by Bob
Anyway, that’s a bit of a sidetrack from the dragging I was talking about – and so is this. There was one man called Alf who used to come to the drag racing, but he wanted to go out poaching, just to see what it was like. He was a big talker and thought he was a very hard man and he kept asking me to take him out of a night. I didn’t want to because I know that them who makes the most noise is usually the least tough. Anyway, he kept on at me, so I takes him this night just to put an end to it and, when we gets to the woods, I’m looking up in the trees for a bird. But Alf keeps talking and talking – like he’s nervous or something. This is getting me nowhere, so I think I’ll shut him up. I put a finger up to my lips.
‘Shhhh!’
‘What is it, Bob?’
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘A cough . . . and something stepped on a dry twig.’
I can see he’s beginning to flap a bit now. I tell him to get hold of a stick or a small tree branch and wait under cover to see if somebody comes along. I know there’s nobody about, but he don’t.
‘What do I do then?’
‘Trip him up with the branch and then sort him out.’
‘Where will you be?’
‘I won’t be far.’
Anyway, he’s sitting trembling in a bush with a big stick and I move off. I circle round behind him and whisper, ‘He’s getting closer.’
He whirls round, but can’t see me.
‘Who’s there?’
I whisper again.
‘Closer.’
He’s shitting hisself by now, so I pick up a big stone and throw it into the bush right beside him. He nearly dies of fright and starts calling out for me.
‘Bob! Bob!’
I circle back round and come over to him. He’s shaking like a leaf and I think he might have wet hisself.
‘What’s up, Alf?’
‘There’s something in the trees.’
‘What is it?’
‘Dunno . . . but it’s whispering.’
‘Whispering?
He’s nodding his head like a demented pigeon.
‘Could be the whispering Wodwose.’
‘The what?’
‘The furry man of the woods. I think we better go take a look see.’
‘No, no. I think we better go home.’
He never asked to come out with me again.
But, getting back to the drag – there’s something in the air this Sunday morning, as we set up the equipment and test it to make sure it’s all working well and there’ll be no problems – it’s like I got this bad feeling something nasty’s going to happen. It’s only a little after daylight and I can see the early morning lights of the village in the distance. Our helpers turn up after a while and we has some tea out of the warm flasks and a chat about this and that. Then the dogs start to arrive. There’s a few Asians too, not the ones who calls me Mister ‘bad man’ Bob, but some I ain’t never seen here before. They has this Chinese fella with them and they tell me his name’s Kan. I see him looking at my communist hat, so I gets talking to him, just to be sociable, and he’s not a Chinaman at all, but a Mongolian. I speak to him in pidgin English and he answers me with a posh Oxford accent. He tells me he went to school under the Soviet system back in his home country and, after Mongolia got its independence, he came to college over here. He works now as an advisor in some financial institution.
I tells him about how Ernie got me the hat and how I wears it a lot just to wind people up. The Asians brought him along today because he misses the closeness to nature he had back in Ukulele.
‘Ukulele?’
‘Ain’t that the capital of Mongolia?’
‘Certainly not! It’s Ulaan Baatar, which means “red hero” and I come from the Mountains to the north of Uliastayi.’
He says it’s a lucky country, with gold and copper and cashmere and camels and many, many horses. And in the mountains they has wild boars and wolves and snow leopards and elk that see humans so seldom they’re almost tame.
‘Great hunting country, then?’
‘Perhaps you can come and visit sometime?’
‘Is it hot there? Don’t like it too hot.’
‘Sometimes . . . in summer. But cold in winter.’
‘Colder than here?’
‘Much!’
Well, you certainly learns something new every day. He’s an eloquent speaker and he tells me the trees there are eternal and the high hills are the axis of the world and the bridge between heaven and earth and the spirits of the mountains and the forests provide his people with everything they needs.
‘Why are you here, then?’
‘My father insisted.’
He’s some talker, this Kan fella and, now that I’ve started him off, I can’t get him to stop – going on about how his race is the best handlers of horses in the world and how a blue wolf and a fallow doe were the spiritual ancestors of all the Mongols. And how his country’s a land where the wolf and wild horse runs free and eagles hang in the bare blue sky. I gets a bit fed up with all this flag-wagging and bragging and say why don’t he go back there if he misses it so much.
‘Because I like your English tea.’
And he’d love to come out hunting with me sometime to renew the closeness to nature that he lost in Oxford. But vans and pickups are arriving now, so I leave him to his half-baked homesickness. Dogs is yelping in anticipation of the chase and gruff voices growling and kids running round and women setting up their food trestles. There’s all sorts here, West Country people like ourselves and the Asians from Birmingham and Welsh from over the border and others I couldn’t tell you the origins of. All waiting for the racing to begin.
It’s an eight-dog stake, which means four runs to begin with, with the four winning dogs going through to the semi-finals, then two runs to determine the finalists. The two finalists will have to run up that drag three times – it’s a hard task and takes a lot out of an animal. We has our own dog running in the first race. He’s a black two-year-old greyhound called ‘The Coalman’ and he’s wearing red, which means he’ll be slipped on the left. I’m confident of our dog though I don’t bet on him because I’m here for the sport and the spectacle, not to make money. Brian starts to wind the lure. The dogs can see it and they’re going mad. The slipper lets ’em go and they comes flying up the field. They’re neck and neck for the first hundred yards, urged along by the shouting, cheering, cursing crowd. Halfway up the course and The Coalman takes a slender lead. I’m at the finish and I throw my hat into the air as he crosses the line first. One course down and two to go. The Coalman takes a rest while the other three races is run off and I slips a raw egg down his neck and washes his feet with warm soapy water.
He’s drawn agin’ a large, fawn dog in the second course. But the bigger greyhound’s slow getting into his stride and The Coalman builds up a nice lead over the first half of the field. But then the big dog gets going and he’s closing fast. My heart’s in my mouth and I’m screaming at him to hold on. The big dog keeps gaining, gaining, and it seems like they’re running in slow motion. Then they flash past the line and I’m waiting to see which flag the adjudicator will raise. He takes a lifetime. But it’s red! There’s bedlam in the crowd, with swearing and squawking and objections being raised and calls for enquiries and threats and the shaking of fists. But the decision stands. The other semi-final is run and there’s a break for refreshments and for the dogs to get their breaths back. The Coalman’s breathing heavy and I know the first two courses has taken it out of him. I just hope he has enough energy and stamina left for the final.
The two victorious greyhounds go to slips for the last race. Brian mans the winder. The lure starts to move. The dogs see it and go mad. The slipper’s ready. Away they go. The other finalist is a brindle dog called ‘Blinder’ – and he is. He’s away first and leading up the course. Halfway and the brindle dog’s ahead by nearly a length and it seems like the race is lost for The Coalman. Then,
coming up the gradient, Blinder starts to slacken. This is the test of a true dog, to see who has the most heart, with three gruelling courses taking it out of them. Blinder slows again; the sting’s gone out of him. He’s had it. The Coalman passes him twenty yards from the finish. The race is won. Double delight and delirium tremens. All hand-shaking and back-slapping and three cheers for the Chinese!
Then it happens – what I was feeling uneasy about. The bad feeling. There’s a commotion in the crowd: men shouting and women screaming and dogs growling and barking. A fight’s broken out between a group of hard-looking farmhands from Malmesbury and the Asians. I’m over to intervene, but it’s escalating quickly and Brian’s in there as well, trying to break it up. The Asians is coming off the worst and there’s sticks and bottles being used and blood being spilt. Them not involved is panicking and gathering up their coats and children and running from the field. The biggest and mouthiest of the farmhands is swinging a short axe-handle and the Asians are lashing out with their legs and trying to kick the ploughboys away. Pandemonium. This ain’t good publicity for our little track – nobody wants to come out of a Sunday and get involved in a riot, except maybe the habitual mayhem-makers.
Then this Kan fella steps forward and grabs the arm of the big shit-kicker. The rest of the fighting stops and it’s a face-off between the two of them. A straightener, so to speak. The farmhand swings the axe-handle at Kan’s skull, but the Mongolian dodges the swipe. He swings again and again fails to connect. He growls now and swings wildly back and forth with the stick, but not one of the swipes connects, because Kan moves like mercury. After a few minutes of this, the big fella’s exhausted and Kan easily takes the axe-handle from his grasp. The he chops him to the side of the neck with his hand and the man collapses onto the ground. The other shit-kickers carry their half-unconscious mate away, none of them anxious to mix it with the Mongolian, while the Asians lick their wounds and get ready to go. And some days can disappoint like that, no matter how hard you try, and people can turn like dogs on the innocent bystander. I approach this Kan.
‘What started all that?’
‘A private bet. The farmers wouldn’t pay.’
‘You can handle yourself, Kan.’
He tells me that his ancestors were the Mangudai, a fierce tribe of Mongols, and his history’s a history of blood and savage conquerors – but he learned how to fight at the Oxford Emporium of Martial Arts. I apologise for the behaviour of the farmhands and ask how much the bet was for, but he’s philosophical about the fight.
‘What’s money, my friend? Here today and gone tomorrow. In fact, the present itself is a fleeting thing, if it exists at all.’
I don’t know what he’s talking about and he asks me how I’d go about explaining the present – is it a day or an hour or a minute or a second, or even less than that? I can’t say for sure.
‘There really is no present, Bob, only past and future. Once the future appears, it immediately becomes the past. There’s nothing in between. And life, therefore, is a complete illusion.’
The Asians are leaving and he has to hurry after them. But he hopes we’ll meet again.
‘Toodle-oo.’
We never do.
Bob in his element, hare-netting at Dunley, near Andover, 24 February 1990. That day we caught 124 live hares
18
Brian – Country Activities
Everyone wants to complain – it’s a national pastime. Some bright spark could earn a fortune: ‘Sympathetic ears for hire, fifty quid an hour. Pour all your troubles in one and watch them disappear out the other.’ Five minutes guarantee. Or make a mountain of money by singing a little love song. Or maybe set sail some day on a first-class star to the outer reaches of the universe. Never again come back down to swim against the stream of shit in this sewer-world. But wishful-thinking ain’t all it’s cracked up to be – so never look back, in case, like Lot’s wife, you get turned into a pillar of self-pity.
Country traditions have changed over the years. There was once a way of life that had lasted for centuries, but villages are just towns with a bit of rustic trimming now and farms and estates are big businesses. Beagling was one of those old country sports and we had the Wick and District Beagle Pack around here. They used to hunt up and down the area for miles and miles. But it’s been banned now, like all hunting with dogs after the Hunting Act came into force in 2005 – except when just following a scent or after rabbits. The traditional quarry of the beagle packs was always the hare and us Toveys supplied those hares for the beaglers. Unlike fox-hunting, beagling’s done on foot rather than on horseback, with a pack of twenty to forty beagle hounds. The beagle looks like a foxhound, but it’s smaller, with shorter legs and longer ears, and the dogs have a higher pitch to their cry when hunting a line. They’re what’s called scenthounds, bred for tracking. They have a great sense of smell and are intelligent and even-tempered. But they’re not fast enough to catch a hare, like a foxhound would be able to outrun a fox, so the hares were rarely caught by the dogs and mostly lived to run another day.
But the banners of hunting with dogs didn’t see the point, that beagling was mainly a sport of tracking, rather than killing.
All the famous public schools had beagle packs in the old days, along with the universities and the military, and there’s still about fifty or so packs registered in England and Wales. But there’s less country available for hunting now, due to roads being built and small villages growing into small towns to accommodate the city people who come out here to live when they’re not working in their glass offices and call centres. Since the banning of beagling after live hares, many packs now hunt artificially, which means following a pre-laid scent, or hunting rabbits, which ain’t banned. Sometimes they’re used for flushing hares to guns or the retrieval of injured animals following hare shoots, which ain’t banned either. But it’s all just a pale imitation of the real job the dogs were bred to do.
There’s also a handful of basset hound packs still operating today. They hunted the hare too, before it all got banned, and the dogs have even shorter legs and longer ears than the beagle. Their sense of smell is nearly as good as a bloodhound’s and they’re a great tracking dog, though a bit too slow to be much good for any kind of poaching. They have a strong, deep voice and great stamina and they’re more headstrong than the beagle or the foxhound. The hunting or English basset has a longer leg than the traditional breed you see in dog shows like Crufts and that. This gives them greater speed to hunt with and a slightly higher pitch when speaking on a line. They’re difficult to control, though, and hunt more as individuals than as a pack. I’m talking about these scenthounds, as opposed to greyhounds which are sighthounds, because they’re all part of the lore of the countryside, going back generations. Although we never used them for poaching, just the greyhounds and spaniels, it’s only fair they should get a mention because they were once a common sight, baying and bowling across the land.
Another pack hound we supplied hares for was the harrier. The harrier looks like the foxhound, but it’s smaller, though not as small as the beagle. Someone once described a harrier as a ‘beagle on steroids’ because of its muscular physique and short, hard coat. It has big bones for stamina and strength and is longer than tall. It’s a cheerful dog, even-tempered and good with other dogs and it’s a first-class tracker. Harriers could push a hare faster and straighter than beagles and, for that reason, they were sometimes followed on horseback. They were used to hunt foxes too, but not round here, the West Country packs where we live always kept to the hares. There’s no harrier packs left now, to my knowledge; the last of them disbanded in the 1990s when the harrier bloodlines died out.
With this kind of tracking sport, it’s mostly beagling now since the hunting ban, following trails and rabbits – at least, that’s the official line. But, as the only long-netters left in the country, we still supplied hares to beagle packs up until recently, even if those hares were rarely killed because the beagles could
catch bugger-all, except maybe an old or weak animal. It was all about the following for miles, just for the fun of it. Getting out there and doing something different, instead of sitting inside watching your neighbours through the window. Or driving down to the do-it-yourself shop for a grouting tool and a gallon of pastel paint. Or drinking ten pints of IPA in the pub with your mates – and your whole world turning into a great cauliflower while you slide into a stupor.
Beagling was different to saddle-bumping, even if them who organised it were just as snooty. But it can still be a sport to participate in, if that’s what you want. Foot-followers can watch it from a distance or get more involved. The hunt officials wear uniforms, but the rest can dress how they prefer. Unlike foxhunting, the main purpose of the hunt ain’t a kill, but to experience the hounds at work and to get some fresh air and exercise and enjoy the countryside. They usually meet at a pub in the morning, have a few drinks and then move off. They watch the hounds working for three or four hours, or until they get washed home by rain. And what hares were killed by coursing and beagling was nothing compared to how many were shot or died from disease or got run over by mad motorists.
Apart from providing the hares, we never really got very involved with the beagling – too many stick-seats and tweed twin-sets and hysterical haw-haws for our liking. We’d watch them, though, and, in summer, maybe lie in the meadows with a donkey or two grazing round our ears – elderflowers laced in their bridles to keep the flies away. Bees buzzing and butterflies flitting across the clover and eyelids heavy in the heady air. Sometimes it’s therapeutic to just hazel in the sun like that, with no bastard bothering you – you could even make a hollow promise to God that, if he don’t ask you to get up and do something, you’ll behave in future and never find fault with blind faith or make a savage of yourself on a Sunday. And us poachers ain’t like normal people – we work to live, not live to work. And sometimes, when the world’s bright and fragrant and warm, no man should have to toil – but only lie back in the long grass and dream. And they say in some parts of the world there’s a millionaire made every minute. How?