The Last English Poachers (15 page)

‘Actually, I know your village very well. My father was vicar there for a time.’

It only turns out that his father was the old vicar I used to push round in his wheelchair when I was a young lad. I don’t know if the judge recognises my name and remembers that time, but
he gives me a year, which is very light, considering. I’ve already been on remand for four and a half months and I’m sent to Bristol Prison and given a job painting cells. Three and a
half months later, I’m free again.

Within two days of being released, I’m back out poaching.

10

I think Brian already told you there’s two kinds of lamping. The first kind involves being out at night with a small handheld torch and a gun to shoot pheasants roosting
in the trees, and we’ve said a lot about that. The second kind’s going out at night with a fairly powerful, solid-beam lamp and a greyhound in search of rabbits and hares. For me, this
is a great way to see a sighthound in action. It takes patience and skill and you has to know what you’re doing – so does the dog. The first thing I does is go out during the day and
trek the area I’m going to lamp that night. I’ll know where the quarry’s likely to be and I’ll remember fences and barbed wire and other things that might damage the dog.
The greyhound will be running at full pelt in the black dark, except for the beam from the lamp, so I don’t want it taking its head off on a wire or breaking its legs in a hole.

The best time to lamp is on dark, windy nights with plenty of cloud and as little moon as possible. I make sure I’m downwind of the rabbits or hares and that’ll deaden the sound, as
well as the smell, of me and the dog approaching. I takes the time to position myself and the greyhound where I wants to be, from the reconnaissance earlier in the day. Then I scan the field with
the lamp to find the coneys quatting in the forms. A lot of people use lurchers for lamping, but I always prefer the greyhound. It’s by far the best dog going and it has to be a fast hound
that’ll be quiet and do as I tells it. I’ve lamped with a brace of dogs as well as with a single dog, it makes no matter to me – though two dogs can sometimes get tangled up in
each other and have a tug-o-war with the kill afterwards, where a single dog will be single-minded and bring me back the rabbit or hare in one piece. The greyhound must be trained to come back as
soon as I calls it, after it makes the catch and, if the quarry ain’t dead by then, I’ll kill it myself in seconds.

I keeps a tight grip on the greyhound until I’m ready to slip him – until I sees the ruby glint of a rabbit’s eyes. If the lamp comes across anything else, like a deer or a fox
or a badger, or even a cat, I might hold the dog back – or I might not. Once I see the rabbit or hare, I’ll keep the lamp beam on it until I’m sure the dog sees it too. As soon as
he spots it, he’ll perk up and try to pull away. I lets him go and he’s off like a bullet out of a gun and it’s a sight to behold. It’s like being back when the prehistoric
people moved through their dark world at the beginning of time. I feel what they must have felt back then, in the night – under the never ending black sky. It gives an edge to my senses and I
knows I’m alive and alert.

Adrenaline rushes through my veins and through the dog’s, and the short hairs stand on the back of my neck and it feels like I’m part of the greyhound, running with him. I’m no
longer myself, so I ain’t able to explain myself. And there ain’t nothing to explain – no sense nor sentiment in the primitive night. To be able to explain it would be like being
able to explain the meaning of everything. And who can do that? I just forget who I am – what I am – and every step becomes its own little lifetime as I runs through the dark field.
Birth and life and death. And again. And again. Until it’s over and the dog brings me back the kill.

If I hunts the same area a few times over, the rabbits can get lamp shy – they gets crafty after a while and run through the hedge. Soon as you shines the light on ’em, before you
can shoot ’em or put a dog on ’em, they’ll bolt, and that’s when some people say to use a red filter lens to confuse ’em. But I don’t, because it don’t
shine a long way, so I just leave the fields be for a while and go lamping somewhere else.

But not everyone has the choices that I do – to go where they wants and hunt where they wants – so they got to improvise. I suppose I’m a bit like that fella in Australia I
heard about once, who staked a claim to a remote bit of some red desert and declared independence from the rest of the country. He made his own money and printed his own postage stamps and paid no
taxes and was completely in charge of his own little acre of land, without interference from any authority. I ain’t got the same exemption from the law, but I knows how he must’ve felt,
to rise every morning to a brand new sun and to walk at night with the darkness as your friend and to feel at one with the free birds and all the wild things around you – and I stretch out my
arms and say ‘Halle-bloody-lujah!’

Slimbridge, on the Severn Estuary, is a wetland area of marshes where Siberian wildfowl spend the winter. It’s full of geese and ducks and curlews and all sorts of other
birds and it belonged to the Berkeley Estate before it became a wildfowl sanctuary. The Dumbles is an area of the foreshore with gulleys going through it out into the sea and geese fly over it in
the morning and sometimes feed there. The toffs used to shoot geese from the foreshore before it became a wildlife trust and a sanctuary for game birds, and they used to have a decoy down there
– not a decoy you’d use to lure in geese over a stubble field – a wetland netted decoy.

Let me explain: a wetland decoy has a big wide circular mouth, made of sticks. It’s covered in nets and it gradually gets narrower and narrower as it goes in, for about seventy or eighty
yards. Wildfowl will swim happily in the mouth because there’s nothing to threaten or obstruct them. A specially trained dog flits in and out of the decoy, attracting the wildfowl and taking
them further and further in. The birds only get brief glimpses of the dog and they follow it because they’re curious. The dog charms them to follow it in, just like a stoat will charm a
rabbit, and they’ll go deeper and deeper, following and following. All the time, the decoy’s getting narrower and narrower and they go into a funnel at the end which can be shut off.
Then the hunters get in front of the mouth of the decoy and the ducks has no place to go – so they move in there and kills ’em. The Berkley Estate decoyers caught thousands of ducks and
geese over the winters for the castle and those connected with it.

But people like me was never welcome there.

Then Slimbridge was taken over by the Wildfowl Trust and now the castle crowd have a shoot once a year down there – but, as a rule, there’s no shooting allowed. In Scotland, anyone
can shoot from foreshores when the tide’s out, but in England you have to belong to a club, because they’ve paid for the rights to shoot from what was, and still should be, free fowling
ground. Gloucester Wildfowl Club has the shooting rights to the foreshore near Slimbridge between low and mean high tide and you got to do a course in bird identification to become a member.
I’ve been shooting birds for longer than any of them and I don’t need no identification course to know what I’m shooting. All foreshores is Crown property between low and high
tides and anyone can go fishing there without a licence – but these clubs have exclusive shooting rights from the councils so ordinary people like me, who want to shoot a duck or a goose for
dinner, have had that right taken away from them – without even being asked!

But it never bothered me whether I was welcome or not, and the Dumbles was always one of my favourite hunting haunts. I’d go over there, hit and run, sneaking in through the dykes and
gulleys and reed beds, get a few shots away, bag ’em up and get out. We liked to go down there at Christmas time and, one year, Brian went over on his bike when it was dark. He walked along
the canal then slipped down into a dyke, where he couldn’t be seen by anyone in the bird towers, watching with their binoculars. He waited for the morning flight off the estuary and shot ten
geese, but they was too heavy to carry home on his pushbike, so he made it back to the towpath, hid the birds, then walked into the village and found a phone. He rang me up and I drove over there
and picked him and the geese up. Ten shots from a 12-bore makes a lot of noise but, on that occasion, no one came out and he got away with it.

On another Christmas Day, I sneaked out on the foreshore to do some shooting and this time I brought a dog. He was the old springer called Jack, who found the albino deer for Brian, if you
remember, but he was nearing the end of his usefulness. I shot a few geese and one of them fell into the nearby Sharpness to Gloucester Canal. By the time I got over there, old Jack had gone in
after the goose but couldn’t get back out, because the water level was about two foot lower than the edge of the canal. The dog wouldn’t let go of the kill and he was paddling to keep
hisself afloat and was nearly dead with the cold by the time I pulled him out. Once he was out of the water, the spaniel got the life back into him and dried hisself out in the long grass. But it
just goes to show, a good dog won’t give up what it’s retrieved, no matter what. Jack was twelve years old when I shot him, because he was ill and dying. He’d done enough work to
shame a bulldozer and retrieved tons of game in his dog’s life. But when it’s time to go it’s time to go. No use hanging about trying to prolong this life – better to move
on into the adventure of the next.

And it’s things like that what makes life such a sweetness – the excitement of poaching, the not knowing what might happen next, the whistling gladness of it all. When the family was
growing up, I had to poach to feed them. And I was very successful at it – pheasants and partridge and rabbits and fish and deer and anything I could get. I remember once I went down to
Bristol with a bit of scrap metal and made about fifteen quid. On the way back, I spotted a cock pheasant behind a barn, so I went home and got my gun and came back and shot it. It was close to one
of the big estates and, as I was making my way back to the car, the estate agent came through a hedge with a threatening scowl on his ugly mug. I knew he was going to blame me for shooting the
pheasant on the estate, which I didn’t, it was just outside it. He was a big bugger and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to come at me, so I raised my gun and shouted at him.

‘Stay where you are!’

He backed off, into the hedge he’d come out of. But when I got to the car, the earl who owned the estate was there with the boot open. I didn’t take too kindly to that.

‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

‘Looking for game.’

‘And did you find any?’

‘No.’

‘My car’s on a public highway; you’ve no right to be meddling with it.’

But they thought they could get away with anything, and most of the time they could, because of the undue deference shown to them by the forelock-pulling public – and the police. He knew
me and I knew him. He came towards me with a walk that once might have been used to follow funerals.

‘What’s in your bag, Mr Tovey?’

‘None of your business.’

I knew his reputation, but he also knew mine and, without his agent to help him, he didn’t fancy having a set-to. So I was able to drive off without interference.

About a week later, I got a message from the same earl asking if I’d go see him. I went to the estate office and knocked on the door. He opened it. He was all nice and polite, not his
usual arrogant self at all.

‘How are you, Mr Tovey?’

‘I’m fine. How’re you?’

‘Let me get straight to the point . . . if I give you all the rabbiting on the estate, will you leave the game alone?’

I think I told you already, a rabbit is called a coney and it ain’t considered game – it’s classed as vermin by the people who attend pheasant and partridge shoots. I looked
him square in his inbred eye.

‘I give you my word.’

He started to smile, thinking he had me in his pocket.

‘You do?’

‘That I’ll shoot pheasants on your land whenever I want to.’

The expression on his face was worth twenty pounds, as I turned and walked out. We was never going to be friends, but now we’d be worse enemies than ever.

I didn’t care.

And I was true to my word and took pheasants from his land every chance I got. You see, I didn’t consider them to be
his
pheasants. They was wild birds and there for the taking by
anyone who had the skill to do it. I had that skill – the skill to know where pheasants are and how to get ’em. The skill to entice a bird to where you wants it. Like, I know pheasants
love daddy-longlegs, or crane flies as they’re called. Pheasants will follow ’em anywhere. The daddy-longlegs is impossible to control and they’ll fly wherever they wants to, all
over the place. But they sometimes eats the root hairs from vegetables, like carrots or parsnips or sugar-beets, and if you goes to the trouble of laying a trail of root hairs, you might get a good
few of ’em to follow that trail – and the pheasants will follow the daddy-longlegs, away from the private estates and onto land where you can trap and shoot ’em. If you
can’t be bothered with luring the daddy-longlegs, just lay a trail of corn – but the birds prefer the flying insects and, while they’re about in September and October,
they’ll ignore the corn and most other kinds of bait.