Keeping a record
Once consigned to a gamebook, days in the field – whether facing a rogue hippo or an ancestor’s stalking tales – are captured for posterity, agree Neil and Serena Cross
NDC As another season draws to a close, I find myself leafing back through the pages of my gamebook as I write up the last few days’ sport. I have always kept a gamebook and as time marches on, I’m increasingly glad that all those days are recorded for posterity. The lovely thing about these records is that they recall the sheer variety of the sport we’re fortunate enough to enjoy and my jottings now run to three volumes. The first book details sparse marauds, when two or three of us marched miles through Welsh bogs for a handful of snipe, an unlucky teal and some farmyard jackdaws. These were special days as we were starting out on our own, without dogs, but no longer as guests of our fathers. At the time they certainly felt like great achievements and decades later would have faded out of memory if they hadn’t been recorded in fine detail, down to who fell in which bog and who failed to lift his gun to a wisp of snipe as he was lighting a fag. Incidentally, both these notable events concerned our host, who still enjoys being reminded of them.
The red-letter days are never those with the heaviest bags but tend to be outings in wild places where variety was the spice of life. Having always relished shooting over rough country, I have recorded many double-figure species days (often bolstered by a squirrel or jay towards the end). However, for real variety, the pages scribbled by the light of a hurricane lamp in Africa always transport me instantly back to the scenes of some thrilling species days. I have always taken a shotgun with me when hunting big game as not only does it provide fresh, feathered meat for camp, but usually affords some unexpected and memorable sport.
Most of these entries refer to days when feathered game was incidental to the main event and all involve rusty, pig-iron shotguns. Of these days, the one that started with Egyptian geese, continued with spurfowl, Guinea fowl and francolin, before culminating with a rogue hippo, shot in the dark, still gets the pulse racing. We ate everything under ‘Various’ and for days, the aroma of hippo rogan josh wafted through camp like spicy marsh gas.
All our days are worth recording and I hope that future generations will read these jottings and wonder where that random cobra came from in the middle of a buffalo hunt.