The Last English Poachers (27 page)

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.

18

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?

We’d follow mink hounds now and then too, between April and October, through the streams and small rivers all around Berkeley. Mink hounds were once called otterhounds and they have a
shaggy coat and are as big as a Labrador. The hunt would draw waterways, searching for the mink and, when one was found, the chase was on and the foot followers would often have to take to the
water to keep up. The mink we have here in this country ain’t native; they’re American animals that were brought over here for fur-farming in the 1920s and here’s a bit of history
for you. Fur-farming was at its peak in the 1950s, with four hundred farms in the UK – and there were also many illegal backyard operators. Plenty of the animals escaped and established
themselves in the wild by the 1960s, reverting to their original chocolate-brown colour and spreading over England and Wales. The government tried to eradicate the wild mink population in 1964, but
it was too little and too late. Animal activists attacked the fur-farms in the 1990s and released loads more of ’em and fur-farming was banned altogether in 2000.

We rented out an old abandoned mink farm near Bradley Stoke and we kept about a hundred greyhounds there – I think I told you how Bob used to make me walk there if I was up late as a boy.
Bradley Stoke is a new town in South Gloucestershire now, on the north side of Bristol. It was built in the 1990s and people who bought properties there were hit by the housing crash of the same
decade, so the town got the nickname ‘Sadly Broke’. Anyway, we coursed the dogs across the farmland that was there before all the building and, not so long ago, the body of a young boy
was found on a rubbish tip, not a stone’s throw from where we had those kennels. He was abducted in London and abused and murdered by a paedophile, before his body was discarded. As far as I
know, they caught the culprit – but I can’t be sure. I could never understand how a man could hurt a child like that – or a woman either. But then, I suppose the world’s a
twisted place at times and it might be something to do with the shit food people eat, or some subliminal sickness they see on the television.

To get back to the mink – they’re still spreading in some parts of the country and nobody knows how to deal with them, especially since the banning of hunting with dogs. Mink are bad
little buggers – they kill everything. When a company of mink, or a gang, as they’re sometimes called, goes through an area, they’ll kill mollies [moor hens] and coots and take
the eggs and attack domestic fowls and water voles and other wildlife. They hunt over several miles, in ones and twos mostly and, when they’ve eaten everything, they’ll move on. They
used to be valuable for their pelts but women ain’t wearing fur coats no more, and although they’re expanding out to more remote regions, there’s not as many round here as there
used to be – just like all the other wildlife. We used to hunt them along the Little Avon, following the hounds and setting fenn traps that would snap shut and most times kill them
instantly.