ENDPAPERS
Another Part of the Forest
By STRIX
IN the country Sunday used to be a dies non, a day on which nothing hap- pened or was expected to happen. Now it is more . likely to prove eventful than any other day of the week; and the events are generally, from the countryman's point of view, of an untoward or disagreeable kind.
Last Sunday my son and I were extruding a vagrant heifer from the garden when my young gamekeeper, very hot and out of breath, came pounding on to the lawn. My heart sank. He reported that four youths with two guns were shooting in a wood through which the main road runs; when he accosted them they had threatened to beat him up, so he had withdrawn for reinforcements. He said the youths smelled strongly of drink.
Z Cars and All That While my son telephoned the police, I drove the keeper round to a lay-by on the far side of the wood, where I reckoned the poachers would have left their vehicle. The lay-by was empty save for a car in which an extremely nice couple were eating their sandwiches. Yes, they said, they had seen some young men come out of the wood a few minutes ago, get into a lorry and drive off in the general direction of London. Two or three of them had been carrying guns, but so openly that it had not occurred to the eye-witnesses that there was anything wrong and that they ought to have taken the number of the lorry.
At this juncture, as pat as if we had all been on television, a police patrol car arrived and in five minutes a general description of the lorry and its occupants was being radioed to the police in neighbouring Bankshire, through whose terri- tory the miscreants were probably now passing. As I got back to the house, about twenty minutes later, the telephone rang. The duty ser- geant at our local police station reported that the Bankshire police had stopped the lorry on the rnotorway; but the youths had licences for their guns, there was no game in the vehicle and the police, though they were playing for time, had no right to detain them for much longer. I said that my keeper would be able to identify the men; I would get him down to the police station as fast as I could, on the off-chance that the poachers were still within reach of the law's long arm. Off we went.
A Slight Case of Hubris?
In fact by this time the Bankshire police had already let the poachers go, and they were tootling merrily towards London. But when in- telligence was received that a vital witness was on his way, orders went out that the lorry was to be stopped a second time. It was found drawn up on the verge of The motorway, empty save for a small boy of ten, much the youngest of the party. He said his mates had gone to relieve themselves. Possibly they had; but they had im- proved the occasion by breaking into a semi- derelict house and killing a chicken in the back- yard, where they were arrested. So they could be charged with larceny for a start. They looked, when the keeper and I caught up with them in a Bankshire police station, a peculiarly horrible trio of louts; but I dare say they were only mal- adjusted. I felt sorry for the small boy, who seemed rather a nice person and ought to have been keeping better company. He said they had been shooting, unsuccessfully, at rabbits. The guns were filthy.
Of course, they weren't really poachers, they were just armed hooligans, the sort of people who shoot swans on their nests but are unlikely to achieve any higher feats of marksmanship. All the same, I was glad they were caught. I wish all the alarums and excursions which so often bedevil weekends in the country had equally satisfactory dénouements.
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