John Lewis-Stempel - The Wild Life

A Year of Living on Wild Food

John Lewis-Stempel

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THE WILD LIFE
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552774604

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers Black Swan edition published 2010

Copyright John Lewis-Stempel 2009
Map Neil Gower 2009

The lines of poetry on page 8 are extracted from The Earliest English Poems, edited and translated by Michael Alexander, 1992. Copyright 1992 Michael Alexander. Reprinted by permission of Penguin UK.

John Lewis-Stempel has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.

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For Penny, Tristram and Freda. Naturally.

In 1996 John Lewis-Stempel convinced his London-born wife to up sticks from the city and move to Herefordshire, where his family have lived for five centuries. As well as hunting for wild food, he farms cattle and sheep. He is also the author of a number of books, including the highly acclaimed The Autobiography of the British Soldier (What a book. Five stars. Daily Express).

He has two children.

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This is the story of a year living off the land in the last valley in England. To protect the guilty, I have changed some names.

The reader should also be aware that some wild plants and fungi can cause allergic and adverse reactions in susceptible people; consequently an authoritative field guide should be consulted before consumption of the foods mentioned.

O CTOBER CLAMPS THE VALLEY. In the hedge bottom, mouldering oak and hazel leaves produce a burnt-incense spice so thick it suffocates. My trigger finger is pinewood-pale with cold; to get looseness back into it I flex it frenetically. All the while I scan the field before me. Nothing.

A blackbird erupts like a car alarm. For a moment I think Ive been spotted but in the twilight the culprit, a dog fox, lopes across the fields narrow promontory into the Escley brook and away into the copse.

The valley returns to its mausoleum silence.

Im here in hope, no more than that. Two days ago I saw them, by chance, when they came out of the wooded old quarry across the Escley but there is no certainty they will visit again.

I wait on into the gloom. Im about to give up when they come, sailing in over my head, as quiet as spirits.

Scolopax rusticola. Woodcock. Three of them. If I was a sportsman Id shoot them in flight, maybe even try a celebrated right and left. But Im not a sportsman, Im someone who is hungry, someone who is hiding in a drainage ditch up to his chest hoping for a sure-fire kill. I allow the woodcock to land a mistake, as it turns out. Momentarily they probe with their needle bills and one disappears. Then another. Amid the gathering dark, the drifted leaves and the tufted grass the woodcocks marbled camouflage works to Darwinian perfection. Only the movement of the third bird allows me to see it. I slip the safety catch off and mount the Baikal 12-bore shotgun to my shoulder. And fire.

Thirty yards to my front, the woodcock performs a crippled cartwheel. The other two woodcock, flushed out by the echoing gunshot, fast-beat it away in the ether.

Im as glad to be able to rise from my dank hide as I am with my kill. Hobbling with pins and needles I gather up the broken bird.

There are few creatures more plainly beautiful than a woodcock. I dislike killing them. But then I dont truly like killing. American Indians used to ask an animals permission to take its life. I do it all the time.

I slip a collar of pink baler twine around the woodcocks neck and, bird hanging from the gun-free hand, trudge up the sodden dark fields to the farmhouse, lying long and low out of the weather. Away to the west, across the valley, a last smear of daylight silhouettes the looming wall of the Black Mountains, the absolute edge of England. As I walk I ponder, with unceremonious saliva swilling into my mouth, tonights meal. Woodcock with blackberry sauce? Woodcock with crab-apple sauce? Whatever, it will make a God-thankful change from rabbit, dish of the day and night for the last week.

When I open the door to the kitchen, light explodes out into the cow byre we use as a mudroom. So do dogs, four of them, headed by Edith, my year-old black Labrador. She sniffs, quivering, at the dangling woodcock. Somewhere in her head is the archaic understanding that, in some way, the bundle of feathers should mean something to her. That latent knowledge is what I must work on if I am to train her to become a hunters best friend, a dog that flushes and retrieves game; the pity is that I have never trained a gundog before. Dont worry, Edith, well get there one day, I say, as much to reassure me as her, and tickle her in the suprasternal notch under her chin.

Only the dogs are home. Penny and the children are not back yet. I lay the woodcock on the wooden table and lean on the Aga, surveying the kitchen. It looks like a Dickensian chemists shop, overflowing with jars containing strange pickled shapes and bubbling demijohns and earth-filled boxes with protruding mangled roots. But the kitchens concoctions and specimens are not for the arts of the apothecary; they are the wild foods I eat. My studying of the kitchen is not idle; Im looking for inspiration, the accompaniments to the woodcock. It has to be the blackberry sauce, violently purple and fresh-made. Roasted burdock roots and steamed sorrel too.