'Guns!' I gasped. 'They don't have guns!'
'All keepers have guns, Danny. It's for the vermin mostly, the foxes and stoats and weasels who go after the pheasants. But they'll always take a pot at a poacher, too, if they spot him.'
'Dad, you're joking.'
'Not at all. But they only do it from behind. Only when you're trying to escape. They like to pepper you in the legs at about fifty yards.'
'They can't do that!' I cried. 'They could go to prison for shooting someone!'
'You could go to prison for poaching,' my father said. There was a glint and a sparkle in his eyes now that I had never seen before. 'Many's the night when I was a boy, Danny, I've gone into the kitchen and seen my old dad lying face down on the table and Mum standing over him digging the gunshot pellets out of his backside with a potato-knife.'
'It's not true,' I said, starting to laugh.
'You don't believe me?'
'Yes, I believe you.'
'Towards the end, he was so covered in tiny little white scars he looked exactly like it was snowing.'
'I don't know why I'm laughing,' I said. 'It's not funny, it's horrible.'
' "Poacher's bottom" they used to call it,' my father said. 'And there wasn't a man in the whole village who didn't have a bit of it one way or another. But my dad was the champion. How's the cocoa?'
'Fine, thank you.'
'If you're hungry we could have a midnight feast?' he said.
'Could we, Dad?'
'Of course.'
My father got out the bread-tin and the butter and cheese and started making sandwiches.
'Let me tell you about this phoney pheasant-shooting business,' he said. 'First of all, it is practised only by the rich. Only the very rich can afford to rear pheasants just for the fun of shooting them down when they grow up. These wealthy idiots spend huge sums of money every year buying baby pheasants from pheasant farms and rearing them in pens until they are big enough to be put out into the woods. In the woods, the young birds hang around like flocks of chickens. They are guarded by keepers and fed twice a day on the best corn until they're so fat they can hardly fly. Then beaters are hired who walk through the woods clapping their hands and making as much noise as they can to drive the half-tame pheasants towards the half-baked men and their guns. After that, it's bang bang bang and down they come. Would you like strawberry jam on one of these?'
'Yes, please,' I said. 'One jam and one cheese. But Dad...'
'What?'
'How do you actually catch the pheasants when you're poaching? Do you have a gun hidden away up there?'
'A gun!' he cried, disgusted. 'Real poachers don't shoot pheasants, Danny, didn't you know that? You've only got to fire a cap-pistol up in those woods and the keepers'll be on you.'
'Then how do you do it?'
'Ah,' my father said, and the eyelids drooped over the eyes, veiled and secretive. He spread strawberry jam thickly on a piece of bread, taking his time.
'These things are big secrets,' he said. 'Very big secrets indeed. But I reckon if my father could tell them to me, then maybe I can tell them to you. Would you like me to do that?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Tell me now'
5
The Secret Methods
'All the best ways of poaching pheasants were discovered by my old dad,' my father said. 'My old dad studied poaching the way a scientist studies science.'
My father put my sandwiches on a plate and brought them over to my bunk. I put the plate on my lap and started eating. I was ravenous.