The Last English Poachers

by Bob

  That night I sleep restlessly, being woken at regular intervals by the sound of the wolves. They seem very close, but I know they could be as far as five or six miles away. I get up at dawn and emerge from the tent to find there’s been a heavy snowfall during the night and the early morning takes on a strange sort of luminescence, reflected in the drifted snow. Overhead, the sky’s clearing and still alive with stars, with the ghost of a moon gradually giving way to the day. The enchanted half-light sparkles like dancing fireflies, filling the place with an air of unreality, like in some child’s fairy-tale. I feel strange and stand transfixed, head raised and arms outstretched, and it seems like all that matters is here – nothing’s gone before and nothing needs to follow. I walk towards a tree to relieve myself and, suddenly, I’m flying through the air and land with a breath-blasting thump on the steep side of a ravine. I begin to roll – over and over and over and over, bouncing off snow-hidden boulders and young saplings and crashing through thorns and undergrowth. I seem to roll forever, until I finally black out and everything fades to soothing darkness.

  When I open my eyes again, I can’t see anything, just a kind of whiteness. I wipe a thick covering of snow from my face and see that it’s still day, with a blizzard falling so hard I can’t make out the boundary between land and sky, nor can I see further than a couple of feet in front of me. There’s a searing pain in my head and I put my hand up to find congealed blood on my left temple. I try to stand, which I’m able to do only after several shaky attempts but, as far as I can tell, no bones are broken. I feel feverish and completely disorientated and I’m shaking from head to toe. The ravine wall’s too steep to climb back up for my gear and I won’t last long without my coat and hat. I can’t see the sky to know which direction’s east, or west, or north, or south, and I don’t know how far I am from a trail. Then I hear the wolf howls again, and I decide to follow them.

  I move off slowly and, after a while, it begins to grow dark and I know night’s approaching. I swallow some snow to slake my dried-up and blood-encrusted mouth. Although I’m an experienced woodsman and have survived in some very rough terrains, I know this ain’t good. Without hard-weather clothes and a sense of direction, I might not make it. The night, when it comes, will finish me off for sure if I don’t find cover. But I keep following the wolf howls – it seems to be the only alternative I have. I must go west, back into Poland, but my legs won’t stand no more and I find myself back on the ground. I crawl through snowy undergrowth, pushing myself forward. Time’s passing and the sickly light from the sun’s fading. Then I hear water close by. I crawl towards the gentle lapping and the smell of the river until I can see it: some tributary of the River Bug that runs through this region – maybe the Lesnaya or even the Narev? There’s a boat moored about a hundred yards along the bank and I get myself into it and cover myself over with a heavy tarpaulin. Darkness comes and I’m exhausted and I fall into a fretful sleep.

  I wake to a rocking motion and, when I stick my head out from under the tarpaulin, I can see the boat’s come adrift during the night and I’m moving along a fast-flowing stretch of water. The snow’s stopped and I can make out from the position of the sun that I’m heading west, which is where I want to go. There’s no oars or paddles in the boat, so I can’t control it, as the tributary opens up into a bigger river, and it ain’t long before I have company on the water.

  ‘Help!’

  I’m close to civilisation and some villagers take control of my boat and bring it ashore. They can see I’m sick, with some kind of virus, and maybe that’s what disturbed me in the tent and disorientated me when I came outside. They lift me out of the boat and I’m taken to a local hospital. I can’t understand what anyone’s saying to me – until a doctor comes who speaks English.

  ‘You got forest fever.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He tells me it’s caused by the bite of a mosquito that’s unique to the area I was trekking in. The effects are flu-like and can cause mild hallucinations. It ain’t a serious condition if it don’t develop into malaria, and it wears off after a couple of days. I was more at risk from hypothermia and I was very lucky to find cover in that boat.

  I’ve been back to the forests of Eastern Europe several times since. But I never found out who owned that boat – or if the wolf howls led me to it.

  Speaking of boats, I’ve been out fishing on the Danube Delta for carp and perch and roach and eels. There’s freshwater sturgeon there too, and many other kinds of fish I don’t even know the names of. And three hundred and twenty species of wild birds – pelicans and herons and egrets and cormorants and all kinds of exotic ducks and geese and the water’s lovely and so clear you could drink it. Animals inhabit the banks on either side – otter and mink and raccoon and wild boar and fox and wolf – and there’s times, I must admit, when I wish I had a gun with me, so I could take home some rare meat to the family.

  The Lofoton Islands is an archipelago off the coast of Nordland, in Norway. They’re inside the Arctic Circle and lately I’ve been going up there following the killer whales. I don’t go with any tour operator, just under my own steam, like with all the other places I go to. I fly up to Bødo Airport, then sail out on the trawlers. The killer whales come after the herring that spill out of the trawler nets and I go out on a Zodiac speedboat and come right up alongside them to take pictures. All these things I do just because they’re there to be done. I see a picture of something or read about it in a book, then I want to go and do it. And I get there however I can – by plane or boat or motorbike or horse-and-cart or whatever. I hope to keep on doing these things for as long as I can – till I’m at least ninety.

  Along with the poaching, of course.

  And they say that evolution and the genetic code have brought the world along to the state it’s in today. How far have we come? Or are we still as savage as when we first fell from the tertiary tree – with a hatchet in our hand?

  Brian in Pamplona, 2012

  20

  Brian – The Last English Poachers

  They say there’s big money to be made on the internet these days. Danger is, some smart bugger might identify your password and intercept your stash before you retire to your rocking chair. Or else the military laboratories might accidentally unleash some deadly disease or the God-botherers might find the key to nuclear technology and blow us all to bits. It only takes some disillusioned scientist who’s hit the skids to post the formula on Facebook. This planet’s an unsteady place now, what with the super-rich frightening the moronic classes into believing the world’s in danger of being overrun by reason. And it’s hard to say if good will triumph over evil or vice versa – I mean, who knows, these days, which is which?

  Just to recap a bit on what we’ve been saying in this book and sum it all up: until the 1980s, when you had land with a titled person on it, like the big estates around here, all the farms and houses were full of estate men. All under the lord’s boot – all cap-tippers to the lord. Tenant farmers and anyone in an estate cottage, paying estate rent, owed their allegiance to the earls and dukes. The main preoccupation on those estates was the shooting. The toffs thought more of their sport than they did of people. They had millions of pounds’ worth of houses and land and farm buildings and crops and tractors, but the thing they valued most was their game – and poaching it was what stung them the most. However, they always had this army of cap-tippers to come after you and grass you up to the police and try to beat the shit out of you. And that was the ‘us-against-them’ game we played all our lives, and are still playing to some extent.

  After the ’80s, all these villages got built up and commuters moved in – plastic people, bought people – following the false promise of money and mundanity. All they do is go to work every day for their bosses, come home, sleep, go to work, and on and on and on. So, it’s not so much of the old class system any more, where everything revolved round the estate. A lot of estate cottages got sold off and the people living t
here now are mostly city people who wouldn’t know anything about shooting or rabbiting or hunting or poaching.

  ‘I heard some banging in the night . . . what was that?’

  You still get hospitality shooting, where companies will buy a day or a weekend. And corporate shooting’s big business in itself and has to pay its way and ain’t so much the exclusive pursuit of the gentry. Although most of the estates round here are still owned in name by the aristocrats – like the Duke of Beaufort, whose family name’s Somerset, and others as well, who try to hang on to the old days and the old ways. In reality, they were never that much different to the rest of the rabble. They’ve always been ordinary, even if they thought they were extraordinary – and now they’re accountable to the law, just like us poachers. They’ve always blamed us for thinking we’re above the rules that they made themselves – rules that applied to everyone else except them. And even still they believe they’re above those rules and sometimes they are.

  Sometimes they get away with murder, like Lord Lucan, and sexual deviancy, like Lord Podge, and all kinds of other frauds and fiddles, like giving land away to the National Trust to save on death duties. Have to account for it all someday I hope – because there must be more in the universe besides this contaminated little planet, full of wastrels and wishful-thinkers.

  The Earl of Ducie once owned most of this village and nearly everyone in it, except for us. Berkeley Estate, with its big deer park, is still owned by the Berkeley family and there’s a lot of other titled families still strong in this area. You still have foreign kings and queens and princes and princesses going up the estates for shoots and horse trials and stuff, and they still have some say-so and we still have to go a bit careful. But it’s not like it used to be, when they could get gamekeepers and estate workers to come out mob-handed and patrol the village streets armed with clubs and cudgels looking for us poachers. If they came upon us, they’d chase us and try to trap us; surround us and give us a good beating. And Bob told you about the six police cars with dogs coming out in response to some silly saddle-bumping earl, just over a few rabbits.

  You’d get in the local papers quicker now for being up before the magistrates for a simple motoring offence than you would for poaching. They’d be hard put to even know what poaching was – probably think you were being done for grooming kids on the internet or something. But poaching was a big crime once, and we had the full force of the law against us because of who we were taking from. I remember when that rural copper who discovered the truck used by the Great Train Robbers at Leatherslade Farm was interviewed, he said: ‘We ain’t used to this sort of thing, just arresting poachers.’

  And arresting poachers was their main occupation. What else did they have to do – stopping a fight outside the local pub? Catching kids stealing potatoes? Farm workers nicking batteries from tractors? Drunks coming pissed out of the pub on a Saturday night and pointing their plonkers up against the church wall?

  But poaching ain’t their priority no more and the lords ain’t got the same power as they used to have. There’s no local police cap-tipping to the earls now. That system got diluted in the ’90s. All the old boys who sucked up to the toffs and worked for them for forty years or more have died off. Now it’s all commuting and credit cards and mortgages and social media and idiocy like that, and they have too many other things on their minds. Our village ain’t such a closed community. We still got the farm workers and the hangers-on up the bigger estates like Beaufort, where they say the King of Spain comes to shoot – and rich Yanks pay £50,000 for two days’ sport and stay in Beaufort House, then go back to America and tell everyone they stopped with one of the bastard descendants of King Henry VII. A gamekeeper bragged to me about how much they paid. And I said, ‘I hope they left some for us; we don’t pay anything.’

  So, you see, things are changing, even though the land’s still owned by the rich – maybe not the same rich as in days gone by, but the rich nevertheless. Some would say the change is for the better and others would say for the worse. To me it makes no matter, I still live my life the way I always did. I just have to make adjustments every now and then. These changes affect rural areas all over England, not just south Gloucestershire, where the old agrarian feudalism of the countryside’s being swallowed up by the new economic feudalism of the towns and cities.

  And it’s not just the social changes – the landscape around the village is evolving in step with the modern obsession with banality and conformity. A lot of the local shops and pubs are gone, priced out of existence, and there’ll soon be a Starbucks on every sheep trail, and a Burger King on every bridle path. The village is getting bigger and bigger, with outsiders coming in and private houses being built for people who commute to Bristol and other cities for their livelihood.

  We used to know everyone in the village; now we know nobody. There’s no character to the area any more – no local coppers who understand the lore of the poacher, despite being set on catching us for their lords and masters. The ponds are all being filled in to reclaim land for housing, and farming methods have changed, with more sheep than ever before. Nothing likes living with sheep, no wild animal – they graze everything down to the root and stink the fields up with their piss. They attract ticks that can take the eyes out of hares and send them blind. Once the sheep moved into this area, the hares moved out and, along with the hard winter I told you about, that might have been another cause of their disappearance. There’s no ground cover for wild animals, with it all been nibbled down bare, and we’ve caught hares with no eyes from the ticks. Only good thing about sheep is their shit – it thickens the grass when they thread it into the close-cropped earth. And they say a sheep’s fart’s better than a ton of farm manure.

  Bob has almost come to the end of his poaching life, due to health reasons rather than any loss of interest. He still comes out as a lookout for me when I’m after the pheasant, but he’s pushing on for eighty now and, although he’s not had a drink for well over forty years, the alcohol he drank when he was young has taken its toll. The old illnesses have come to stake their claim on him, along with the other things that age brings. He still has the scarring on his brain from the accident in the Navy and now he can’t piss proper and has to have a catheter. But he has no regrets. He wouldn’t have lived his life any other way. He’s always believed in treating with respect those who treat him with respect, and tried to live life a day at a time and enjoy his family. In any case, there’s little space left in a politically correct world for men like him, who’ve spent their whole lives on the land, hunting wild animals that people who’ve never been to the countryside now feel they need to protect.

  Despite all the things that’ve changed, I still go out all the time and I’m flexible enough to adapt. In some ways it’s easier to poach now because the police station’s been closed and there’s no village coppers keeping an eye on me. I can move about of a night and the newcomers wouldn’t have a clue what I was doing. On the other hand, the keepers have night-sights now and mobile phones with cameras and satellite navigation systems and all sorts of electronic equipment. And there’s these constant news reports of rampant tabloid phone-tapping and secret letter-opening and computer-bugging and all kinds of unmentionable surveillance – and apprehension growing daily among us fugitive classes that anonymity will soon be as dead as the dodo.

  And what will it be like when the buggers invent telepathy?

  But what’s in the blood to begin with stays in the blood forever, and I just have to adjust my methods and my means and on I go, away into the mist beyond the hill. Between us, me and Bob have been poaching for eight decades and I want to make it up to a hundred years before I’m finally finished.

  I never got married, even though I had many a girlfriend when I was younger and even one or two now – some long time and some short time and some I might have married, but it didn’t work out that way. The thought of losing my freedom to be able to go where I want and do what I want kept
me back from marriage. I didn’t want to be tied down; I wouldn’t have been able to stick it. It’d be like being in jail the whole time, wouldn’t it? There can’t be more to love than lust or more to marriage then madness. Can there? In any case, I was never an ideal ticket for a woman – alright to muck about with and have a hidden huddle, but not a good long-term proposition. Not a municipal misfit like me, who didn’t want to work eighty minimum-wage hours a week to make some tax-dodging entrepreneur rich. I’m probably too old for it now and the thought of being penned up still don’t appeal to me. There’s too many things I still want to do before I’m on a Zimmer frame.

  I’m over fifty now, but I can still run and climb a mountain and wrestle a stag and fight a gamekeeper. Once I’m over seventy I probably won’t be able to do so much of that any more – so maybe I’ll get married then. But, for now, I’m doing the same at fifty as I did at five. And I like the freedom of it. I’ll carry on poaching till the day I die. I’ll never stop. There’ll always be land and wild animals – rich buggers with their gormlessness and their game – and there’ll always be me, taking it from them. And if I can’t walk I’ll get myself a wooden leg.

  We’ve always been known as men who stood up for what we believed in and were never afraid to say what we thought. I hate freemasons, lords, earls, vicars, yes-men, and anyone else who believes they’re better or bigger or bullier, who think they’re special in some way. But we’re in a minority these days, free-thinkers – people who ain’t been brainwashed by the system, who see things a different way from the stampeding herd. And most of the old poaching skills are being lost. Young people ain’t brought up to have to kill animals for food any more, so they don’t know how to hunt with dogs or nets or traps – and all they want to do with guns is shoot each other. Times are different, just like Bob’s before me, and I remember the village the way it was. Nothing much changed between his time as a boy here and my time as a boy here. His time was in the 1940s, before he went into the Navy, my time was the 1960s – twenty odd years apart – and nothing much changed in those twenty years, apart from going from horses to motors.