Shooting Times & Country Magazine
If John Buchan had written Essex
Simon Garnham and his son, William, set themselves a Midsummer Macnab challenge. Would they succeed in pulling it off?
The air was damp. A heavy dew had settled on the ground one hour before the sun rose at the start of the longest day. I glanced at my watch. It was 3.35am and surprisingly chill.
The last of the fleeting night’s pinprick stars were being extinguished by a faint glow in the north-eastern sky. I made my way to the orchard’s high seat, every sense alive after a sleepless night imagining the day ahead: planning, plotting, hoping.
Through the dark and stillness, a distant cockerel cried out heralding the morn. Rabbits, some tiny, others seemingly as big as houses, were grazing. I paused to scour the ground every few yards — on edge for a deer. A muntjac or a roebuck would take the pressure off and help me relax to enjoy the longest day. I knew there was one about. The trail cam confirmed that the damage I had seen done to the Braeburns was fraying and bark stripping.
But it was the unmistakable brush and pricked ears of the gamekeeper’s foe that greeted me. Reynard had paused in profile and lifted his head to sniff the air. The dawn seemed impossibly quiet as I splayed out the bipod legs and nestled the rifle into them. He was on high alert as I lowered the crosshairs onto the centre of his ribcage.
Inauspicious start
The safety catch slipped forward noiselessly. The orchard rows are exactly 85 metres long. He was just inside the far end. I had check-zeroed at 100 metres from bipod legs with a grouping of less than an inch. The moment had come. He would pose no further threat to nesting birds.
I squeezed my left forefinger a distance of less than three millimetres. The thwack seemed to
“The Midsummer Macnab was an idea that I had spawned during home-schooling”
be a .223 round splintering skin and bone. I watched, expecting at every moment that he would fall.
Instead, the dark shape stiffened for only a millisecond then sauntered on across four more rows of trees, through the nettles and back into the woods to disappear from view. It was an infuriating and inauspicious start to the day — one of those shots that seemed impossible to fail. But fail I had. It wasn’t even the reason I had ventured forth at dawn on the longest day.
The Essex Midsummer Macnab was an idea that I had spawned during home-schooling. My son has been increasingly difficult to lever away from his computer. The excitement I remembered as I read John Buchan’s 1925 classic John Macnab was something I wanted to help him discover, too. In Buchan’s story, three friends challenge themselves to poach two deer and a salmon from three Scottish estates. What follows is a superb tale of adventure and fieldcraft.
Now the Macnab tradition includes a brace of grouse. I was determined that we should limit ourselves to our little piece of Essex, replacing salmon with sea bass, grouse with pigeon and red deer with the somewhat more diminutive muntjac or roebuck.
A glorious dawn in the high-seat did much to raise my spirits and the light in the woods as I took a silent stalk made the early start worthwhile. William was up and raring to go when I returned — quietly pleased that the high-seat strategy had not succeeded.
We prepared lures, drinks and buoyancy aids to take to the water.
Sea bass have been plentiful in the estuary this spring and, as we launched, I felt pretty certain that a catch would
trees and flopped lazily on distant wires, but there was no urgency to their movements and for nearly an hour we went without action.
Frustration mounted. I put up a shot to stir some birds into life and sure enough a familiar handsome grey shape swung over William’s hide within just a few yards. Approaching from behind and flaring impossibly as he rose, it survived. I picked up a long crosser with a good 10ft of lead that Tess retrieved, glad of the chance to hunt in the cool of the linseed.
Spinning to earth
Now birds were on the move.
William had another chance but was uncharacteristically off the pace — his mind still perhaps on the river and the skills he had been taught with the rod. A pair flew high and handsome over me like finest driven pheasants and one fell gratifyingly, spinning to earth at my second barrel in a puff of feathers. We had our brace and a third followed as it lifted and fell in the thermals, offering an interesting and sporting target quartering across me, rising and falling like a roller coaster.
It was nearly 5pm. We had five hours to bag ourselves a deer. Mrs G had prepared cold drinks and a venison pie with thick gravy, mushrooms and bacon to galvanise us for the last push. We rehearsed our routes and our movements, checked our kit for unnecessary noise, talked our way through all eventualities.
I had left an Idleback chair in the plum orchard where I had seen a ‘muntie’ the day before. It was to be our first port of call. At 7pm, we set out.
The grass was alive with insects. Cockchafer beetles dived and span. Swallows swooped into the stables. A pheasant bellowed his krokk-kok and a cuckoo seemed to respond. William glassed the orchard. Nothing. I called — sucking and squealing through my teeth. Will sniggered. We both fell about. Deer can make an ungodly sound, but this wasn’t it.
We moved silently, row-by-row, along the northern side of the orchard. Then suddenly there she was: the unmistakable stooped form of a muntjac. Will slipped open the bipod. I eased forward the safety