Bob - The Last English Poachers

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright 2015 by Bob and Brian Tovey

This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Bob and Brian Tovey to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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Hardback: 978-1-47113-567-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-569-9

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To Robert Seward Tovey, who was a proper countryman, and Beatrice Frances Tovey, who died too young.

Also Francis George Neal, who died on HMS Monmouth at the naval battle of Coronel on 1 November 1914, and Jane Ellen Neal, who was a lovely woman.

A light March drizzle is sticking to the windscreen of the Austin A35 as we drive in the rare hours, without headlights, up to the high brick wall that marks the boundary of the Berkeley Estate. We park the car in the narrow lane, under cover of some trees, and camouflage it with undergrowth that weve used before on many occasions. Then we scale the wall, with me legging Brian up first and him fixing a rope round the overhanging branch of an oak tree. Even though hes no more than seven years old, the boy knows what its all about. Hes been coming out with me since he was four and hes as good a watcher as any man Ive known.

I picks this spot whenever we comes out here from our village because its easy to get over the wall. I pull myself up by the rope now and drop down the other side, into the estate. I catch Brian when he jumps from the top and set him down, before we move off, after making sure the rope aint visible from either side of the wall. The ghost of a moon is shining through the thin cloud as me and the boy makes our way across the fields to the edge of the woodland. Its as quiet as a graveyard, with the scurrying of the night animals and the odd hoot of a tawny owl the only sounds. And its times like this I loves the most, an hour before daylight, with my son on my heels and the feel of the land under my feet and the fresh breeze blowing agin my face.

Its darker once we gets inside the tree line and we need to take cover and wait for first light to break over the hills to the east. I has a flask of strong sweet tea and I gives the boy a drink from the plastic cup first and then I takes myself a slug just to keep out the chill thats trying to creep in through our clothes and make us shiver and shake. Im carrying a .22 rifle and we waits for the sickly pale rays of sunlight to come shafting through the leaves.

Brian drinks the tea and grins back at me because Im the man he looks up to most in the world. I gives him this this freedom from all the other stuff and it sometimes feels like were part of each other. Every son is part of his father, but few of em feels it like Brian does.

Im wearing my long army coat and boots and Brian has a thick corduroy jacket and trousers and a woolly hat on his head. The colours of our clothes being brown and green to blend in with the woodland vegetation and keep us from getting spotted by some keen-eyed keeper with a pair of binoculars.

The light creeps up like a ghostly spectre in the distance to the east. And once we can see with some clarity, we starts off on our hunt for a suitable deer. The estates a big place, maybe ten thousand acres altogether, with five or six hundred acres of parkland alongside farmland and fisheries and small hilly woods dotted about over six or seven miles, where the deer take refuge.

We keep low to the ground when we has to break from the cover of the trees to get from one thicket to another. Them gamekeepers aint beyond giving poachers a good kicking and taking our guns away from us. And I hope they dont come upon us all sudden like, because Ill want to fight em and probably get beaten and I hates to see them kick the boy away when he tries to help me. But weve been here before and know the escape routes well enough to make a run for it, as long as were alert and dont let em get too close to us.

We can see the outline of the old Norman castle silhouetted agin the skyline to the north of us. Its a dark and demonic-looking place, where they murdered King Edward II by sticking a red-hot poker up his arse so thered be no sign of any wound on his body. And every September, on the equinox, he can be heard screaming. I know that because I hears him sometimes, even though we lives a fair distance away his voice comes floating and finds its way into our house and I tells it to go leave me and mine alone. And it does.

And Dickie Pearce, the last court jester in England, died there after falling from the minstrels gallery, and Queen Matilda came and killed all the deer in revenge for Roger de Berkeley not supporting her in the war they called the anarchy. So its a foreboding place with a blood-flecked pedigree, and it growls at us now as we cross its land in search of its game.

Theres about two hundred red and fallow deer on the estate and we start to see em as the early spring sun climbs to a low slant in the milky sky. We wants a big stag, not a hind or an albino, or a fawn. I want to joint it up and keep what we need for ourselves, then sell some and give whats left to the poorer people of our village. I does this all the time and gives away a lot of what we hunts because theres too much for me and Brian and my daughter June and theres just the three of us now, since their mother left when they was younger. Though Cora says shell be moving in soon to take care of us all. Very soon, I hope.

And then I sees him a big proud fella with maybe twelve or fifteen points to his antlers. I signal the boy to be still and quiet because I has to get close to him to make a clean kill and, if I spook the herd, hell run with them. The deer is alert, even at this time of morning, but theyre used to humans on this estate. Theyre semi-tame and not as flighty as truly wild deer that youd get on the high hills of Scotland so, as long as we keeps downwind of em with the low light behind us and in their eyes, well be alright. We move silently, stealthily, like we was animals ourselves and this was our natural habitat which, in a way, it is.

The .22 bolt action has a decent range for about a hundred yards; after that the bullet can fall away at a rapid rate and not hit the target, but I wants to get closer than that, to make sure I drops the animal with one shot. We might get away with the one round not being heard by the keepers, but not two or three. I make my silent signals and Brian knows I want to get as close as possible to make the kill maybe as close as thirty yards. The boys job is to keep watch while I do my job and shoot the quarry, which is what I call whatever it is Im hunting. So he turns away from me and keeps his eyes peeled and I can concentrate without worrying about someone creeping up behind me. The gamekeepers will have shotguns and they wont think twice about using them. If they pepper one of us, they can always claim it was in self-defence because we pointed the rifle at them. And whos going take the word of a poacher and his seven-year-old son agin that lot?