Flying high
Alex James
It was a rainy morning on Friday when I woke up warm as toast in a small castle in Northumberland, surrounded on all sides as far as the eye could see by the immaculate, formal gardens still dancing under the weight of the winter sky and beyond them racing-green moorland stretching to infinity and eternity in all directions.
I’d brought my gun and my guitar and we’d all been up singing until the small hours, singing all the songs I could remember. Well, there were a few sore heads at the breakfast table but the atmosphere was jocular, festive. Most of the guests had known each other for many years and it was an extremely well-staffed, well-run house. Cooks in the kitchen and boys in the bootroom; porridge and papers, coffee and cigarettes; an English breakfast banquet. Fires were roaring and an elegant young man buttled around the banter, soothing and assuaging, dodging jokes, delivering eggs.
I was reasonably apprehensive. The ScottHarden pheasants are legendary. Fast, high, curling birds. Pheasants fly the fastest of all the game species and there was quite a good chance I wouldn’t hit anything all day long. Then there’s always the chance of getting shot, or shooting someone. I wondered what would be worse over my third cup of coffee. Guns make me nervous. I’ve had a near miss. Everybody has. Our hostess had recently taken a pellet in the face, and her hat had been ruined. She was still upset about that hat.
Down tracks and alongside streams we bumped and skidded: loaders, goaders, pickers-up and eight tweedy guns in a cavalcade of 4x4s, dogs of all sizes in the back, arriving in a remote and silent valley, a flat grassy riverbed with woodland rising up on either side in smudges of mist. It was still early, still drizzling, but not cold. We adjusted to our surroundings, falling quiet and still, drinking in the landscape, listening to the faint sounds of the middle of nowhere, slowly becoming part of it all. It was beautiful, far from the present, from telephones, computers, families and work. Yes, beautiful, but the English countryside is all equally and impossibly beautiful, and, really, like dinner, shooting is only ever as much fun as the people you are with. I can only handle it about twice a year, but now I was among friends old and new, and I forgot everything as we waited quietly for the birds to rise.
The beaters approached through the trees, the odd woof and the odd whistle. Nothing, nothing, nothing and then bang, bang, kerbang: wave upon wave of pheasants rushing overhead. Dogs dashing, guns blazing, insults flying like bullets, birds flailing and falling. Total exhilaration.
By the time we stopped for soup and sherry, I’d hit half a dozen birds, better than I thought I’d manage all day. The hangovers were gone and it felt like Christmas morning. One of the party had managed to tickle a trout from the stream in-between drives and it sat alongside the crates of birds in the back of the gamekeeper’s jeep. The weather was improving, the sun was just reaching over the treetops on the far side of the valley, warming us in gold. There really is no finer way to get lunch.
Shooting has been a fast-growing sport over the past decade and it was a big industry to start with. Like violins, which they remind me of somehow, guns cost exactly as much as you want them to, from a hundred pounds to more than a house. The clothes aren’t cheap, the accessories endless. It takes a huge amount of resources to raise and shoot a pheasant: acres and acres of well-maintained Grade I English countryside, a fully staffed castle, a vast organisation of gamekeepers, beaters, loaders, dog trainers, dog handlers and shooters. It struck me in the butcher’s the other day, as I looked at the neat rows of game birds, that they had all probably been shot by company directors, CEOs, billionaires and toffs, taking the day off work and paying a huge amount for the privilege. Game is about the best bargain going and it’s hard to think of how an animal could be more ethically reared, or how it could be any more expensive.
This is what it takes to put a pheasant, a grouse, a red-legged partridge, a snipe or a woodcock on the table. It is never done any other way. Most of the pheasants shot in this country are eaten in France, not thrown away as some people believe. I have only one question. Why would anyone eat chicken instead? q
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