‘I don’t suppose by any chance these keepers might be carrying guns?’ I asked.
‘All keepers carry guns,’ Claud said.
I had been afraid of that.
‘It’s for the vermin mostly.’
‘Ah.’
‘Of course there’s no guarantee they won’t take a pot at a poacher now and again.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Not at all. But they only do it from behind. Only when you’re running away. They like to pepper you in the legs at about fifty yards.’
‘They can’t do that!’ I cried. ‘It’s a criminal offence!’
‘So is poaching,’ Claud said.
We walked on awhile in silence. The sun was below the high hedge on our right now and the lane was in shadow.
‘You can consider yourself lucky this isn’t thirty years ago,’ he went on. ‘They used to shoot you on sight in those days.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I know it,’ he said. ‘Many’s the night when I was a nipper I’ve gone into the kitchen and seen my old dad lying face downwards on the table and Mum standing over him digging the grapeshot out of his buttocks with a potato knife.’
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘It makes me nervous.’
‘You believe me, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I believe you.’
‘Towards the end he was so covered in tiny little white scars he looked exactly like it was snowing.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right.’
‘Poacher’s arse, they used to call it,’ Claud said. ‘And there wasn’t a man in the whole village who didn’t have a bit of it one way or another. But my dad was the champion.’
‘Good luck to him,’ I said.
‘I wish to hell he was here now,’ Claud said, wistful. ‘He’d have given anything in the world to be coming with us on this job tonight.’
‘He could take my place,’ I said. ‘Gladly.’
We had reached the crest of the hill and now we could see the wood ahead of us, huge and dark with the sun going down behind the trees and little sparks of gold shining through.
‘You’d better let me have those raisins,’ Claud said.
I gave him the bag and he slid it gently into his trouser pocket.
‘No talking once we’re inside,’ he said. ‘Just follow me and try not to go snapping any branches.’
Five minutes later we were there. The lane ran right up to the wood itself and then skirted the edge of it for about three hundred yards with only a little hedge between. Claud slipped through the hedge on all fours and I followed.
It was cool and dark inside the wood. No sunlight came in at all.
‘This is spooky,’ I said.
‘Ssshh!’
Claud was very tense. He was walking just ahead of me, picking his feet up high and putting them down gently on the moist ground. He kept his head moving all the time, the eyes sweeping slowly from side to side, searching for danger. I tried doing the same, but soon I began to see a keeper behind every tree, so I gave it up.
Then a large patch of sky appeared ahead of us in the roof of the forest and I knew that this must be the clearing. Claud had told me that the clearing was the place where the young birds were introduced into the woods in early July, where they were fed and watered and guarded by the keepers, and where many of them stayed from force of habit until the shooting began.
‘There’s always plenty of pheasants in the clearing,’ he had said.
‘Keepers too, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but there’s thick bushes all around and that helps.’
We were now advancing in a series of quick crouching spurts, running from tree to tree and stopping and waiting and listening and running on again, and then at last we were kneeling safely behind a big clump of alder right on the edge of the clearing and Claud was grinning and nudging me in the ribs and pointing through the branches at the pheasants.
The place was absolutely stiff with birds. There must have been two hundred of them at least strutting around among the tree-stumps.
‘You see what I mean?’ Claud whispered.
It was an astonishing sight, a sort of poacher’s dream come true. And how close they were! Some of them were not more than ten paces from where we knelt. The hens were plump and creamy-brown and they were so fat their breast-feathers almost brushed the ground as they walked. The cocks were slim and beautiful, with long tails and brilliant red patches around the eyes, like scarlet spectacles. I glanced at Claud. His big ox-like face was transfixed in ecstasy. The mouth was slightly open and the eyes had a kind of glazy look about them as they stared at the pheasants.
I believe that all poachers react in roughly the same way as this on sighting game. They are like women who sight large emeralds in a jeweller’s window, the only difference being that the women are less dignified in the methods they employ later on to acquire the loot. Poacher’s arse is nothing to the punishment that a female is willing to endure.
‘Ah-ha,’ Claud said softly. ‘You see the keeper?’
‘Where?’
‘Over the other side, by that big tree. Look carefully.’
‘My God!’
‘It’s all right. He can’t see us.’
We crouched close to the ground, watching the keeper. He was a smallish man with a cap on his head and a gun under his arm. He never moved. He was like a little post standing there.
‘Let’s go,’ I whispered.
The keeper’s face was shadowed by the peak of his cap, but it seemed to me that he was looking directly at us.
‘I’m not staying here,’ I said.
‘Hush,’ Claud said.
Slowly, never taking his eyes from the keeper, he reached into his pocket and brought out a single raisin. He placed it in the palm of his right hand, and then quickly, with a little flick of the wrist, he threw the raisin high into the air. I watched it as it
