Hard pluck story

WE ONCE WENT, IN WHAT GRANNY called our "courting" days, to supper with a friend in London whose family appeared to own half of Jura. Our host produced a goose he had shot and brought back by road, ferry, train and, finally, the Circle Line.

The bird was disgorged from the oven and set on the sideboard for carving when our host announced rather pathetically: "I can't eat it." The rest of us sat about making awkward guffaws and grabbing for the bottle to hide our confusion. "It was ... its mate ..." he spluttered, "it came back and just flew round and round and ..."

At this point I would like to report he burst into tears, forswore shooting, fishing and the eating of meat for all time and sold his grandfather's Purdeys at Bonhams to give the proceeds to a Cypriot donkey sanctuary.

But as far as I know he went on to stalk and shoot like the rest of us. But the girls all looked mightily impressed at this show of compassion - one almost wondered if he was pulling an almighty fast one. We argued ourselves to a halt over the merits and demerits of shooting and went for a Chinese meal instead. No-one actually said, even if we all thought it, that the obvious solution would have been to shoot the mate too, if it was silly enough to come back.

I was not aware, until it was explained over the roasted corpse all those years ago, that geese mate for life. Actually, it is even more complicated than that because geese have homosexual tendencies. Happily, though, they don't seem to mind allowing a gander into the relationship, mating with her and then all three flapping around the resultant goslings. Which is nice. So unless something nasty has happened out there over the North Atlantic there will by now be 400,000 geese newly arrived from the Arctic Circle for some winter warmth in Scotland.

There is nothing quite so atmospheric as the honking of geese in the autumn morning half-light, which makes me disinclined to shoot them. On the other hand, and putting aside the vision of the lone goose returning to search for its downed mate, they make good eating, if hellish to pluck.

Most of us don't get our hands on wild goose that often. You cannot buy one from the butcher because it is illegal to sell them. This is a conservation measure, and although you might think that 400,000 geese is more than enough, you can be sure that man in his greed would shoot and sell the lot if there was a bob or two in it. So you are allowed to shoot, in theory, only what you can eat or give away.

As geese are incredibly wily - ancient Rome was saved from the barbarians by the cackle of watchful geese - they are harder to shoot than their size suggests. So in the confusion of birds and guns you would be very lucky to kill two or three before the air cleared. Last winter we tried decoys on barley stubble where they had been seen feeding the day before. We could muster only four decoys and one of them was of the floating type for a lake or pond. As geese are spooked by anything untoward - like a goose trying to paddle across a field of stubble, apparently - the incoming birds took one look and plonked themselves in the middle of the field next door, obscured by a dyke. A rifle would have been handy.

I shall start worrying more about the monogamous traits of the goose once I manage to shoot one.