The Last English Poachers Read Online Free

I was an only child and I found that to be a disadvantage because you don’t learn about other people and how to deal with this bear-baiting bastard of a
world. You don’t know what it’s like to go hungry, or what to do when they’re all about you with big sticks, trying to break your bloody neck. I’m not saying it was all
plums and soft-pedal; I had plenty of jobs to do for my father – sawing railway sleepers for firewood and carrying the coal and digging in the big garden. I had to carry water using a yoke, a
wooden beam that fitted over my shoulders, with a chain each end and buckets attached to the chain, like a medieval milkmaid. But the work made me strong and I went everywhere with my father. He
hunted with whippets and terriers, and he taught me to poach and how to work the dogs. But the first thing he taught me was how to be quiet.
    ‘You’ll never get nothin’ talking.’
    And he was right. I was young then and full of fidgeting like youngsters is and I couldn’t keep still. But he never lost his temper with me and I learned from his example.
    I got my first greyhound when I was about six or seven and I’d take it out with a terrier. The terrier would work the hedges and the greyhound would stalk the outside and catch anything
that bolted. This was pre-myxomatosis and there’d be thousands of rabbits quatting in the grass in frosty weather. I learned how to move quietly and creep up on them, which ain’t easy
because a rabbit can see backwards as well as forwards. And it was a jumping joy to kick up a hare and have the dog catch it and bring it back without chewing it up and spoiling the meat, and
I’d be out every chance I got, roaming the land and breathing the free fresh air of this wild west country.
    My first dog was called Queenie and I loved her like the leaves on the trees. Me and her was inseparable when I was a young ’un. I remember being out with her one rainy day and she caught
a rabbit in a small field. She brought it back and, as I leaned over to take it from her, I noticed a hare about two yards in front of me. It was quiet in the grass and not moving. I took some mud
off one of my boots and threw it at the hare and it ran. Queenie saw it and took off after it. It made for the hedge to escape, but the dog ran round and forced it back into the field. She was
clever enough to keep it in the field until it got tired. Then she killed it. And to see this spectacle – dog after hare, this wild battle of wits – was one of the finest sights in the
world.
    The rain eased on the way home and it was just me and Queenie out there under a jet-black sky, with the moon trying to peep out of its cloud pocket and a warm satisfaction round my heart at the
young knowing inside me.
    I learned from my father how to read tracks: what’s been this way and that way and how long ago. A boy can learn a lot from early cobwebs across a path or flattened grass or a snapped
branch. I learned how to lure pheasants with a drop or two of aniseed in the corn, because they likes it a lot, and how to work with ferrets and how to set snares and traps and nets and lures. Some
Gypsies made me a catapult when I was young, with a metal frame and thick, strong, square-shaped rubber and a leather pocket. That thing could do serious damage at close range with a clear view and
it was silent and stealthy. I sometimes shot four pheasants in a row with it, and plenty of pigeons at roost in the trees.
    One dull drizzly evening, just as it’s getting dark, I leaves my bicycle in a ditch and creeps out onto the Berkeley Estate. I sees a pheasant at roost and shoots it with my catapult. The
bird falls, but gets stuck in a blackthorn bush. I’m about to go in after it, when I sees a keeper approaching. I legs it back to the bike and takes the chain off. The keeper follows me and
comes over.
    ‘What you up to, Tovey?’
    They all know me by my name.
    ‘Bike chain’s broken.’
    He looks me up and down to make