No beating about the bush, we were bad
We had our beaters’ shoot on the Monday before the end of the season which allowed those who needed to to tag an extra day off on to the weekend or “throw a sickie”. In the old days this was known as a “cock” shoot because the keepers wanted to get rid of all the old cock pheasants and then gather up the hen birds and take broods of chicks off them for the next season.
Nowadays a great many keepers just go for a total clean out and start afresh with bought-in chicks or poults in the spring. As it happened, our birds were by the end of the season pretty thin on the ground anyway and extremely wily, as you would be if you had been shot at for four months and survived.
We were split into two teams of six, plus those beaters who don’t shoot – quite a number just come with their dogs for the walk and the craic – with one armed team beating towards the others lined out at the end of the drive. The walking guns had strict instructions not to shoot anything flying forward, not only for safety reasons, but otherwise very little would have reached the standing guns.
After an entire season mocking the paying guns on normal shoot days, we were rather on our mettle to show just how much better we were. Which needless to say we weren’t, with one or two notable exceptions. So no pressure.
As luck would have it I drew the hot spot on the first drive where mercifully the birds did what they have not done all season and came sideways through a high stand of beeches which made them relatively easy to hit. So by the end of the drive I was looking pretty good. Thereafter things went downhill.
Waffle, who to my horror has taken to whimpering very loudly with excitement (she never used to) had a fight over a running bird with a very large lab at the end of which we were left with a pile of feathers and a lot of hurt feelings. But they then kept clear of each other, more by luck I suspect than design.
The partridges, pride and joy of the shoot manager, which have performed miserably for the entire season by sneaking out of every drive at waist level, decided this was the day they would present themselves perfectly and flew at high speed at regular intervals over one gun who missed the lot in view of everyone. Much commiseration.
An appalling selection of alcohol from gin to Baileys to Dubonnet was attacked in the bothy afterwards over chicken curry and pavlova, and Duncan told a joke about a man who had an intimate tattoo of a Land Rover. Don’t ask. n