THE OPENING OF THE DUCK-SHOOTING season on September 1 is shared with partridges, geese, woodcock, golden plover and, oddly, coots and moorhen. I have never yet been invited on a coot shoot or, indeed, encouraged to stalk a moorhen, or eat one for t
hat matter. They can't even fly very well and it's a mystery why they were ever considered worth shooting, but they must have been otherwise there would not be a close season. Anyway. An invitation had been issued by one of the myriad cousins with sporting interests, to flight duck one evening.
The party would be: one son, Alf the sporting friend, son's friend Ed who caught the salmon and grilse last week (grrrr) and, without guns, myself and John the keeper. We had the devil's own job extracting Alf from the clutches of his girlfriend, whom we think has become rather possessive and inclined not to let him out to play.
His ploy this summer has been to take her to game fairs and country events, where he ushers her into impossibly expensive stands selling Dubarry boots and "country wear" jackets and silly hats. His thinking, quite cunning really, is that the only places she can reasonably wear most of this stuff is out with him, shooting. I'm not sure it is working. He came and she didn't.
Our host telephoned to say he was terribly sorry but he had remembered he had to be in Toulouse for a birthday party, as you do. So we met up with John and were duly issued with cartridges loaded with bismuth shot instead of lead, because that is the law under the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement – no lead shot over wetlands for fear of poisoning birds.
We drove down, through the village past the old pond which was once a rustic mill dam and is now a "water feature" surrounded by bungalows and hanging baskets, and out the back of the houses down a track to a farmyard. The pond is through a hedge, along a shelter belt, over a big ditch and out along the edge of the still-standing barley, but inaccessible to vehicles.
So it was at this moment that John revealed they hadn't actually managed to get any feed to the pond to encourage the duck, so there might not be any. All the same, as a duck pond it is almost perfect. Some years ago, under the guise of one of the many wildlife and tree-planting schemes, my cousin planted two sides with trees and shrubs and dug out what was really a damp depression in the field, which then filled with water. An island was left in the middle as an anti-fox measure. The cover has since all grown in so there is no need for butts or hides.
Guns can hide like pigeon shooters in the gathering gloom on the edge of the trees. I stood with Alf and we discussed the finer points of Westwood mower gearboxes and the cider- making season. And while we were chuckling at some particularly amusing exchange there were two bangs and down came two ducks. We hadn't noticed the black silhouettes dropping in out of the dying light. The others had.
And that was that – low score but a 100 per cent success rate. Once the barley is cut there will be more. So we went up to the cousin's house, where his daughter had cleared the freezer of the remnants of last season's pheasant and constructed a huge casserole with baked potatoes. And we drank lashings of her father's wine. Result, as Alf says.
arobertson@scotsman.com
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