Foxglove

There is always something to see, to hear, to scent. Hunters' instincts fine-tune even blunted human senses, so that you become one with the landscape, taking in all its tiny hints and promises. A driven shoot day might be formal, but Nature stays the same, and standing quite still at your peg while waiting for the drive to start gives plenty of occupation. The dead leaves in a thousand shades of brown patter with small footsteps, and often larger ones, as creatures move about. Here comes the pheasant that knows the score, creeping between two of us, no intention of flying. Pass, friend: live and breed, if you can evade your enemies. A squirrel scurries, stops and starts, runs up a tree keeping the trunk between itself and me, then leaps from flimsy branch to flimsier, and away. The woodpecker drums briefly on a dead elm, then flies in long swooping curves, cackling. There is a single shot: we have started. Then nothing, then the staccato of three or four single shots, the excited sound of one barrel fired, then its brother, in quick succession, a patter of spent shot through the trees and a puff of feathers floating slowly down after it. Putting pheasants over guns is a skilled job, for they should come in ones and twos, just as these are. Then the high ones start to rocket across. Pheasants look as if they should not be able to fly all that well, but they can and they do, and a curling pheasant with the wind under its wings is so fast that you have to be clever and maybe a little lucky to shoot it. For full feature see West Sussex Gazette January 9