Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Guns with stories to tell
often to be found walking his lurchers in the hope of giving them a start at a hare. Entering a gateway, he saw a fox loping across his field and he set the longdogs after the wily creature. Despite the cunning of his breed, the fox was swiftly run down by the sighthounds. When Jesse reached them, it appeared the fox was dead.
Picking up the fox by its hind legs, the farmer slung it over his shoulder, at which point the fox regained consciousness and snapped at the farmer’s back. Family legend has it that Jesse carried a scar on his back for the rest of his days, but he did have the last laugh. Having despatched the fox, he removed the brush and sent it away to be treated. His wife, Bessie, was delighted with a fashion accessory she treasured for the rest of her life.
Daylight raids
Some three decades later, Lijah was an octogenarian and already suffering the early stages of a condition that would cause his passing. It was around this time that he began losing hens from his flock and he was keen to eliminate the culprit.
Initially, he had suspected that a local farmer’s dog was the problem, proving how limited his experience of foxes had been during his long life. It wasn’t until a local shepherd passed judgement on a discarded hen carcass that Lijah finally accepted he was up against a fox. In his eagerness to bring it to book, he spent many long hours sitting in a makeshift hide by his garden plot, his trusty Darlow resting across his knees as he waited in vain for Reynard to put in an appearance.
The vixen that had been making the daylight raids on the hen enclosure must have been feeding a litter of cubs. After rearing her litter, the crafty old-timer sporadically returned to Lijah’s garden when in need of an easy meal. She appeared to be lying-up in a wood adjoining Lijah’s orchard and was startled by an old Fordson Major tractor that took a shortcut through Brick Kiln Lane on its way to drill some winter wheat the following autumn.
As she sought an escape route back to the wood, the startled vixen took a shortcut across the small field and through the hedge into Lijah’s garden. A single shot rang out along Brick Kiln Lane and the old chap’s last ambition was fulfilled. Within minutes, the ailing man was to be seen cycling through the village with a sack slung over his shoulder. There are still a few elderly locals who can recall his glee as he showed them the sack’s contents. A most memorable last hurrah for the old countryman.
I often bump into people at the pub or at game fairs who reckon that it must be a fair bit of work editing a weekly magazine. And they’d be right — week in, week out, keeping the content fresh and exciting is a challenge, but it’s also a real joy. The variety of stories that we run in Shooting Times has always been what makes it such a special magazine.
Lots of people assume that editing the magazine means I must shoot a lot and, again, they’re right. I do get to travel the country to shoot lots of different things in lots of different places, but the greatest joy of my time as Editor, so far, was when Mark and Graham Lorne asked me if I’d like to become the custodian of Elijah James’s Darlow hammergun. Lijah was Graham’s great uncle and he thought I might like to have it.
I’ve shot rabbits and pigeons with it and I’m looking forward to taking it north for geese and grouse. I’ve got a few modern guns in my cabinet and my Blaser F3, my everyday go-to, is a real treat — German engineering at its finest. But if guns could talk, it wouldn’t have many stories to tell. The Darlow, on the other hand, would be a fine drinking partner and I look forward to writing more about it in due course. PG