to the east. And once we can see with some clarity, we starts off on our hunt for a suitable deer. The estate’s a big place,
maybe ten thousand acres altogether, with five or six hundred acres of parkland alongside farmland and fisheries and small hilly woods dotted about over six or seven miles, where the deer take
refuge.
We keep low to the ground when we has to break from the cover of the trees to get from one thicket to another. Them gamekeepers ain’t beyond giving poachers a good kicking and taking our
guns away from us. And I hope they don’t come upon us all sudden like, because I’ll want to fight ’em and probably get beaten and I hates to see them kick the boy away when he
tries to help me. But we’ve been here before and know the escape routes well enough to make a run for it, as long as we’re alert and don’t let ’em get too close to us.
We can see the outline of the old Norman castle silhouetted agin’ the skyline to the north of us. It’s a dark and demonic-looking place, where they murdered King Edward II by
sticking a red-hot poker up his arse so there’d be no sign of any wound on his body. And every September, on the equinox, he can be heard screaming. I know that because I hears him sometimes,
even though we lives a fair distance away – his voice comes floating and finds its way into our house and I tells it to go leave me and mine alone. And it does.
And Dickie Pearce, the last court jester in England, died there after falling from the minstrels’ gallery, and Queen Matilda came and killed all the deer in revenge for Roger de Berkeley
not supporting her in the war they called ‘the anarchy’. So it’s a foreboding place with a blood-flecked pedigree, and it growls at us now as we cross its land in search of its
game.
There’s about two hundred red and fallow deer on the estate and we start to see ’em as the early spring sun climbs to a low slant in the milky sky. We wants a big stag, not a hind or
an albino, or a fawn. I want to joint it up and keep what we need for ourselves, then sell some and give what’s left to the poorer people of our village. I does this all the time and gives
away a lot of what we hunts because there’s too much for me and Brian and my daughter June and there’s just the three of us now, since their mother left when they was younger. Though
Cora says she’ll be moving in soon to take care of us all. Very soon, I hope.
And then I sees him – a big proud fella with maybe twelve or fifteen points to his antlers. I signal the boy to be still and quiet because I has to get close to him to make a clean kill
and, if I spook the herd, he’ll run with them. The deer is alert, even at this time of morning, but they’re used to humans on this estate. They’re semi-tame and not as flighty as
truly wild deer that you’d get on the high hills of Scotland so, as long as we keeps downwind of ’em with the low light behind us and in their eyes, we’ll be alright. We move
silently, stealthily, like we was animals ourselves and this was our natural habitat – which, in a way, it is.
The .22 bolt action has a decent range for about a hundred yards; after that the bullet can fall away at a rapid rate and not hit the target, but I wants to get closer than that, to make sure I
drops the animal with one shot. We might get away with the one round not being heard by the keepers, but not two or three. I make my silent signals and Brian knows I want to get as close as
possible to make the kill – maybe as close as thirty yards. The boy’s job is to keep watch while I do my job and shoot the quarry, which is what I call whatever it is I’m hunting.
So he turns away from me and keeps his eyes peeled and I can concentrate without worrying about someone creeping up behind me. The gamekeepers will have shotguns and they won’t think twice
about using them. If they pepper one of us, they can always claim it was in self-defence because we pointed the rifle at them. And who’s going take the word of a poacher and his
seven-year-old son agin’ that lot?
The big stag’s getting frisky now – he senses something, maybe the adrenaline that’s filling the air, or the spectres of the poachers that’s been hung here over the
years, drifting past us in the half-light – and I’ll have to take the shot soon. I don’t have telescopic sight on the rifle, but I got a good and well-practised eye. A deer is a
big animal, but the vital areas for clean kills are small. I always aim for the heart or lungs rather than the head. I’ve known idiots in the woods to hit an animal in the mouth instead of
the brain and shatter its jaw and it runs off and starves to death because it can’t feed no more. Clobheads like that needs beating with the butts of their own guns.
Brian’s waiting for the sound of the shot. He don’t know when it’ll come because he’s turned away from me. I know he’ll be saying to hisself ‘any second
now’ and ‘be prepared’, but it always makes him start, no matter how ready he is. Always.
I gets into a good position to take the shot and I know the boy’s watching out behind me to see if any sneaking keeper sticks his big ugly head up when I pulls the trigger. I takes the aim
and can almost see the anticipation in the animal’s eye as I squeeze off the round. The bullet flies through the air and strikes the stag in the heart, a split second before it hears the
sound of the shot. The animal drops to the ground and the rest of the herd takes off across the open part of the estate towards another copse of trees and scrub. We wait, to see if there’s
any shouting in the distance, because the gamekeepers are like lumbering bulls and, even if we can’t see ’em, we can hear ’em coming a mile off.
There’s no sound, so we move forward until we comes to the stag. Its eyes are wild with panic and it’s making low, baying sounds of distress. So I takes out my hunting knife and
slices its throat and lets it bleed out, because venison can go off quicker than some other meat if you don’t get the blood out straight away. The smell will soon attract fox and stoat and
reclusive badger and birds of prey, and they’ll circle and hover round us to see if we’ll leave anything for them when we move off. When the predators and carcass pillagers come,
they’ll make a lot of fuss and I know they’ll attract the keepers if we ain’t quick.