The Last English Poachers (12 page)

‘We’ve had reports of someone ferreting.’

The rabbits is gone, so there ain’t no evidence there, but we still has a couple of ferrets in a sack and the nets. More coppers come up, and one of them’s a big mouthy clobhead
– a bully, the type that would punch you in the bollocks in a police cell when he’s backed up by his mates. He snarls at us.

‘What you lot doing?’

‘Piss off!’

Brian snarls back at him, then runs off with the ferrets and the nets. One of the coppers tries to stop him, but Robert puts his foot out and trips the twerp and he goes rolling down the
bank.

‘Oh, sorry.’

Now there’s no evidence at all. But a police van’s turned up, with a dog and handlers. The big copper grins all over his horrible chops.

‘This is a bad dog. He’ll catch that bastard and chew him up.’

I just grin back at him.

‘Bet you a fiver he don’t.’

Brian has a good head start and he runs and runs, with the dog and handlers after him – through a wood and across a main road and into a field with a load of sheep and cattle, in and out
of ’em to lose the scent, and down into the valley. He runs for about five miles without stopping, carrying nets and sacks and ferrets.

Meanwhile, back at the bank, all the evidence is gone and some of the coppers is having a chummy chat with me and Robert. The local police know us well and one of them asks if he can come round
and see our dogs, because we has about thirty of them at this time. ’Course, he’s only pretending to be interested and all friendly, like, and he really wants to nose around and see
what he can report to his sergeant.

‘As long as you ain’t in uniform.’

The dog couldn’t catch Brian and the handlers brought it back and they let me and Robert go home. Brian always carried change for a phone box, in case he got come upon and chased for
miles. So he went into the first public box he came to and called me and told me where he was. I went over and picked him and the ferrets up. We’d lost the rabbits, but we’d won the
bet.

The mouthy copper never did pay me the fiver.

8

Coursing a dog after a hare or a rabbit is a sport that’s been around for hundreds of years in the countryside. Let me explain. There’s spot coursing, which is a
dog after a rabbit for a kill. Like, if I’m out poaching across the fields with my dog, I might not get a run all day. So, to keep the greyhound interested, I do a bit of spot coursing,
especially around Christmas time when people would have a holiday and some time on their hands. That meant catching maybe forty or fifty rabbits with ferrets and keeping ’em alive. Then
I’d go to a nice big field with my dogs and maybe a group of others would come with me. I’d drop a rabbit out of a sack on a spot and give it about fifty yards start before letting one
of the dogs after it. The rabbit’s out of its familiar runs and don’t know where to go, so it’s at a disadvantage and gets caught nearly every time.

This gives the dogs a kill and bloods ’em and they stays interested when I’m out hunting with ’em. It may sound cruel to them who knows no better – and I’ve seen
some cruel bastards who’d burn a rabbit’s eye out with a cigarette, or tie their back legs up to give their shit dogs a better chance – but I never engaged in cruelty of any kind
and I has no truck with them who does. The rabbit’s killed quickly, much quicker than it would be by that evil disease myxomatosis, introduced to cull the coneys by so-called
‘humane’ people.

But the rabbits are just a warm-up for the real thing: hare coursing. Hare coursing’s banned now, of course, but there was a time when it was widespread. There was two kinds: being just
out for a run and a bit of sport across the fields, and competition coursing, for trophies and prize money. Competition coursing started off as park coursing, which got banned eighty-odd years ago.
A park course was held in a special field where hares was caught and kept in an enclosure. They were trained to run down the field to an escape at the other end. Two greyhounds would be slipped
after each hare and the one that scored the most points before the hare escaped or got caught was the winner of the course. A lot of horse racing tracks started off as coursing parks for greyhounds
– Haydock Park and Kempton Park and Sandown Park and others too, and you can still see where the dog courses was run in them places, if you looks closely enough.

Lord Lonsdale, who donated the original boxing belts and who was also known as The Yellow Earl, because he liked to wear that colour, had his own park course at Barleythorpe Hall in the East
Midlands. They had an enclosure with a five-foot wall round it where the hares would be kept after being netted. They’d be local hares and put into the enclosure a couple of days before the
course, which would be held on a nice long flat field. There was a chute in the wall that would be lifted and a hare driven out and they had their course – all nice and easy. The earl had
first-class railway carriages to keep his dogs in and he was a man who had enormous wealth from the exploitation of the Cumberland coalminers and he devoted hisself to the outdoor life. But the
likes of poachers never would have got a look in at something like that back then. We was classed as low-life, scurrilous characters – and you’ve seen how poachers is depicted in books
and stories down through the years: sly scoundrels, slipping darkly along the lanes and in and out of crouched corners – evil outlaws, not to be trusted, who would skin a man as quick as an
animal. Even though, in reality, we was nothing of the kind.

In any case, park coursing wasn’t a proper countryside pastime like open coursing, which replaced it when it got banned. Open coursing didn’t have penned hares and the animals had to
be driven in onto the course. It needed a lot of ordinary people: beaters, flankers, slippers, judges, spectators and dog-owners. Beaters would take their flasks and their sandwiches and you were
out in the clean air with the fields under your feet. Open coursing wasn’t as exclusive as park coursing neither, even though the dogs that got run always belonged to the toffs, but it was a
day out for everyone. Except for the hares, some people might say, but most of the hares escaped and many more died of disease caused by intensive farming methods and by shooting than was ever
killed by coursing dogs. You might get as few as two hundred hares killed in a whole year’s coursing – you’ll get that many killed on the roads in a month. There was no cruelty
involved, despite what people who never knew nothing about the sport might say.

Gradually all British coursing became open meetings, where hares native to the ground and knew where they were going were driven onto the course. The course was always in the shape of a
horseshoe and beaters would drive the hares forward and flankers would keep ’em in. A slipper would have a brace of dogs on a double slip-lead behind a shy and, when a hare went by close to
it, he’d give it a 150-yard lead, then slip the dogs. The dogs had to be clearly sighted on one hare or the slipper wouldn’t let ’em go. Or if too much mud was accumulating on the
hares’ feet, so they couldn’t run properly, the course was stopped. A judge on a horse would keep up with the course and award points to a dog every time he turned the hare –
either white collar or red collar, to tell them apart. Four points was awarded for the first turn – one for the turn and three for speed, then one point for each turn after that and one point
for a kill. The course would continue until the hare was either caught and killed by the dogs or it escaped. The dog with the most points at that stage won the course and went on to the next
round.

But the sport was never about catching or killing the hare; it was about the working ability of the dogs. Some greyhounds would run clever to try to catch the hare, one in front to turn it back
to the dog behind. But the hare’s even cannier and could usually avoid these tricks and outsmart the dogs. A good strong hare could outrun two greyhounds any day and the ones who got killed
were usually sick or old and would’ve died soon anyway – and much more slowly. Like I said, it was a great day out and attracted all sorts.

I even remember one time having my fortune told at a hare course by an old duckerer, as the Gypsies calls their crystal-gazers. He told me to sit while he looked at the palms of my hands. I
tells him I don’t believe in this stuff and he laughs at me.

‘We all wants to believe, mister, even if we say we don’t. We wants to see what’s in the stars.’

I know Gypsies is superstitious, with their four-leaf clovers and rabbits’ feet and horseshoes and their old sayings – like never argue in the morning and the hawthorn blow’s
for bad luck and better never to have been born, than cut your hair on a Sunday morn.

He asks for all the details about when and where I was born and he says them newspapers is all liars, they gives everyone born under a star sign the same horoscope. But Gypsy horoscopes needs
dates and times and even places of birth. He says newspapers know nothing about astrology.

‘Astrology, mister, was invented by three wise men, two shepherds and a Gypsy chal.’

And he knows things about my father being a butcher and my mother dying young and me being an only child and he says I’ll live to be seventy-seven and never be filthy rich, but will
sometimes be happy and frequently content. Which is all a man can reasonably ask for, ain’t it? He tells me everyone has a good spirit and a bad spirit and life’s only a dream and it
really begins when you die – when your spirit leaves your body. And some people, like me, dreams in black and white and others in colour, and it’s them who dreams in colour that’s
the prophets and the peacemakers. We talk afterwards and the old fortune-teller says he don’t know his exact age, but it’s in the region of ninety-nine, and his birth
certificate’s on a tree, somewhere in Spain. His words drift back to the old days, when he’d be away on the tramp as soon as the blossom came and the thrush began to sing. And how he
buried his grandmother outside Budapest with her pipe and an ounce of baccy to see her on her way – and how, when she was young, the yawn of her voice in song had a culture all its own.

‘I thinks about it, mister . . . at fresh of the morning and at balance of the day, I thinks about it.’

That was twenty-five years ago, when I was Brian’s age now – and I’m still alive. I wonder if the old duckerer is. Anyways, before hare coursing got banned, people used to say
to me, ‘Why don’t you muzzle the dogs and that would make hare coursing more humane.’ In the first place, like I said, not many hares was caught by the dogs and them that were got
killed quickly. If the dogs was wearing muzzles, they couldn’t get a bite on the hare to kill it quickly, but the muzzle would crush it in their attempts to do so – the hare would be
lying there with a broken back and its guts coming out of its earholes, and it would still be alive – is that more humane? It’s just one example of people talking through their arses
about something they knows nothing about. But, even with the open coursing, it was really a sport of the well-to-do, just like fox-hunting. Coursing clubs would turn down ordinary men who tried to
join, calling them low-class or poachers or thieves or suchlike. When I first started going to hare coursing meetings under National Coursing Club rules, people wouldn’t talk to me or my
sons, even though we was long-netting for them. They tolerated us because we could get them the hares they wanted, but they wouldn’t let us join their
‘we’re-better-than-you’ clubs.

The Waterloo Cup was held at Great Altcar, near Liverpool, and this was the blue riband event in the coursing calendar. A three-day meeting with a sixty-four-dog stake and a purse runoff for
first-round losers and a plate run-off for second-round losers. Over a hundred courses altogether. You needed a lot of hares for that because it’s not just one hare for one course; you has to
take into consideration the ones that gets out the flanks and doubles back and don’t go through the course, and the ones the slipper thinks ain’t right, and so on. For every hare
that’s actually coursed, there might be ten or twenty that gets driven, but not coursed. With television cameras there and sports writers and all sorts of gentry, it would have been an
embarrassment if they ran out of hares halfway through – they’d look like right mugs altogether. Now, the Waterloo Cup wasn’t supposed to use netted hares, unless they was local
or had been relocated the season before – that’s because newly relocated hares wouldn’t have had time to settle into their new surrounding and would run all over the place and
knacker the dogs that was unlucky enough to course one of ’em. But that’s not the way it worked.

They couldn’t keep a population of hares the size they wanted and they needed a couple of thousand hares to be put down every year beforehand, so they’d be sure to have enough for
the whole competition. We netted hares at Newmarket for the meeting and them hares were taken to Great Altcar and we’d feed ’em on crushed oats and carrots and let ’em out as near
as two nights before the Waterloo Cup was run. Sometimes we’d even go up there in Transit vans the night before, when there was nobody about, to avoid saboteurs who’d try to disrupt the
event and because coursing laws stated that netted hares had to be released into the area six months before. Like I said, hares that weren’t native didn’t know where to go – if a
dog got a big strong one, it’d go round and round and try to get back through the beaters and it’d take the dogs with it, so your chance of getting through to the next round was gone
because your dog would be proper fagged out, if you see what I mean. Unlike a greyhound that got on a native hare and had a quick run, up the field and a few turns and out, like on a park course.
It was a matter of luck if you got a good local hare that would give your dog a short chase or if you got a hare that was brought in from somewhere else.