My bloody rites of passage as Scotland’s first female gamekeeper
Her childhood love of the great outdoors grew into a determination to succeed in one of the last men-only professions...
IDIDN’T grow up with a burning desire to be a gamekeeper. There were none among our family and friends, and in fact I had no real idea what gamekeeping was until I was an adult. But from the time I could crawl, I’ve always been a real nature-loving, outdoor girl.
My mother can still recall me as a three-yearold toddler out in the garden in the summer of 1982 picking up slugs, snails, worms and woodlice in my pudgy little hands, and that fascination with nature has never left me.
I grew up in Stonehaven, an old fishing village across the River Dee from Aberdeen, and throughout my childhood – first at primary school, while my classmates played with Barbies and dreamed of fairytale princesses and Prince Charmings, and then in my teens, when my friends were obsessed with fashion, pop music and boys – I was always out of doors, climbing trees, building shelters in the woods out of branches and bracken, hunting for birds’ nests and fishing in the river.
Wherever my love of the great outdoors came from, it clearly wasn’t genetic because my parents and my brother were real townies. We were a middle-class family – my dad was an engineer, working offshore, while my mum was a secretary – and my parents undoubtedly had hopes that I would follow in their footsteps and choose a ‘respectable professional career’ such as being a solicitor or doctor, but I always knew that I wanted an outdoor life.
I was 21 when I first began to think seriously about a gamekeeping career, when my uncle Angus, a keen fisherman, shotgun shooter and deer-stalker, took me out deer-stalking with his neighbour, Billy.
As I looked down at the buck Billy shot that day, I felt mixed emotions: elation at our success, but a deep sense of pity for the death of such a beautiful animal. Its tongue lolled from its mouth and I was startled to see how quickly its eyes had lost their life spark, already becoming dull and rheumy as if a veil had been drawn across them.
I could sense Billy watching me. ‘How do you feel?’ he said as he pulled out his hunting knife and began to gut the deer.
‘Um, well, I feel a bit sorry for it, to be honest.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t worry, most people feel like that the first time, but just think of the great life that buck had led, living in complete freedom, right up until the moment it was shot. And anyway,’ he said with a wink. ‘It’s a great source of free-range meat.’
When I got to bed that night, I was too excited to sleep and lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling, thinking about everything I’d seen and done that day. I’d never had a sentimental, Disney-style view of nature. I knew it could be ‘red in tooth and claw’, and it didn’t upset me to see an osprey swoop to impale a salmon with its talons or a fox stealing away from a farmyard with a chicken in its jaws; it was just the way of the natural world. Taking part in stalking and killing that buck had crystallised everything.
THE whole experience had felt so natural that at that moment I made up my mind: this was what I wanted to do with my life. I decided on a college course in gamekeeping with wildlife management at the North Highland College.
Since gamekeeping is a hands-on job and college could only provide us with small amounts of practical work, much of our time had to be spent working on a Highland estate gaining practical experience. It was a straightforward equation: no work placement equalled no college place.
I was still pretty young at the time, just 22, and had never been to a formal interview before. I had no one to tell me how to do it and no idea what an interview for a gamekeeper’s job would involve. I was so nervous I turned up at the college well ahead of my interview time. A few other students had turned up and I couldn’t help but notice that they were all men. As I was led to the interview room, the administrator said: ‘Now don’t worry, try not to be frightened. There are about 30 head keepers in there, waiting to talk to you.’
If I wasn’t scared before, I was now. In my naivety and ignorance, I hadn’t even worn the appropriate gamekeeper’s traditional garb – stout boots, tweed or moleskin trousers, Viyella shirt and Barbour or similar jacket to keep the Highland weather at bay. I was wearing trainers, a pale blue sweater and a pair of black trousers.
As I stepped through the door my heart nearly stopped. Thirty solemn-looking, leathery faced gamekeepers were sitting at a horseshoe-shaped formation of tables, facing a small chair about 15 feet away. Most of them had bushy beards, they were all dressed in traditional tweed suits and looked like hulking brutes to me.
Feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I sat down on the small chair and shot a glance at the crescent of gamekeepers facing me. Most of them seemed shocked to be confronted by a woman, and even worse, a woman wearing an outfit that she might have chosen for a night on the town, not a day on the moors.
Hastily they looked away, as if embarrassed by me. I could guess the thoughts of this dour Caledonian gathering: ‘What on earth do we have here? What’s this wee lassie doing at the interview?’ Asked why I wanted to become a gamekeeper I started to speak, dry-swallowed and tried again, stumbling through some sort of answer. The vast majority of the gamekeepers stared into space and said nothing at all, as if praying for the ordeal to be over.
When one gamekeeper at least broke his silence to ask me if I’d be able to lift a red deer stag on to a pony or a quad bike, I could only answer, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried.’
By the time it was over I could hardly trust my legs to propel me out of the room. When the call came from the college several weeks later, I was told I didn’t get a placement with any of the keepers. I was distraught. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was not part of the grand plan at all.
‘Don’t worry too much, though,’ said the college tutor, ‘because we forgot to invite two head keepers to the interview and, since there were 12 students, including yourself, who didn’t get a place, we’re sending out your CVs to them.’
A few days later I got another call from my college tutor. ‘I have some good news for you. Ardverikie Estate want to interview you for a placement. Can you come?’
Could I? Wild horses couldn’t stop me.
My interview took place in the estate office of Ardverikie, between Aviemore and Fort William. I still wasn’t wearing a traditional keeper’s outfit because I didn’t really have any country clothes and I was reluctant to fork out for a whole new outfit for a job that I might not get anyway. Hoping that it wouldn’t count against me too much, I turned up in a pair of smart black trousers and a nice dark-red shirt.
I had also spent many hours preparing myself and rehearsing
answers to difficult questions that had been thrown at me last time. The factor was a friendly, handsome Englishman in his mid-thirties and, to my delight, he made it very clear that he believed in equality and wasn’t going to let any prejudices or old-fashioned attitudes stop him hiring me if he felt I was the right person for the job.
That night, I got a call. I’d got the job. I danced around the kitchen: it was the happiest moment of my life.
ARDVERIKIE was a vast, 40,000-acre estate, an amazing sight, seeming to stretch as far as the eye could see. The conifer forests on the lower slopes gave way to wild, open moorland and rocky crags on the heights above.
The factor met me at the estate office and we drove to the small, whitewashed stone cottage that I’d seen at my interview and that would now be my new home. Nestling into the foot of the hillside, it had a small garden and open views to the front, with the woods cloaking the slopes behind it. I felt extremely nervous as I opened the door but also very excited.
My new home was miles from anywhere but that didn’t bother me at all because I’d always felt at home in places far from ‘civilisation’, the farther the better.
The gamekeeper, Dougie, was a weather-beaten man in his midfifties, his dark hair flecked with grey. He was wearing a deerstalker hat that never left his head. Before long I began to suspect that he might even sleep in it.
‘Welcome Portia,’ he said. ‘We’re all looking forward to working with you. We’ve not had a woman keeper before, although...’ He gave a broad smile. ‘Come to think of it, nobody has, have they?’
By the time the stag season began the following week, I was raring to go. I’d been practising with a target for quite a while, so I felt ready. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and, full of excitement at the thought of shooting my first stag, I set off with Dougie.
‘Take the shot when you’re ready,’ he said.
I squinted through the telescopic sight of my rifle, studying the stag that he had picked out. When it turned broadside-on to me, I lined up the cross-hairs on the exact centre of the stag’s chest. I took up the first pressure on the trigger, exhaled in a long, sighing breath and then squeezed the trigger home.
I was so intent on making the shot count that I was not even aware of the recoil. The bang echoed across the hillside and the stag jumped, ran ten feet and then fell down, stone dead.
I’d imagined that I would feel a sense of sadness after shooting my first stag, just as I had when watching Billy shoot one, but when it came to it, all I actually felt was relief and a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
The next step was to carry out ‘the gralloch’: the disembowelling of the deer. Taking my knife out of my pocket, I turned the stag onto its back and made an incision just below the sternum. Placing my fingers inside the cut, I ran the knife down, opening up the stomach wall all the way down to the lower abdomen.
I was sure that Dougie had been watching for any signs of squeamishness from me, but blood and guts had never fazed me at all and I caught a slight nod of approval from him when I had finished.
Between the two of us we lifted the stags onto the back luggage rail of the quad and tied them on securely with rope.
‘It won’t be that easy when the shooting guests arrive,’ Dougie warned me.
‘We’ll be using hill ponies then and, if you think lifting a stag onto a quad is hard work, just wait until you’ve lifted one five feet onto the back of a pony.
‘I hope you’re feeling strong, Portia, because you’ll need to be – but on what I’ve seen so far, you’ll do just fine.’
This is an edited extract from The Gamekeeper by Portia Simpson, published by Simon & Schuster, £16.99