The gamekeeper is heading out north on his tractor with his water bowser on behind, fox rifle jammed in beside the seat. It is ten o’clock in the morning and we are already hiding out in the bushes where he probably can’t see us. I don’t know what we are going to do today, but I’m excited and a little bit frightened already. Maybe you haven’t had the idea yet. You are idly scooping slivers of bark off the pine tree with your penknife and leaving multi-coloured shavings on the ground around your feet. Treading on rainbows. I’m picking my nose, biting my nails and flicking. I don’t have a penknife. A blackbird in the clearing is hauling at a recalcitrant worm that is clearly dug in for the day. I don’t know the word recalcitrant. But I wonder how far a worm will stretch. Or if its elastic body will suddenly pitch the bird onto its face. I don’t see the answer because I am already trying to catch a butterfly by the wings between my finger and thumb. It lands on a blade of grass and folds up neatly at the edge of the wood. I wonder if butterflies can hear well with those big aerial ears on their heads? I sneak up carefully, breaking no twigs, putting the butterfly between me and the sun. I’m holding my breath now, stretching out, I’m just a few inches away, getting ready to lunge and it’s gone, evading capture with the random pattern of its flight. It seems to take such a long route between a and b, with no recognisable reason for the scribble of its path. I don’t follow it into the open, don’t want to reveal myself, but instead start snapping dead twigs into the smallest fractions and piling them next to your pine-shavings. You look at me and with the slightest jerk of your head beckon me to follow you into the deep shade of the beech wood. An excited puppy couldn’t trail you better. Or more enthusiastically. Our bare calves tear on brambles, we catch our shorts on thorns. We go south. It seems a simple strategy, when the gamekeeper went north. We are skipping over wheel-tracks full of stagnant water, stumbling over flints eroded to the surface by the winter’s heavy rains. A dozen strutting pheasant cackle out of a thicket just in front and blunder through the debris of the decaying wood, and you charge at the middle of them, yelling loudly in your strident alto using swear words the birds cannot understand, but which make me laugh. And each one of them, with its nodding neck and fear-struck eyes and goalless running lives up to the name you give it. Fucken thick whanker. I’m throwing flints and they’re landing right beside them and they’re looking round with quick staccato movements of the head, still not able to connect the movement of my arm with the missile landing, so, like soldiers diving for cover, they bend their knees and sit lower to the ground, just a millisecond after each rock lands with a thud beside them. They have been granted wings, but never think to fly. You have crept round one of them so it dare not come back past us to flee, and you start to push it forward, one slow, threatening pace at a time. I am following your lead and like a pair of intrepid hunters we drive our quarry forward, we steer it where we want it, it is no longer running its own life. Ten minutes that only seem long we manoeuvre it through the trees, it responds to us as if it has no existence beyond us, and we, surely, know nothing beyond this, right now. Then, with a sudden flash of inspiration in its bright frightened eye it darts into a tangle of bramble, and squats, motionless, apart from its questing eye, and hopes we cannot see it. We stop, and sit there, looking, doing nothing for a while, and it begins to settle, betrayed only by its one eye that is never still. We are looking at each other, I am waiting for the signal, your almost nodless nod, which comes and we rise as one, and the pheasant, hidden, he thinks, by the genius of his own plan, crouches a little further in his belt and braces, just in case, while we throw ourselves bellies first onto the brambles, and I watch you reach in with one slick move and grab it by the neck. Its legs are flailing, drawing blood from your arm, you trap its body between your elbow and your side, get hold of the legs in your other hand, and stretch its neck so far the head comes off, which seems to work, although it trots around for a bit before pitching forward onto its wound in the mud. At the sound of the tractor labouring up the ride you stuff the bleeding bird under your arm, and we start to run, laughing, before the keeper comes. Fucken thick whanker.

*****

My mum and dad sometimes wondered who I would be without you. When in the house I was so introspective, where did all the mischief come from. He’s a troubled kid I sometimes heard them say, he sits there in the mill drawing pictures in the flour for hours on end, his mind far away, and his finger drawing holes. What’s going on in there? Well they didn’t like that, but they worked too hard, with the business and all the other kids, they had no time, and I needed time, but they didn’t like it either when the trouble that you got me in came visiting. Like when the keeper nearly broke the door in, knocking with his fist and forearm and forced his hand through the crack they opened in the door and put the terrified staring head of a decapitated pheasant so close under their noses they could smell its blood and smell its fear and he shouted at them with spittle bubbling round his lips, where do you think the rest of it is? Eh, tell me that. Tell me now. And they told him I was a quiet boy who read a lot and that as far as they knew I had been in all day. But how could they possibly know, when there was always so much to do, when they were just happy when I came home alive and well and took my needs elsewhere to sort out by myself? I was sitting at the top of the stairs listening when the keeper stamped off down the cobbled road raising sparks with his hobnail boots in the descending dusk. They shut the door quietly and turned to me with the question forming in their eyes, and I answered before they asked, it wasn’t me, and I stood up and came timidly down the stairs, so one of you could slap me round the head. Just in case.