Ed was waiting for us on the gravel. When he saw us he tapped his watch with his finger and said, ‘Francis, if I’d known you were coming in that old banger I’d have told you to set out yesterday. What was wrong with Wilberforce’s Range Rover?’
We stopped and got out.
Ed said to me, ‘Wilberforce, I don’t think you know Heinrich Carinthia? Or Philippe de Bargemon?’ I shook hands with a large, smiling elderly man and then a younger, dark-haired Frenchman. The other guns I knew. Eck greeted me with a wave of his hand. One of the party, to my surprise, was Annabel Gazebee.
‘Hello, Annabel,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you would be shooting.’
‘We rely on her to get our bag,’ said Ed. ‘She’s a top gun.’
Then Ed introduced me to my minder, Bob. ‘Go and stand with Francis this morning. You’ll get a better idea of what goes on from behind the line. Then, if you feel like it, you can have a go yourself this afternoon, and Bob will show you what to do. He’ll stand with you and make sure you’re safe.’ Bob had the gun that Ed was lending me slung in a sleeve over his shoulder.
‘Francis, why aren’t you shooting?’ I asked.
‘I gave up shooting years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s an expensive sport, and anyway I much prefer working my dog nowadays.’
‘It’s a pity,’ said Ed to me, ‘because Francis was one of the best shots in the county in his day.’
‘I was about average,’ said Francis modestly. ‘Now, my father was what you would call a good shot. And my grandfather was one of the great shots.’
Ed laughed and said, ‘It runs in the family, I expect.’
Then we climbed into our vehicles and set off towards the moor. We drove in a convoy up a moorland track towards the first line of butts. An undulating landscape of heather and peat hags and small pools opened before us and we stopped and parked the vehicles on a dry bit of ground in the lee of a small hill. Then the guns and the followers, including Catherine and Francis and myself, walked slowly along the line of the wooden butts, Ed indicating to each gun in turn which butt to occupy.
Francis turned away from the line and strode across the heather with Campbell dancing at his heels. I followed him, and when we were about three hundred yards back from the line, we stopped and hunkered down in the heather.
The silence was, for a time, absolute. Francis did not speak, and Campbell sat quivering beside him, once letting out a small moan of excitement. A great white sky arched over us. In every direction the moors rolled away, like a huge sea. Not a house or a road could be seen, nor any human figure. Then I saw a line of moving dots on the distant horizon. They did not appear to get any closer for a while, but then I realised it must be the beating line, and I began to hear, in the stillness, the snap of the flags they carried to drive forward the grouse. Occasionally shouts would arise from the line of ‘Flag up! Flag up!’
‘They’re trying to stop the grouse flying back over the beaters, and turn them back towards the guns,’ Francis explained. ‘Things should start to happen soon.’
Now I saw a cloud of birds in the sky wheel and turn over the beating line, and then drop low again so that I could not pick them out against the heather. Then a shot rang out from one end of the row of butts; then shots were being fired up and down the line. I saw a pack of grouse coming straight towards us and, as it flew over the butts, I saw two or three birds tumble and then those that were not hit went past us in a rush of wings almost before I had realised they were coming.
At the end of the drive Francis stood up and Campbell sat up, a paw raised, waiting for orders. Francis gestured with his arm. ‘Go on, Campbell,’ he said. ‘Hi lost. Hi lost!’
The little dog surged through the heather, his head appearing from time to time with its ears flapping as he searched for fallen birds. In a few minutes he came back with one in his mouth.
‘There, Wilberforce,’ said Francis, handing me the soft, still-warm creature with its brown plumage and downy white leggings: ‘your first grouse.’
I held the bird gingerly for a moment and then gave it back to Francis. He smiled, and went back to working his dog.
After everything had been picked up, we walked on to the next drive, and then a third. Each was as exciting to watch as the first one and, by the time the last drive was over, it was afternoon. A pale sun was trying to burn its way through the overcast and not succeeding. It was warm and still. Francis and I walked back to the line of butts and joined up with the guns, and then we all walked together for a few hundred yards down the hill to where a small burn trickled between soft, grassy banks where the sheep had grazed off the heather. There we had a picnic beside the stream, and the keepers and the beaters took themselves off into a huddle with their Thermoses and sandwiches fifty yards away. The rest of us sat or lay on the grass surrounded by wicker hampers and wine coolers from which Horace, clad in a tweed jacket and twill trousers instead of his customary dark suit, dispensed all manner of good things.
Catherine came and sat down beside Ed and Eck and me and said, ‘What did you think of it all, Wilberforce?’
‘Very exciting, but I don’t see how anyone ever hits anything. The birds fly so fast.’
She laughed. ‘You’ll soon find out for yourself. I expect you’ll hit something. You are going to shoot after lunch, aren’t you? Try to remember not to shoot more than Ed. He won’t like it if you do.’
Ed, who was reclining in the heather munching on a chicken leg said, with some asperity, ‘On the contrary, Catherine, I would be absolutely thrilled if he did.’
‘I know you would, darling,’ said Catherine. She went and sat down nearer to him and stroked his hair. ‘You’re so good.’
Before we finished lunch Ed pulled a camera out from his pocket and took photographs of everybody sitting on the grass, eating their lunch. Then Catherine asked me to take a photograph of herself with Francis and Ed. The three of them got to their feet for the picture. Francis stood in the middle with an arm around Ed and an arm around Catherine. The heather stretched behind them to the milky sky, and the air was so clear that whenever I looked at that photograph afterwards - for Ed gave me a copy - it seemed to me as if the three of them might at any instant step out of the picture, or that I might step into it and return to the innocent happiness of that moment.
The shooting began again after lunch. Bob the minder followed behind me, carrying my gun in its sleeve and a bag of cartridges slung over his shoulder. We followed Ed towards another line of butts, about half a mile from where we had sat and eaten our picnic. As we came to the butts Ed directed the guns where to stand. Halfway along the line he stopped and said, ‘This’ll do for you, Wilberforce. You should get some shooting here. There are plenty of grouse about on this bit of the moor this year.’
I could hear them all around us, their liquid bubbling music occasionally broken as a cock bird would flutter up for a moment to see what was going on, uttering its cackling admonition: ‘Go back! G’back!’
Bob and I entered the butt, and Bob took the gun out of its sleeve and began to instruct me. ‘Now then, sir,’ he said, ‘I’ll put these two canes on either side of the front of the butt. Never swing your gun past them, otherwise you’ll shoot one of the other gentlemen in the line, and they never enjoy being shot, sir. And when you hear horns blowing, that will mean the beating line will be within range, and then you must only shoot grouse that have gone past us and are behind the butt, otherwise you’ll shoot one of the keepers, and they definitely dislike being shot, sir.’
Then he showed me how to break the gun and present it to him so that he could reload for me after I had fired it, and we settled down to wait. Various other pickers up and flankers walked past, and the flankers settled themselves in the heather at each end of the line of butts, with sticks on to which were stapled sheets of white plastic from old bags of fertiliser.
‘What are those men going to do?’ I asked Bob.
‘When the grouse start coming through, they’ll get up and flag them to make sure they go over the line of guns and don’t get out the side. There’ll be a bit of a wait now, sir. The beating line starts the drive quite a long way away.’
I stood in my butt, a wooden hurdle with heather along the top to give the illusion of camouflage, with my gun resting on the lip, waiting for the grouse to appear. My heart was beating faster than usual. I half-hoped I wouldn’t hit anything; but a deeper urge made itself felt: I knew I would want to shoot the grouse when at last they came.
The silence was absolute. The limitless horizons of the Pennines opened up before me. A huge grey bird wheeled in the sky above us.
‘Look at that, sir,’ said Bob: ‘that’s a hen harrier. They eat the grouse chicks in the breeding season and pick off any wounded birds we don’t find. They know what’s going on today, sir.’
The great raptor soared and wheeled against the pale sky, waiting for its chance. Strange-looking flies drifted past in front of the butt, locked in amorous embraces. A solitary bumblebee droned past in search of heather honey. The milky sky and the horizon seemed indivisible, as if the land rose up to meet the white light of heaven, as if it went on for ever. Somewhere far to the east were the urban sprawls of Tyneside and Wearside: now it seemed as if those places, and everything in them - my work, my life so far - were an unguessable distance away.
I saw a line of dots appear on the horizon.
‘That’s the beating line,’ said Bob. ‘In a few minutes we should start to get busy. Remember, when you see the grouse, pick your bird and stay on it. Shoot it in front as far out as you dare. They travel that fast, if you wait, it’ll be on you and past you before you can shoot.’
A moment or two ticked by. I could hear the occasional flap of a flag, as the beating line snapped them to and fro, to move the packs of grouse forward. Once or twice I heard again the screams of ‘Flag up! Flag up!’
Bob said, ‘Any minute now.’
My heart started to beat a little faster. I still had not seen a grouse on the moor. I wondered whether we would draw a blank. Perhaps Ed was wrong. The grouse I had heard earlier had all gone quiet. There didn’t seem to be a bird anywhere except for the hen harrier, still circling above the beating line. Then there was a shot from further down the line, then a ragged fusillade and then, before I had a chance to do anything about it, a pack of small brown birds was rocketing past the butt on every side, swarming in every direction. The birds were moving at an incredible speed. They were gone before I had even thought to raise my gun to my shoulder.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Bob. ‘It takes getting used to. Just keep your eyes open and - now, there in front: do you see that single bird?’
A lone grouse was darting this way and that along the gullies in front. It was about two hundred yards away. I put my gun up and Bob said, ‘Now. Now, sir!’
I swung on it and fired and everything slowed down: the grouse, which had already closed the gap to less than forty yards, seemed to tumble in the air in front of me, and then something whizzed past my head at great speed, and I turned and saw it bounce as it hit the ground ten yards behind me, in a cloud of white and brown feathers. After that I fired shot after shot, and by the end of the drive six more birds had fallen. Bob had made me wear ear protectors, but even so, by the time the beaters arrived at the butts and the drive was over, my head ached, my shoulder felt bruised from when I had fired before nesting the gun properly into my shoulder, and my throat was dry with the pollen from the heather.
As we walked back from the last line of butts towards the vehicles, I found myself beside Catherine. ‘Did you enjoy yourself today?’ she asked.
‘It was unforgettable. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again, but I’m so glad to have tried it once.’
‘Oh, you’ll do it again,’ said Catherine. ‘Ed will see to that. You’re his mascot now.’
Suddenly she bent and picked something from the ground. When she straightened up, she was holding a sprig of white heather. She gave it to me and said, ‘Wear this in your cap, Wilberforce. It brings good luck.’
I thanked her and stuck it into the tweed cap that Francis had lent me. Then she walked on and I found myself beside Heinrich Carinthia.
‘You have shot your first grouse, I hear. Then, I should say, you have had a very good day.’
‘It has been memorable.’
‘It is always a special moment when you shoot your first grouse. Of course, we have none at home in Austria. I still remember my first grouse. It was here, many years ago, just after the war, almost the first year they started shooting the moors again. I was sixteen years old, and Ed’s grandfather and Francis’s father were still alive. I still remember that little bird coming down, just as if it was yesterday. You arrived here with Francis. He is a friend of yours?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘He used to shoot so well, before he gave it up. It is a great shame that he does not shoot any more. His obsession with wine, I fear, has cost him his fortune. I feel a little bit responsible, for it was I who started his interest in wine.’
Heinrich stopped walking, and so I stopped as well. ‘I must catch my breath. I am not so young. Walking over this heather is hard work for an old man. Yes, Francis came to me for some months when his parents wanted him out of the way of some trouble. He never told me what it was, but I expect a girl. Francis was so good-looking in those days. I looked after him for his father’s sake. His father had been in the army and had stopped Russian troops from burning down my family’s house at the end of the war, so I felt that I owed the Black family some favours. I took Francis to see my new winery in California that I had just bought. In those days it was very brave for Europeans to try to make wine in California, but it has been my best investment. Then I took him to my little property in Bordeaux. You have heard of Château Trébuchet?’