Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

‘There’s no time for that.’

‘I must count them.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

‘One…

‘Two…

‘Three…

‘Four…’

He began counting them very carefully, picking up each bird in turn and laying it carefully to one side. The moon was directly overhead now and the whole clearing was brilliantly illuminated.

‘I’m not standing around here like this,’ I said. I walked back a few paces and hid myself in the shadows, waiting for him to finish.

‘A hundred and seventeen… a hundred and eighteen… a hundred and nineteen… a hundred and twenty!’ he cried. ‘One hundred and twenty birds! It’s an all-time record!’

I didn’t doubt it for a moment.

‘The most my dad ever got in one night was fifteen and he was drunk for a week afterwards!’

‘You’re the champion of the world,’ I said. ‘Are you ready now?’

‘One minute,’ he answered and he pulled up his sweater and proceeded to unwind the two big white cotton sacks from around his belly. ‘Here’s yours,’ he said, handing one of them to me. ‘Fill it up quick.’

The light of the moon was so strong I could read the small print along the base of the sack. J. W. CRUMP, it said. KESTON FLOUR MILLS, LONDON SW17.

‘You don’t think that bastard with the brown teeth is watching us this very moment from behind a tree?’

‘There’s no chance of that,’ Claud said. ‘He’s down at the filling-station like I told you, waiting for us to come home.’

We started loading the pheasants into the sacks. They were soft and floppy-necked and the skin underneath the feathers was still warm.

‘There’ll be a taxi waiting for us in the lane,’ Claud said.

‘What?’

‘I always go back in a taxi, Gordon, didn’t you know that?’

I told him I didn’t.

‘A taxi is anonymous,’ Claud said. ‘Nobody knows who’s inside a taxi except the driver. My dad taught me that.’

‘Which driver?’

‘Charlie Kinch. He’s only too glad to oblige.’

We finished loading the pheasants and then we humped the sacks on to our shoulders and started staggering through the pitch-black wood toward the lane.

‘I’m not walking all the way back to the village with this,’ I said. My sack had sixty birds inside it and it must have weighed a hundredweight and a half at least.

‘Charlie’s never let me down yet,’ Claud said.

We came to the margin of the wood and peered through the hedge into the lane. Claud said, ‘Charlie boy’ very softly and the old man behind the wheel of the taxi not five yards away poked his head out into the moonlight and gave us a sly toothless grin. We slid through the hedge, dragging the sacks after us along the ground.

‘Hullo!’ Charlie said. ‘What’s this?’