Trickery Read online

  ‘How many keepers are there?’ I asked.

  ‘Three.’

  Claud threw away a half-finished cigarette. A minute later he lit another.

  ‘I don’t usually approve of new methods,’ he said. ‘Not on this sort of a job.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But by God, Gordon, I think we’re on to a hot one this time.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘There’s no question about it.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘It’ll be a milestone in the history of poaching,’ he said. ‘But don’t you go telling a single soul how we’ve done it, you understand. Because if this ever leaked out we’d have every bloody fool in the district doing the same thing and there wouldn’t be a pheasant left.’

  ‘I won’t say a word.’

  ‘You ought to be very proud of yourself,’ he went on. ‘There’s been men with brains studying this problem for hundreds of years and not one of them’s ever come up with anything even a quarter as artful as you have. Why didn’t you tell me about it before?’

  ‘You never invited my opinion,’ I said.

  And that was the truth. In fact, up until the day before, Claud had never even offered to discuss with me the sacred subject of poaching. Often enough, on a summer’s evening when work was finished, I had seen him with cap on head sliding quietly out of his caravan and disappearing up the road towards the woods; and sometimes, watching him through the windows of the filling-station, I would find myself wondering exactly what he was going to do, what wily tricks he was going to practise all alone up there under the trees in the dead of night. He seldom came back until very late, and never, absolutely never did he bring any of the spoils with him personally on his return. But the following afternoon – and I couldn’t imagine how he did it – there would always be a pheasant or a hare or a brace of partridges hanging up in the shed behind the filling-station for us to eat.

  This summer he had been particularly active, and during the last couple of months he had stepped up the tempo to a point where he was going out four and sometimes five nights a week. But that was not all. It seemed to me that recently his whole attitude towards poaching had undergone a subtle and mysterious change. He was more purposeful about it now, more tight-lipped and intense than before, and I had the impression that this was not so much a game any longer as a crusade, a sort of private war that Claud was waging single-handed against an invisible and hated enemy.

  But who?

  I wasn’t sure about this, but I had a suspicion that it was none other than the famous Mr Victor Hazel himself, the owner of the land and the pheasants. Mr Hazel was a local brewer with an unbelievably arrogant manner. He was rich beyond words, and his property stretched for miles along either side of the valley. He was a self-made man with no charm at all and precious few virtues. He loathed all persons of humble station, having once been one of them himself, and he strove desperately to mingle with what he believed were the right kind of folk. He rode to hounds and gave shooting-parties and wore fancy waistcoats, and every weekday he drove an enormous black Rolls-Royce past the filling-station on his way to the brewery. As he flashed by, we would sometimes catch a glimpse of the great glistening brewer’s face above the wheel, pink as a ham, all soft and inflamed from drinking too much beer.

  Anyway, yesterday afternoon, right out of the blue, Claud had suddenly said to me, ‘I’ll be going on up to Hazel’s woods again tonight. Why don’t you come along?’

  ‘Who, me?’

  ‘It’s about the last chance this year for pheasants,’ he had said. ‘The shooting-season opens Saturday and the birds’ll be scattered all over the place after that – if there’s any left.’

  ‘Why the sudden invitation?’ I had asked, greatly suspicious.

  ‘No special reason, Gordon. No reason at all.’

  ‘Is it risky?’

  He hadn’t answered this.

  ‘I suppose you keep a gun or something hidden away up there?’

  ‘A gun!’ he cried, disgusted. ‘Nobody ever shoots pheasants, didn’t you know that? You’ve only got to fire a cap-pistol in Hazel’s woods and the keepers’ll be on you.’

  ‘Then how do you do it?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and the eyelids drooped over the eyes, veiled and secretive.

  There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘Do you think you could keep your mouth shut if I was to tell you a thing or two?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘I’ve never told this to anyone else in my whole life, Gordon.’

  ‘I am greatly honoured,’ I said. ‘You can trust me completely.’

  He turned his head, fixing me with pale eyes. The eyes were large and wet and ox-like, and they were so near to me that I could see my own face reflected upside down in the centre of each.

  ‘I am now about to let you in on the three best ways in the world of poaching a pheasant,’ he said. ‘And seeing that you’re the guest on this little trip, I am going to give you the choice of which one you’d like us to use tonight. How’s that?’

  ‘There’s a catch in this.’

  ‘There’s no catch, Gordon. I swear it.’

  ‘All right, go on.’

  ‘Now, here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Here’s the first big secret.’ He paused and took a long suck at his cigarette. ‘Pheasants,’ he whispered softly, ‘is craz y about raisins.’

  ‘Raisins?’

  ‘Just ordinary raisins. It’s like a mania with them. My dad discovered that more than forty years ago just like he discovered all three of these methods I’m about to describe to you now.’

  ‘I thought you said your dad was a drunk.’

  ‘Maybe he was. But he was also a great poacher, Gordon. Possibly the greatest there’s ever been in the history of England. My dad studied poaching like a scientist.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I mean it. I really mean it.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘my dad used to keep a whole flock of prime cockerels in the back yard purely for experimental purposes.’

  ‘Cockerels?’

  ‘That’s right. And whenever he thought up some new stunt for catching a pheasant, he’d try it out on a cockerel first to see how it worked. That’s how he discovered about raisins. It’s also how he invented the horsehair method.’

  Claud paused and glanced over his shoulder as though to make sure that there was nobody listening. ‘Here’s how it’s done,’ he said. ‘First you take a few raisins and you soak them overnight in water to make them nice and plump and juicy. Then you get a bit of good stiff horsehair and you cut it up into half-inch lengths. Then you push one of these lengths of horsehair through the middle of each raisin so that there’s about an eighth of an inch of it sticking out on either side. You follow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now – the old pheasant comes along and eats one of these raisins. Right? And you’re watching him from behind a tree. So what then?’

  ‘I imagine it sticks in his throat.’

  ‘That’s obvious, Gordon. But here’s the amazing thing. Here’s what my dad discovered. The moment this happens, the bird never moves his feet again! He becomes absolutely rooted to the spot, and there he stands pumping his silly neck up and down just like it was a piston, and all you’ve got to do is walk calmly out from the place where you’re hiding and pick him up in your hands.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘I swear it,’ he said. ‘Once a pheasant’s had the horse-hair you can fire a rifle in his ear and he won’t even jump. It’s just one of those unexplainable little things. But it takes a genius to discover it.’

  He paused, and there was a gleam of pride in his eye now as he dwelt for a moment or two upon the memory of his father, the great inventor.

  ‘So that’s Method Number One,’ he said. ‘Method Number Two is even more simple still. All you do is you have a fishing line. Then you bait the hook with a raisin and you