Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Finding solace in the country
With a friend of Charlie’s staying for a few days, Richard Negus treats the pair to a Saturday morning of gamekeeping and sheep-wrangling
Whenever my son, Charlie, invites a friend to our house for a sleepover, I treat each to the same regime. On Friday night we watch a film, accompanied by a smorgasbord of snacks and drinks high in saturated fat and sugar — just the sort of foodstuffs more responsible parents recoil from. When Saturday dawns, Charlie and his guest are awoken early as I blow a pink-footed goose call at them at 6am. Hungover from their bacchanalian orgy of popcorn, peanut butter cupcakes and fizzy pop, they are dragged to Flea Barn.
There they are tasked with checking the pheasants and counting the sheep, topping up feeders, peering into traps, collecting some firewood and walking the margins, watching for partridges and foes of partridges. This burns off all those calories and E-numbers accrued the night before.
“I had forgotten the grey partridge thrived in their thousands in prewar Ukraine”
House guest
So the routine went with Charlie’s latest house guest. Gleb is in many ways little different to most of my son’s friends. He is polite in a shy way — bashfulness towards adults is common in 12-year-old boys. He laughs at fart gags, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of computers and attracts dirt like filings to a magnet. Gleb only differs from my son’s other friends because Gleb is a refugee, hailing from northern Ukraine.
“Not far from Chernobyl,” he told me matter-of-factly, when I asked him whereabouts in the war-stricken country he hailed from. My mind flashed with images of the irradiated ghostville, overrun with wild boar and deer, selfsown trees and scrub growing in the empty streets like some dystopian rewilder’s fantasy.
Gleb stayed with us for five days. During his sojourn, he came to rugby training at my son’s club. He threw himself physically and mentally into this incomprehensible sport, tackling boys double
his diminutive size with tigerish venom and skipping around other players with gymnastic aplomb. Movie night dispensed with, the Saturday morning ritual of Flea Barn keepering and sheep-wrangling commenced with the reveille of ‘wink, wink, wink’ from the goose call.
On the way to the farm, Charlie sat in the back of the truck with Gleb alongside me in the front. Mabel was perched on his knee, and they both stared avidly at the road ahead. As he fondled her ears, I asked him, cautiously, of his experiences of war and the invasion of his homeland.
He spoke of his windows rattling as Russian jets flew over, and of being awoken by the roar of artillery fire. He retold how he and his mother fled Putin’s might, making their way through Hungary then eventually to the UK. His father and older brother, he said, stayed behind — retreating to the relative safety of Kyiv so that his older sibling might continue his studies. I stopped my truck next to the sheep grazing serenely in a Flea Barn meadow and felt hollow. How could this young man speak so calmly about such terrible things?
Mutiny
Charlie flipped the clip off the live cable of the electric fencing unit. He and Gleb stepped over the wires and began to count the ewes. Meanwhile, I filled the water trough from a bowser. I watched the pair wander among the flock of Romney Marsh — a hardy breed — which stared back at them with muttonous mutiny.
I joined the boys as they counted then recounted the sheep, explaining to Gleb — slowing my narrative so that he could more easily understand — “The sheep will help increase the wild flowers here,” I said. “More wild flowers means more insects, and more insects means more food for our grey partridge chicks,” I concluded.
I think he followed my gist, although by his vague expression I took it that ‘grey partridge’ wasn’t a phrase he knew well. After a minor disagreement about whether there were 53 or 54 sheep, we re-energised the fence and went off to scatter some wheat in the margins and check the DOC traps.
“Look, Dad,” shouted Charlie as he sprinted ahead. He stood over one of the trap boxes set next to a feeder, the unmistakable bottle-brush of a squirrel tail sticking out. Flipping up the lid, the boys looked down at the cadaver. Charlie beamed; Gleb looked pale. I pulled the stiffened corpse from the jaws and Gleb grabbed it, clutching the body to his chest like a kitten.
I heard Charlie lecturing his friend about why we trap squirrels while I reset the jaws, sprinkling some peanuts from my side bag over the treadle plate. I locked the lid once more. Gleb continued to cradle the beast as we walked on, checking more traps and scattering wheat every 10 strides or so.
“Do you understand why we kill squirrels, Gleb?” I asked. He was noncommittal in his reply. “You shouldn’t really cuddle it,” I cajoled. “They are full of disease, and if we chuck it into the field the buzzards will be glad of the meal.”
He continued to hug the corpse resolutely, and I sensed that the boy was genuinely upset by this sight. I remembered his earlier words, recounting warplanes, artillery and invaders. “Go and place it over there, Gleb,” I bid him gently. “Over in the scrub, he’ll be happy there.”
Out of my peripheral vision, I could see Charlie making the face he reserves for ‘what is the silly old fool talking about now?’ Gleb did as I suggested and laid the squirrel ceremoniously under some blackthorn, and I watched him mouth a silent incantation.
Red listed
We filled the last of the feeders, and Charlie spotted a covey of partridges alongside some cover crop. “Greys, Dad,” the boy sung out, shaking Gleb by the shoulder to make him look. Gleb, in a moment of realisation, said: “Ah, kuripka, we have those at home.” My party piece of showing our guest these red-listed birds had fallen flat; I had forgotten that the grey partridge thrived in their thousands in the rolling arable landscape of pre-war Ukraine.
Our farming and feeding duties done, we trundled off in the truck and stopped at the butchers in Debenham. The owners love to see Charlie’s friends come into their shop.
They treat the boys to a tour of the cold store to marvel at the array of meat on the hooks, and our house guests then choose a pie for lunch from the deli. Gleb refused the offer of both pie and butchery tour, sucking on a sweet while Charlie tucked into a bacon turnover as we drove home.
As soon as the truck stopped, the boys sped off to get up to mischief on the village green. I relayed our adventures to my wife. I told her of Gleb’s affection for sheep, his squirrel cuddling and squeamishness in the butchers. “I think the boy has seen too many horrors back in Ukraine,” I philosophised. “Death has scarred him.”
My wife smiled somewhat ruefully. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?” she laughed. “Gleb is a vegetarian.”
In next month’s Sporting Club, Richard Negus takes a young team out for a day in the beating line.