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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
When Laurence Catlow, a classics master at a Cumbrian boarding school, sees a beautiful pheasant in flight, he wants to reach for his gun. In this diary of his sporting year, he asks himself, between days on the local rivers and shoots, why this is so. His answers are surprising, controversial and convincing. They provide an articulate response to the anti-fieldsports arguments, and he presents them in an entertaining, frank and amusing manner. Throughout 1995, Laurence's diary records his hopes of buying some precipitous shooting ground in the Pennines, his fishing days on the Eden, Wharfe and other rivers, the arrival of a second gundog and days spent together on shoots. All this activity is interspersed with Laurence's quest for his true motives in killing what he most loves. He looks at foxhunting, vegetarianism, man as a hunter, man as created in God's image and man as a creature doomed, himself, to die. Nearly 25 years later, this diary remains highly topical, thought-provoking and original. yet its tone is also very human and it comes from the pen of a true nature-lover.
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CONFESSIONS OF A SHOOTING FISHING MAN
When Laurence Catlow, a 45-year-old classics master at a Cumbrian boarding school, sees a beautiful pheasant in flight, he wants to reach for his gun. In this diary of his sporting year, he asks himself, between days on the local rivers and shoots, why this is so. His answers are surprising, controversial and convin-cing. They provide an articulate response to the anti-fieldsports arguments, and he presents them in an entertaining, frank and amusing manner. During the year, Laurence’s diary records his hopes of buying some precipitous shooting ground on the Pennines, his fishing days on the Eden, Wharfe and other rivers, the arrival of a second gundog and days spent together on shoots. All this activity is interspersed with Laurence’s quest for his true motives in killing what he most loves. He looks at foxhunting, vegetarianism, man as a hunter, man as created in God’s image and man as a creature doomed, himself, to die. This diary is highly topical, thought-provoking and original. Yet its tone is also very human and it comes from the pen of a true nature-lover.
CONFESSIONSOF A SHOOTING FISHING MAN
Laurence Catlow
In Memoriam
J.C.P.G.
Author’s Preface
This diary was written for my own pleasure, to celebrate my joy in the countryside that surrounds me and my delight to be out in it with a fishing rod or with a spaniel and a shot gun. It was written for my own pleasure and satisfaction; if it gives others pleasure, then it will give me all the more satisfaction.
It was written two years ago, at a time when I sensed that many shooters and hunting men, in spite of their passionate belief in the innocent and wholesome nature of their sporting pursuits, had acknowledged that the mood of the times was against them and that their days as hunters and shooters were drawing to a close. I was troubled by the way in which they seemed to accept the imminent death of fox-hunting, and the less imminent but hardly less certain end of shooting for sport, as part of the irresistible process by which urban men were imposing their values on the traditional pattern of rural life.
I was troubled too by the evasive and unconvincing nature of the arguments produced in defence of fieldsports by those who felt themselves qualified to speak up on their behalf. And, although as a fisherman I did not feel seriously concerned for the immediate future of angling, there was a nagging suspicion that, if killing foxes and pheasants should ever be declared immoral and illegal, some rudimentary regard for equity or for intellectual consistency must eventually persuade our law-givers to a similar pronouncement concerning the killing of trout. Perhaps this was an unfounded suspicion.
I have kept a sporting diary for years, usually a bare record of fish caught and birds shot, in some years an attempt to preserve for myself something of the individual flavour of my shooting and fishing days. Two years ago I decided that the time had come for another diary of the more ambitious sort. I decided too, perhaps in response to the despondency of my shooting and hunting friends, to use it as a means of exploring my beliefs as a sportsman, in the hope that I might see more clearly why fishing and shooting are so important to me and why I have always held them, properly pursued, to be blameless activities.
This diary was not written to convert others to my way of thinking; it was written rather for my own benefit, to elucidate to myself the nature of my thoughts about killing birds and fish for pleasure. If it should happen that it turns hunt saboteurs into aspiring masters of foxhounds or shoot captains, I shall be delighted. More likely is that it will help fellow fishers and shooters to unravel a few strands of their attachment to field-sports and may stimulate some of them to develop arguments more convincing, and perhaps more succinct, than any advanced by me.
Most of this diary is not directly concerned with the morality of killing animals. It is about the countryside and, unavoidably, it is about me. I should have liked to keep me out of it as much as possible. But it has proved very difficult to keep me out of my own diary. I think that I am probably the worst thing about my diary, and my advice to anyone who buys this book and bothers to read this preface is that, in reading what follows it, he should try to forget all about me and to concentrate instead on the fields and the woods and the riverbanks where I spend so much of my time. For, if I have managed to convey some impression, however adumbrated, of the beauty of that part of England which it is my privilege to call home, then this diary has not been written in vain.
Laurence Catlow Sedbergh, August 1996
Contents
THE DIARY
1 February
There were torrents of rain all morning. The fells are seamed with gushing lines of water. Rivers are brown and foaming and intemperate. There are pools in every hollow of the sodden fields. For me there was no shooting. I did not even bother to go out to Brough after morning school; and so it was a wretched end of the season and not at all as it should have been. For the pheasant season should end with a few birds bustled out of gorse and bracken by Merlin the spaniel; it should end with a few flurries of excitement, with some sadness that it is all over again, with grateful memories of the sport that has filled the last months and with intimations of spring in the longer light, the feel of the air and in the singing of a few birds. By the end of January, there come days that are not wholly of winter, days when the sun shines with something like a waking power and the wet earth seems to breathe out a yearning to be done with doing nothing, a yearning to be busy again and growing things. Then everywhere there is a sense of aspiration. Already there are snowdrops under the trees, and already this January I have heard dunnocks singing; already robins are piping and whistling all day long. Mistle thrushes are shouting and there is a restless edge to the cawing of rooks. I did go out in the end, but not to Brough and without a gun. I took Merlin to the woods at the foot of Dentdale and ran him through the rhododendrons. He gets sharper to whistle every day. He is a fine dog with a foolish master and his virtues may yet triumph over all my incompetence. The wind was very strong, tossing crows through the sky like black rags, and the screeching of gulls was blown on the air in piercing shreds of sound. There was a brief burst of stinging hail and an even briefer patch of blue sky. I almost regretted not going to Brough and fancied there was still time to leap into the Land Rover and thunder off there. But it was no more than a fancy; it was too late, and so I went back to Sedbergh and fed the dog and did some work.
It is an odd time to start a sporting diary, with shooting over, except for rabbits and crows, and with the first trout still almost two months away. It will help to pass the time and, while I wait for the first day of the fishing season, I shall plan my next season at Brough and think about blood sports. For it is strange, I suppose, that killing birds and fish amounts for me to an act of worship, that I thank God most sincerely for the blessings of life at the end of a day’s fishing or shooting. It is certainly strange; it is also true, and I should like to understand more clearly why it is so. And, if I discover that this worship of mine is a perverted form of piety, then I suppose I shall have to give it up and write a diary about my life as a schoolmaster instead. God forbid!
2 February
It hurt to be trapped in a classroom this morning, and there were bitter thoughts about yesterday’s weather and today’s contrast. For today, with its bright sunshine and still air, would have been perfect for a last outing in search of a pheasant or two. The sky was blue today and everywhere there were vernal stirrings. It was half way to spring today; it was more than half way and there seemed a message on the air: that winter was old and fading fast and doomed, and that the spring of the year was just round the corner. And yet it was not warm. There was a sharp edge to the sunshine, but somehow its light was not a winter light. Starlings were sitting in the bright branches, making chortling and gurgling and whistling noises. From every tree the chiming of tits rang confidently through the air and for the first time I heard a chaffinch rehearsing its spring song. I took Merlin for a gunless walk, trying in vain to find a rabbit for him to flush and trying to find words to define the quality of late winter sunshine. But appropriate words were as elusive as rabbits. February sunshine is different from bright days in December. It is just different.
3 February
There was no longing to be outside today. The wind was howling through the sky and tearing through the trees, snapping off great branches and tossing them on the air like strands of dried grass. Wet snow came slapping against the panes and every window in my classroom whistled and moaned. As I gazed through them disconsolately, sleet went sweeping over the fields in white and swirling sheets. It will be lying deep over the fells now and my pheasants at Brough will have a cold night of it. If their thoughts were turning to love, they will have turned back to food and shelter. My thoughts at the moment are centred upon whisky and a warm fire.
4 February
The sun is shining and old men have come out onto the streets to talk of their green days. On the hills the snow has almost gone. The top of Baugh Fell is just white, shining at the sky like a man’s bald patch. The air is cool but lively and, as I walked Merlin before school this morning, a chaffinch began its song and then thought better of it. Then it began again and got the whole way through and managed the complete performance a second time. Before long it will be so like spring that I shall start cursing mortality.
9 February
Winter is old and feeble and so am I. On Sunday I went to Durham to play fives, an obscure game of which I am inordinately fond and for which I never had much aptitude. It is not unlike squash, except that the ball is hard and you hit it with gloved hands, both of them. And since the ball is hard it sometimes hurts, and this recommends fives to public schoolmasters, who believe, of course, that pain is character-building. And, because it is a doubles as well as a singles game, there is just a whiff of teamwork about it; and we public schoolmasters dote on teamwork. Anyway, whatever moral virtues fives may promote, I love the game. I was never much good at it and I am getting worse fast.
I drove home on Sunday, with no trophies in the back of the Land Rover, but in the sure knowledge that I had caught a cold and with a brooding sense of decrepitude. Once I got home I was so stiff that sitting down and then standing up again were a creaking discomfort, and it hurts in the mind to acknowledge the signs of physical decay.
It is worse for the single and the childless for we have no companion in decline and there is no waxing flesh and bone close enough to us to compensate for the waning of our own bodies. It comes in fits and starts, this preoccupation with progressive enfeeblement. It was particularly strong yesterday, as I blew my nose until the skin was torn and raw, as my eyes streamed and turned red and looked like a drunkard’s eyes, as my throat rasped and grated and complained. I looked at myself in the mirror and was disgusted by what I saw; and my teeth are dropping out and my eyebrows are like unclipped hedges and there is hair sprouting out of both ears. And the worst of it is that I am only 44. What on earth will it be like in another ten years?
Today was much better. I went out to Brough and took down hoppers and filled those I have left hanging to keep birds on my shoot. There were more pheasants to be seen than there have been for weeks past. I suppose it is three weeks with no shooting that has brought them back, which makes me think that next season I should perhaps harry them less frequently and see if I end up with more of them in the bag. But fifty birds for the season just past amounts to success; it is exactly 40 per cent of the 125 released and it was only the second season that I have shot the place. I am sure that I can improve on 40 per cent; and there are plans for strips of kale and for other things to sort out before long.
I love my shoot and loathe the thought of losing it. It looked very beautiful this afternoon, with its miniature stands of firs and larches and its steep banks of gorse. There were catkins shaking in the pale and windy sunshine. And Merlin flushed pheasants and came back to the whistle without chasing them and without asserting his independence in the deep and tangled temptations of the gorse. And it is very pleasant, after the end of a season’s shooting, to watch without the onset of predatory urges, pheasants flying, to watch them with admiration and with hopes of eggs and chicks to come and with a whole half year ahead of you before they turn again into objects of desire.
I enjoyed this afternoon. The gentle exercise was good for my old muscles; the bracing air was good for my cold and I cannot have blown my nose more than twice. I came home quite at peace with a life already more than half-way towards the grave. Tomorrow I shall play fives. Now I shall mark some examination scripts. In an hour and a half I shall go to the pub and drink three pints of bitter beer.
10 February
The last lingering traces of my cold had fled by this morning. I was in tune with the chaste sunshine and the singing birds. Chaffinches are proclaiming themselves everywhere now and song thrushes have begun to explore the possibilities of repetition. At midday there was a charm of greenfinches, trilling and whistling in the bushes beneath my classroom. I could hear then whenever I paused in my vain attempts to explain the difference between pronouns and adjectives.
I was in my ageing-pedagogue-despairing-over-the-incorrigible-ignorance-of-modern-youth mood. I am in it a lot and it should probably be complemented by a gown and perhaps even a mortar board. There was good reason for my mood today, for I was more than once assured that ‘they’ is an adjective; and it did no good to point out that we never say of someone that he is a generous and ‘they’ person. It hurt, when I asked a boy if ‘his’ was an adjective or a pronoun, to see the hunted look in his eyes and to know that, even if he came up with the right answer, it would be no more than a desperate guess. ‘Why is it’, I intoned dolefully, ‘that boys can no longer recognise simple parts of speech?’ ‘And what on earth,’ I muttered under my breath, ‘does the modern English master impart to his charges?’
We classicists enjoy our pedantic indulgences, but there are times when teaching Latin seems an impossible aspiration. Those greenfinches were a very welcome diversion. It also amused me to watch a crow splashing droppings onto the headmaster’s office.
Different robins sing differently. There are, of course, those broad similarities that make the song of every robin unmistakably robin-like. It seems a song so laden with the sadness of mortal life that you can scarcely believe that, to an audience of robins, it throbs with virile aggression and warns potential interlopers to fly elsewhere. It seems a song so sunk into introspection that its singer has lost all awareness of any presence in creation but that of his own melancholy thoughts.
I say so much as a general observation on the singing of robins. But individual robins interpret the inherited theme in their own way. There was one this morning that sang, to put it pretentiously, like late Mozart, with a serenity of sadness; there was one just before lunch that sang a heavier song and sounded more like Brahms. There was another robin this afternoon, perched somewhere in the beeches around the fives courts, and this one seemed almost cheerful. But perhaps it was just me, flushed with health and victory, convinced that Winchester fives (the most obscure variant of this obscurest of games) is the best game in the world and that I, at the age of 44, am still one of its finest exponents. On Sunday, if all goes to plan, I shall lay a hedge.
12 February
Half term has come, with the pleasure of lying late in bed. It is a fine thing to be warm and supine and semi-conscious, harassed by no more gnawing thoughts than a vague awareness that tea will not make itself unless you first plug in the kettle. There comes a time, of course, when guilt sets in and continued sloth seems a waste of the day’s opportunities. This usually happens to me at about half-past nine, although it did not get me from bed this morning until shortly after ten. It was because I had started thinking about my shoot at Brough and the prospect of buying it, and how High Park, for that is what it is called, would then be mine by right and not by favour, mine until I die.
I could fence off Blackberry Hill and dig a flight pond in the meadow, I could plant trees and strips of kale all over the place and spend long days there feeling proprietorial. I could even join the Country Landowners’ Association and put a sticker proclaiming my new status on the back window of the Land Rover. The possibilities are endless. The fact is that Mr. G. seems keen to sell, that I am sick with longing to buy his land and that I have the money he wants for it. I suppose it is madness to buy 65 acres of rough grazing and woodland when I do not own a house. It is the madness of the wise and I am more than happy for the world to think me crazy. For my own part, I think that the world, as represented by almost all politicians, animals’ rights activists, the Children Act, most headmasters, modern popular music, the European Community, strident homosexuals, feminists screaming about their right to murder the unborn, town-dwellers ranting about no one’s right to murder foxes, liberals simpering about everybody’s right to do virtually anything (except, of course, to hunt foxes or to disapprove of sin) - I think that the world, as represented by such people and such convictions and such institutions, not to mention tabloid newspapers, pornographic magazines, the irresistible enfeeblement of our language, the anti-smoking lobby, the views of most men with beards, the almost universal contempt for self-restraint and chastity as ideals tantamount to a perversion, the absurd assumption that all values are relative, the pervading and pernicious sensuality that taints the air like a miasma and which makes men and women think cheaply of each other and of their own bodies; I think that all these abhorrences make the modern world a disgusting, demented and insufferably tedious place. Which is, in fact, another good reason for buying sixty-odd acres of land on the edge of the Pennines, for rearing and shooting pheasants there and for walking my boundaries thinking reactionary thoughts.
I enjoy intemperate rhetoric for its own sake and it is for others to judge how much of what I have just written is seriously intended. Most of it is. But do not think that I am a misanthropist. My best friends are all human beings and I agree with Doctor Johnson that a tavern stool is the very throne of human felicity. I crave company as a drunkard craves drink. I also love solitude, and I love it for hours on end, whether walking or fishing or just sitting in a chair; but I love it only when I know that the end of it will be a table with someone else there, or a bar with easy talk to season the tang of bitter beer. I find eating alone depressing beyond words and I like pubs only when I have someone to share them with. This is all because I like people; and it is because I like people, and think that each one of us is precious beyond measure, that I hate so much of what today’s orthodoxy holds sacred. I rather think that it is time I changed the subject.
I was very pleased with the dog Merlin this afternoon. We went to the woods together and he plunged into brambles and plunged out again whenever I called him; and, whenever I blew the stop note on the whistle, he froze like a statue, but like a statue with miraculously moving parts: one with a thrashing tail and a lolling tongue. And then he would gaze at me in silent longing to be busy and questing again.
There was a blue sky above the larches, a very pale blue sky, a sky more of winter than of spring, and there was no enlivening feel to the air. There were tits making noises in the tops of the trees, and the finches round the house spent the whole day talking to each other. But these were scarcely spring sounds. It is freezing fast now and they talk of snow for the next days. I shall be tempted to lie abed again tomorrow, for the hedge-laying has had to be postponed.
13 February
It was a quarter past ten when at last I forced myself from bed. Diaries of life in the country should, I suppose, be full of early risings and vigorous activity before breakfast. This one will be an exception, although I may manage a dawn or two when my pheasants arrive in August. But I had better confess that there will be no morning flights in these pages, no prose poems in praise of sunrise over the mudflats. And this will not be the result merely of indolence. It is also because morning flight is the wrong way round. I love waiting for duck in the evening, especially early in the season when soft air and the warm half-light turn lying by a pond into a form of self-indulgence. In later months it becomes a a test of endurance, but in September it is still a sport for easy livers.
The coming of darkness is very slow. It begins to gather in the angles of walls; sharp perceptions turn slowly into less distinct and dimmer forms. But this all happens so gradually that you wonder if it will ever be night, for the sky is still filled with what seems an invincible brightness. Crows flap raucously into the trees; owls begin to hoot; the barn across the pasture sinks into the thickening light and turns black. You realise that the processes of nature have not been arrested and that the night will come; it is time for the first rush of wings.
The whistling of mallards’ wings is unmistakable, although straining and hopeful ears still try to persuade themselves that they can catch the sound of approaching duck in sighing rushes and whispering leaves and in the breathy noises that the wind makes in dry-stone walls. But the real sound is not like these, which are drifting, indeterminate and pulseless sounds, wandering aimlessly through the night and dying away imperceptibly. The true sound is a sound of muscle and sinew, regular, purposeful, and its strong rhythm charges the dark air with sudden excitement, until it turns into a brief vision of outstretched necks, of beating or cupped wings and of webbed feet thrusting forwards.
Two shots ring out and a shape plunges from the sky. Merlin leaps the wall and returns within seconds, carrying a drake. And then a brief waiting; and then the sound again and the loud shot and the swift retrieve. Soon it is over and I am walking back across the fields, enfolded by the comfortable intimacy of September darkness. For sport has ended with the ending of the day, with the lighting of lamps, and that is as it should be. It is wrong to start in darkness and to finish with the coming of light, to be spied out and exposed by the sun and then tramp back to the busy tedium of working life. It is far better to be enveloped by shadows, to sink into the darkness and to think, when it is all over, that it is time now for the quiet things of evening, for food and company and beer.
I am a flighter of evening duck, dreaming of the pleasures of autumn sport on a cold February afternoon. It is bitter cold now, with a sharp piercing wind buffeting the dry and tangled stems of the clematis outside the window. It is a lean and lifeless wind blowing from winter; it is not blowing with the vital cold of a spring wind. And the sky is leaden and makes everything beneath it look dull.
But it is part of the pleasure of February that it keeps you guessing, that one day stands on the threshold of spring, while the next takes you back to December. And so one day brings winter pleasures, the pleasure of defying the wind and finding beauty in withered and faded things, while the next is quickened by a restless impulse of eager life. I pity people who spend these weeks abroad in warm places; for how can you love the true spring of the year, when at last it comes, if you were not around to witness the harsh struggle that brought it to birth?
14 February
When men still believed in God there was no questioning the morality of fieldsports. For then we possessed souls, being creatures made in the image of our creator. Animals did not have souls and had been put into the world to serve the needs of man. They were trapped and netted for food. They were hunted for the glory of the chase and that was that. There were individuals, of course, who felt a special sense of kinship with animals; there was, for example, St. Francis of Assisi, but it is difficult to imagine St. Francis disrupting the local boar hunt or petitioning the pope in the hope that he would declare blood sports a mortal sin.
And the hunter was more secure in his sport in the age before Marks and Spencers; for today’s urban meat-eater has lost contact with the origins of his dinner. He finds it very difficult to connect the stuff on his plate, which came out of a neat and bloodless packet, with the living creature it once was. And this makes it all the easier for him to rend flesh and enjoy its flavour (what there is of it), then to drain his glass and wipe his lips and roundly condemn the barbarities of rural sportsmen.
I am not sure this gets me very far, but it is a start. Any defence of killing animals for human need or pleasure must rest on an assessment of the relative status of men and animals that sets humanity in a class quite apart from all other creatures, that insists, in fact, that the difference is absolute rather than relative. This is more difficult in an age that has little time for the soul and regards man as the result of purely material, evolutionary processes. There can be no doubt that the growing disapproval of hunting derives from the decay of Christianity; that Western men now think of themselves as mere animals and so feel closer to foxes and rabbits and pheasants and trout than they did when they believed that each one of us had been touched in his innermost being by the breath of God.
Few sportsmen realise that it is the decline of religion that now threatens their immemorial rights, and I shall not attempt to argue that shooters and hunters and fishers are a less godless crew than those who shout abuse at them. But almost all sportsmen are at least dimly aware that their opponents come mainly from large towns, and that they are men who have almost forgotten that they are carnivores. Some of them, in fact, are carnivores no longer, but that is a different matter and will need separate attention.
It so happens that I believe in God. I believe in the soul, and that animals do not have them. But, even without these convictions, I think that I should continue to shoot pheasants and kill trout without so much as a prick of conscience. And this is because, quite apart from my allegiance to the teachings of the Church of Rome, I do not believe that a pheasant, or a fox or a rabbit or a trout, possesses the self-awareness, the sharp sense of individuality, the moral possibilities, the emotional sensitivity, the ability to think, to choose, to grow in both its intellectual and spiritual faculty, the craving for love, the capacity to rejoice and to grieve; I do not believe that an animal is born with or develops these qualities that make every human being a unique and precious creation.
I do not believe that a pheasant aspires or longs as we do. I do not believe that it can improve or brutalise itself as we can. I do not believe that, when a pheasant falls from the sky, or when a trout is pulled from a river and then knocked on the head, its death inflicts the agony of loss on the lives it leaves behind. I do not believe that, as killers of flesh and fowl, we make mothers despair, or ravage the bliss of lovers, or that we blight the contentment of whole families and communities.
Neither in its potential as an individual nor in the bond of affection that links it to others of its own kind is there anything in the life of a pheasant or a trout that makes the extinction of that life a significant loss. This is the conviction that lies behind my willingness to kill animals; and perhaps I can put it more succinctly by saying that animals live instinctively and unreflectively, untouched by that higher awareness that is both the blessing and the burden of man. Blot out a human life and you have reduced the possibilities of creation. Kill a creature that lives at the behest of thoughtless impulse and nothing that matters much has changed.
If I did not believe this to be true, then I should never again sit by a flight pond as the light fails, I should never again go fishing on a bright morning in May; and I should never again eat lamb or sausages or feel that it was right to swat a fly. And if the man at the meat counter of his local Marks and Spencers thinks that these thoughts of mine are depraved and wicked thoughts, then he must turn away from Chicken Kiev and buy himself a lettuce instead.
There is much rubbish talked on both sides of the debate about fieldsports. Supporters drone on irrelevantly about incidental benefits; opponents draw ridiculous distinctions, between eating meat through necessity and killing animals for fun. ‘All gibberish’, say I. ‘Forget about such trifles and consider the one issue upon which the whole argument hangs. Man’s long history as a carnivore and his long-assumed right to hunt and to shoot and to fish both rest on the same belief regarding the status of animals in relation to himself: that animals are subordinate to his needs and that he is therefore entitled to kill them. If he is not entitled to kill them then he can most certainly no longer go out shooting pheasants. But I shall be surprised if it turns out that he can continue to eat the creatures that he can no longer kill (unless perhaps he waits for them to drop dead of old age). And if our traditional attitude to animals really is wrong, then this is likely to change more than our rural pastimes and our diet. What about the rats in our granaries and the mice in our kitchens? What about the bugs in our beds and the lice in our hair and what about the locust and the mosquito? It seems to me that they deserve as much mercy as the fox.
15 February
Once again my diary is a refuge from an unwelcoming world outside the front door, from a biting wind and a sullen sky and a countryside drained of all but dreary colours and silent except for the sound of creaking and complaining branches. The trees sound stiff in the joints, like worn-out old labourers, stiff and sore and aching in every arthritic bough. And the hedges are sighing in the wind, cold and weary of this return to winter. I have exercised Merlin and I am glad to be inside again, sitting in front of the word-processor and thinking about field sports.
I do not believe that the modern eater of meat is in a position to condemn us shooters and fishermen. It is true that, when we lived in caves and gnawed bones by the fire, we needed to kill in order to stay alive. But meat-eating is now an indulgence; we can keep hunger at bay without resort to lamb chops and rump steak. In exactly similar fashion, fieldsports derive from the same primitive necessity, and they have been similarly transformed by human progress from the grim activities they once were, driven by the urgent compulsion of hunger, into pleasures that grace spare hours and feed our souls. Today’s carnivorous opponent of blood sports can no longer draw a distinction between eating meat for need and killing pheasants for fun. For we can all ward off starvation with a rich variety of appetizing and nutritious fruits and vegetables. And so opponents of fieldsports, hunt saboteurs, suburban housewives, members of parliament with bizarre sexual appetites, must all express their horror of my sporting pleasures on bellies blamelessly full of lentils. Let flatulence be the proof of their consistency.
16 February
Last night I dreamt of a carnivore with a passion for red meat and for drawing distinctions. He kept me late in bed this morning, sipping tea and arguing with him. For my carnivorous drawer of distinctions, having abandoned his distinction between eating meat for need and killing animals for pleasure, continued to be a distinction-drawer by contrasting different sorts of pleasure, by commending the innocent pleasure of taste and then roundly condemning the depraved pleasure of bloodshed and slaughter.
I felt for a time that he had got a point. It is one thing to say, ‘this lamb is quite delicious; every mouthful is sweet and succulent and its flavour is perfectly complemented by your Mouton-Rothschild ’70. Yes, I should love another slice and thank you for refilling my glass.’ It is quite another thing to say, ‘I have just murdered my mother-in-law with the carving knife; the kitchen is awash with her blood and the sight of it sends me into a transport of the purest pleasure imaginable. Excuse me while I go and have another look.’ There is a difference here between acknowledging a pleasant and harmless sensation and admitting to an diabolical delight in the spilling of blood and the spectacle of death.
It is quite clear that some pleasures are harmless, while others are disgusting and immoral. So far I went along with my flesh-eating distinction drawer and for a time I sipped tea with a thoughtful air. But before long I was saying to him that, although I accepted his distinction between innocent and guilty pleasures, I was not at all certain that he could regard his pleasure in roasted flesh as an innocent pleasure, if at the same time he was determined to classify my pleasure in shooting pheasants among the unspeakable and guilty ones.
‘You seem to have forgotten,’ I said to him, ‘that your taste for meat cannot be satisfied without the killing of animals. If you tell me that I should not kill them, then I shall tell you that you should not eat them. For if an immoral act is necessary to provide an otherwise innocent pleasure, then the pleasure no less than the enabling act is corrupt and abominable. The pleasure of drinking first growth clarets is a blameless, refined and altogether civilised pleasure (to judge from my very limited experience), but, if it is a pleasure you can only satisfy by first robbing banks (which is the case with most of us), it has turned into a reprehensible and dangerous pleasure which you ought at once to renounce.
‘And it will not do to get someone else to rob banks for you. That would be even worse, for not only would it be the behaviour of a coward, but it would also be asking others to do wrong on your behalf. And, excuse me for saying it, but it rather seems to me that you are in the same position as the wine-lover who robs banks by proxy. You will not kill the animals you eat. You expect someone else to do it for you. You have not the belly to provide your stomach with the meat it craves and, to make matters worse, you give yourself moral airs and graces and you look down your nose at men like me who are happy to take a gun and shoot their supper for themselves. Will you be offended if I suggest that you are, in fact, a hypocrite?’
‘Not at all,’ replied the sensitive carnivore. ‘You do not understand the distinction I have just drawn. It is too fine for you. I do not object to killing. I object to killing for pleasure; I object to enjoying killing. Utilitarian slaughter, that of the abattoir, is another matter altogether and it sets meat on my plate untainted by human delight in the death of animals, which is why I refuse to eat pheasant and always have lamb with my claret.’
I think I filled my cup at this point, with tea rather than with wine, and mused for a few minutes.
‘Your distinction is a fine one indeed,’ I said at length. ‘In the matter of distinctions you seem to believe that the finest are always the best. I think that I understand it and I am not certain that I go along with it. One difficulty is that it seems to exclude animals entirely from consideration of the morality of killing them; it makes the human feelings that accompany the killing of a sheep or a pheasant or a trout the one factor that determines its moral status as a blameless act or a heartless outrage.
‘I had rather expected that you, as an opponent of fieldsports, would want to grant animals certain absolute rights. And yet I find that you are denying them any rights at all and approach the question of their proper treatment with no regard for the animals themselves. Rather, your gaze is fixed unswervingly on the heart and mind of man. This puzzles me, as too does your obsession with what I shall call the pleasure-factor.
‘Your preoccupation with this pleasure-factor disturbs as well as puzzles me. For it seems to suggest that the emotions accompanying an act are more important ethical guides than the nature of the act itself. It seems to suggest that you can go ahead and poison your wife as long as the hand that sprinkles the arsenic into her morning tea pauses a while to wipe away a tear and then carries on sprinkling with infinite regret. I accept that whether a given act is right or wrong very often depends on the circumstances that surround it. Famously, for example, there are many occasions when it is not a sin to tell a lie.
‘But the deciding factor should surely be something other than the pain or pleasure the performer will derive from his act. Are not those affected by an act more important than the feelings of the man who carries it out? In the matter of killing animals, are the animals not more important than the emotions of the men who kill them? I think, on reflection, that your distinction is a dangerous and false one. It is your way of distancing yourself from the killing that puts meat on your table and it is sophistry. If you want to eat animal flesh, although you may not want to kill animals yourself, you most certainly want them killed. Anyway I do not have time for any more distinctions. My tea is finished and it is high time I left my bed and let the dog out.’
17 February
As I lay late in bed this morning, on this last day of half-term, I drew distinctions for myself and they ran along these lines.
Most fishers and shooters, including me, regard badger baiting and cock-fighting as cruel and abhorrent practices, rightly banned. And most opponents of fieldsports, I think, would acknowledge that there is something especially monstrous about torturing badgers that sets it apart from pheasant shooting and catching fish, and even hunting foxes, as an immeasurably more degrading and repulsive activity.
The distinction is obvious and uncontroversial, but I think it will be worth my while to examine the thoughts and attitudes that lie behind it. And the first point to be made is that cock-fighting and badger baiting and other outlawed and barbaric forms of sport with animals are all spectator blood sports, and they are sports that truly delight in blood and violence, in bared teeth and snarling jaws and torn limbs. They appeal, in short, to the worst impulses of our human nature and they satisfy these same impulses in a fashion that is peculiarly base and craven; for they provide pleasure in bloodshed and violence and death without personal exposure to either danger or pain. Their sole purpose is to glut revolting appetites. They serve no need except this and they are abominable beyond words.
Blood and violence and cruelty lie at the heart of badger baiting. This is not the case with, say, pheasant shooting, which seeks the instant extinction of pheasants without the spectacle of bloodshed. And if we shoot a pheasant and fail to kill, then we take action to secure our prey as quickly as we can and to despatch it with all possible speed. Moreover, although shooting pheasants is not essential for human survival, it puts food on our plates and thus satisfies a basic and blameless need. Badger baiting ends up with a mangled corpse. The final result of a day’s pheasant shooting, or a day’s trout fishing, is roast pheasant or poached trout.
The pleasure of a day in the coverts or of a day by a chalkstream or by a tumbling northern river is not easy to define, but it does not partake of the savage delights of the bear pit; it derives from the touch of the wind on our cheeks, from the slow moving of the sun through the sky and the changing patterns of shadows beneath the moving sun. It derives from light in waving trees and running water, from a sense of Nature’s teeming bounty and a conviction that it is right for man to take part in the harvest. Now there are those who question man’s right to participate in this harvest when it involves the taking of animal lives. That is not my concern here, which has been rather to demonstrate to myself that my love of fishing and shooting has no kinship with the depraved pleasures of the badger baiter and his kind. I am satisfied that this has been done.
I am less certain that the fox-hunter will think my arguments useful. But he should take heart and point out that he gets on a horse and charges round the countryside and periodically breaks his own bones. At least he is no coward. And he is very rarely in at the death and the death is normally very quick and the sight of blood means very little to him. He is a poet at heart, your fox hunter, delighting in the sight of twenty couple of hounds streaming through field and covert, transported by the strength and beauty of the mount beneath him, by pink coats and shining horses and wide winter skies. He should not claim, in my opinion, that fox-hunting is necessary to control foxes; he knows it is a lie and that lamp and rifle are ten times more efficient than a pack of hounds. He should argue that hunting transforms necessity, the acknowledged necessity to control foxes, into art; that it makes beauty out of the basic things of life and is a tribute to the aspiring spirit of man.
Not everyone will agree with him; but I think he has got a point and it is a point to which I shall doubtless return, though not until I have gone back to school and got on top of my work. But, before I return to Latin and Greek and leave my diary unvisited for a few days, here are some more thoughts on cruelty, which should, I think, be considered from two points of view: that of its victim and that of the man who imposes cruelty on the creatures around him. The badger baiter inflicts pointless suffering and violence on the badger. This is one aspect of his cruelty and it is disgusting. The second aspect of his monstrous conduct is what it does to him; it degrades and corrupts him. It makes him a worse man, a man more likely to beat his wife and batter his children and laugh in the face of human pain.
I do not believe that a pheasant shooter similarly brutalises himself. The pleasures of fishing and shooting are complex but they have no connection with delight in the contemplation of suffering. Nor do shooters seek to inflict pain (there is perhaps a problem with fishing here) but to bring swift extinction to a life that is individually almost meaningless and which exists on such a primitive level of self-awareness that it cannot suffer in any sense remotely analogous to human suffering. I acknowledge that these last observations are dangerous, in that they might be used to justify any treatment of animals. But remember that we must always consider arguably cruel acts from two points of view and avoid conduct likely to deprave. And remember this too: that, although animals treat each other with pitiless indifference, we, in deference to our higher nature, should look upon them with more respect than they perhaps deserve as individuals. And so, although a wounded pheasant is incapable of mental suffering, we are dissatisfied with ourselves until our dogs have brought it to hand and it has been released from its discomfort. And what shooter, when he comes upon a rabbit disabled by the putrid blindness of myxomatosis, is not, out of pity, moved to knock it on the head? We shooters are ready to kill certain animals, because we believe they belong to a category of creation quite apart from ourselves. But anything that smacks of cruelty, of the deliberate imposition of pain or of pleasure in beholding it, is repellent to the true shooting man. And, although nature litters the world with the wounded and the dying, whenever we come upon her victims we are stirred by compassion to help them on their way.
A concluding thought or two about fear, for opponents of field-sports often accuse its practitioners of spreading panic through field and woodland. And so, if not guilty of deliberate cruelty, we might be said to cause it indirectly by the dread our dogs and our guns and our human presence inspires. I want to make two points here, apart from sounding a warning about attributing specifically human emotions to animals. The first is this: that fear, whatever we really mean when we talk of fear in animals, is omnipresent in nature. It is a constant condition of existence for most wild animals and the fear that the shooter arouses with his gun or the fisherman with his rod is just one of a thousand fears that beset the lives of pheasant and trout: fear of the fox, of the mink, of the falcon, of the otter, of the heron. This fear, which is an instinctive response to anything that might threaten danger, is a perpetual feature of the lives of animals. It is of the nature of the beast. It is there whether we are there or not.
Moreover it is not just sportsmen who provoke fear among our wildlife. When two of us go for a Sunday afternoon stroll, the blackbird in the bush flees our approach with startled notes of alarm, the rabbit in the meadow scuttles into his burrow, the trout feeding in the stream shoots off for his lair beneath the stones. If the shooting man is cruel for arousing fear, then I cannot see how Sunday afternoon strollers are less reprehensible. They should stay indoors and leave the animal world in fearful peace. They should sleep off their lunches in their easy chairs. And that is more than enough argumentation for one day. It is time for a whisky.
26 February
I have been a schoolmaster for more than a week and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Today I went out to Brough with Austin, to be initiated into the mysteries of laying a hedge. It was a soggy day, with the vapour from melting snow merging into the greyness of the sky, while from the sky itself there came rain and drizzle and the wet earth breathed out dankness.
I sat happily on the wet earth and listened, while Austin talked of liggers and stools and shooting tongues, and of the necessity, in deference to the habits of sap, to lay your hedge uphill. The hedge that starts at the weir-gate, running back along the rise above the meadow, is a long-untended hedge, full of gaps and sheep wire, but Austin proclaimed that, although it could not have been laid for at least twenty years, there was still a wealth of suitable wood just waiting for the shaping action of his bill-hook. It is a hedge of hawthorn and hazel, with some holly further up the slope. I watched, as Austin got to work, cutting out the old liggers and the dead wood, then slicing almost through living shoots and stems and branches, through gnarled and lichen-covered hawthorn, with its loose and crumbly bark, through smooth and silver-brown hazel, pushing down the laid wood and weaving it into a dense and thorny tapestry of stems that will deter even the most foolhardy sheep.
As the work progressed I could see cover being created before my eyes, and I began to dream of nesting pheasants in April and lurking pheasants in November. I went to inspect the hoppers and found that three of them were almost empty, even though I had filled them on Wednesday (during a couple of hours snatched from schoolmastering). It must have been the heavy snowfalls of Thursday and Friday that have convinced my pheasants that home is where the hopper is. Everywhere there were droppings, and pheasants’ feet have trampled the ground beneath the hoppers into little quagmires. And there were footings running this way and that through all the ragged patches of snow.
Austin had nearly finished when I returned. I was relieved to find it so, for it had been impossible to ford the beck without letting some of it into my wellingtons at each crossing. It was icy water and five minutes of standing froze my feet. Austin staked the section he had finished and we looked at his handiwork while I admired it loudly. Then we squelched down the meadow and climbed into the Land Rover and drove back to Sedbergh. I am very eager now to start wielding a bill-hook myself. Austin tells me that I have about six weeks to do something useful with it, for by then the sap will be rising strongly and it will be too late to lay hedges.
28 February
It is a joy to me, this diary of mine. It is a privilege to write about the things you love, about gentle rain and damp earth and singing birds, about the soft coming of spring. And soon I shall be able to write about rivers, about the Wharfe and the Eden and the spotted trout that swim there. I have kept a sporting diary of sorts for many years, but it has been little more than a record of pheasants shot and trout killed, with occasional comments on wind and water and the obvious things that have made or marred my sport. There have been no entries for days when I did not go out with a rod or a gun; and so days like today have passed unmentioned; and, although today might have seemed to be entirely unremarkable, it has not in fact been so. It has been a day of drizzle and low cloud, but with a mild and quickening air. And I have felt for some reason that, whatever may happen tomorrow, winter is at last over. Frost and snow will from now on be features of the spring, of the inconstant northern spring that is soft as butter one day and as hard as a headmaster the next.
Today was an unexceptional day, except for some quality of the grey light and the moist air that expressed all the hope of the reviving year. And there was a chaffinch that sang with unusual virtuosity, trilling not only at the end of each burst of song but half way through it as well. This was a bird that realised that today was less ordinary than it seemed; and, if I were not keeping this diary, I should soon have forgotten both about the day and the bird that saw through its seeming drabness and recognised it as a day of celebration: a day that deserved its own song.
1 March
I was right when I said yesterday that winter was past. Last night, as I walked Merlin just after ten, the sky was full of the sound of birds, full of pipings and long, sad whistles floating on the air. And those cries were all the more haunting because the birds making them were high and invisible in the dark sky. They were curlews and golden plovers, flying back to their breeding grounds on the fells, and there was also the breathy squeaking of lapwings. They were all spring sounds and they were beautiful to hear.
Today it is March which, however raw and unfriendly it may prove, is unquestionably a month belonging to the spring of the year. It is the month when my trout rods stir from their long winter sleep and emerge from their covers and cases one by one. I cannot believe that they are instruments of torture. I feel instinctively that fishing is somehow the purest of fieldsports. In fact I am convinced that fishers are better men than they would have been if they had never come to love fishing. And yet it seems to me to be more difficult to defend fishing from the charge of cruelty than is the case with shooting. This is, of course, because playing a fish is undeniably a large part of the pleasure of angling and, even were this not so, it would still be a necessary preliminary to the catching and killing of trout or salmon. You cannot , if you angle for fish with rod and line, eliminate the fight that precedes the capture; and, just assuming that you could, how many fishermen would want to find that a mere wave of their rods had brought a hooked fish straight to net and that it was all over?
It is the tension of the fight, with a tight line and a bending rod, with a roused and angry fish running and leaping in his wild longing for freedom, shaking his head and lashing with his tail; it is your fragile contact with this struggling creature; it is the sensations he transmits to you through cane or carbon; it is the fierce desire to possess your prey and the fearful knowledge that your attachment to it is so precarious; it is all this that makes the fight so thrilling and that turns the moment of victory, when a fine fish surrenders at last and is drawn beaten over the net, into a moment of such marvellous and memorable fulfilment.
The glory of fishing is that success comes in stages. First there is the rise. You have fooled your trout; he thinks your fly is food and he wants to eat it. Next there is the strike; you have timed it perfectly and he is on. Then follows, if the fish is big, the great drama of the fight, which absorbs an angler so completely that, as long as it lasts, his happiness hangs upon the hold of his hook and the strength of his nylon. Losing a fish is a form of bereavement; it inspires disbelief and incomprehension; it takes time to come to terms with it. But what of success? What does catching a big trout or a huge salmon mean to a fisherman? It means more than those who know nothing of it could ever begin to guess and, in the case of an exceptional fish, it possesses more than a purely transient significance; it is a permanent joy and a lasting enrichment. And every fisher in the world knows that I am speaking the plain truth.
But the plain truth is also that the surpassing pleasure of catching a great fish lies in the the fact that it is the culmination of a long struggle. The killing, of course, is quick and painless; but the drama that precedes it is necessarily prolonged. And it is in the drama, and in the relief and satisfaction that follow, in the quiet contentment that steals over and stills more turbulent emotions, it is in this wonderful sequence of feelings, at once conflicting and complementary, that the angler finds his addiction and his delight. There are those who say that this is the delight of a torturer and, although I feel certain that they are wrong, it is clear that they deserve an answer. And I shall fish with less easy a conscience this season if I cannot say to myself that I have dealt with their objections to the sport I love best and shown them that they are wrong. I should like them to take up fishing themselves and so turn themselves into better people.
2 March
I went out to High Park this afternoon, filled the hoppers and spent an hour or so, not laying the hedge, but laying cover in the copse above the weir gate. It was a thought that came to me yesterday evening: that I could hone my mastery of the bill-hook by practising in places where it would not really matter if things went wrong. And so I spent an hour or so laying young shoots of hazel in the hope that they will thrive and sprout and thicken to provide cover for pheasants in summer and in September, persuading them that my land - with its hedges and hoppers, its dense stands of gorse, its thickets of hawthorn and bramble, its firs ideal for roosting, its beck with the purest of pure water for drinking, and with its new and welcoming luxuriance of undergrowth - is the very place where they want to settle down and remain warm and sheltered and well-fed for the winter. What will happen to my new cover, of course, is that it will never come to anything, for the sheep will munch each bud and leaf just as soon as it shows itself.
One of the arguments that fishermen are always producing in defence of their sport is that it is good for fish. And so it is; but this most certainly does not mean that fishermen are therefore right to go fishing; all it means is that they are willing to take pains and fight battles and spend both time and money in order to make sure that there are fish around for them to catch.
