Wilbur’s high pheasants

The Seventh Scroll is almost certainly unique amongst best sellers, as author WILBUR SMITH includes a pheasant shooting sequence written in his own highly readable style, capturing the moment so perfectly.

There was an open meadow at the foot of the hills, the expanse of smooth green grass broken up by patches of dirty grey snow from the previous week’s fall. Down this meadow the keeper had set a line of numbered pegs. At the beginning of the day’s sport the guns had drawn lots to decide the peg number from which each of them would shoot.

Now each man stood at his allotted peg, with his loader holding his second gun ready behind him, ready to pass it over when the first gun was empty. They were all looking up expectantly to the high ground from which the pheasant would appear.

‘Which is Sir Nicholas?’ Royan called to her mother, and Georgina pointed to the far end of the line of guns.

‘The tall one,’ she said, and at that moment the keeper’s voice on the radio ordered, ‘Gently on the left. Start tapping again.’ Obediently the beaters tapped their sticks. There was no shouting or hallooing in this delicate and strictly controlled operation.

‘Forward slowly. Halt to the flush of birds.’

A step at a time the line moved ahead, and in the brambles and bracken in front of her Royan could hear the stealthy scuffle of a number of pheasants moving forward, reluctant to take to the air until they were forced to do so.

There was another ditch in their path, this one choked with an almost impenetrable thicket of brambles. Some of the larger dogs, like the Labradors, balked at entering such a thorny barrier. Georgina whistled sharply and Magic’s ears went up. He was soaked and his coat was a matted mess of mud and burrs and thorns. His pink tongue lolled from the corner of his grinning mouth and the sodden stump of his tail was wagging merrily. At that moment he was the happiest dog in England. He was doing the work that he had been bred for.

‘Come on, Magic,’ Georgina ordered. ‘Get in there. Get them out.’

Magic dived into the thickest and thorniest patch, and disappeared completely from view. There was a minute of snuffling and rooting around in the depths of the ditch, and then a fierce cackle and flurry of wings.

A pair of birds exploded out of the bushes. The hen led the way. She was a drab, nondescript creature the size of a domestic fowl, but the cock bird that followed her closely was magnificent. His head was capped with iridescent green and his cheeks and wattles were scarlet. His tail, barred in cinnamon and black, was almost as long again as his body and the rest of his plumage was a riot of gorgeous colour.

As he climbed he sparkled against the lowering grey sky like a priceless jewel thrown from an emperor’s hand. Royan gasped with the beauty of the sight.

‘Just look at them go!’ Georgina’s voice was thick with excitement. ‘What a pair of crackerjacks. The best pair today. My bet is that not one of the guns will touch a feather on either of them.’

Up, and then on up, the two birds climbed, the hen drawing the cock after her, until suddenly the wind boiling over the hills like overheated milk caught them both and flung them away, out over the valley.

The line of beaters enjoyed the moment. They had worked hard for it. Their voices were tiny and faint on the wind as they urged the birds on.

They loved to see a pheasant so high and fast that it could beat the guns.

‘Forward!’ they exulted. ‘Over!’ and this time the line came involuntarily to a halt as they followed the flight of the pair that were twisting away on the wind.

In the valley bottom the faces of the guns were turned upwards, pale specks against the green background. Their trepidation was almost palpable as they watched the pheasant reach their maximum speed, so that they could no longer beat their wings, but locked them into a backswept profile as they began to drop down into the valley.

This was the most difficult shot that any gun would face. A high pair of pheasant with a half gale quartering from behind, dropping into the shot at their terminal rate of flight, set to pass over the line at the extreme effective range of a twelve bore shotgun. For the men below it was a calculation of speed and lead in all three dimensions of space. The best of shots might hope to take one of them, but who would dare to think of both?

‘A pound on it!’ Georgina called. ‘A pound that they both get through.’ But none of the beaters who heard her accepted the wager.

The wind was pushing the birds gently sideways. They started off aimed at the centre of the line, but they were drifting towards the far end. As the angle changed, Royan could see the men at the pegs below her brace themselves in turn as the birds appeared to be heading straight for them, and then relax as the wind moved them on. Their relief was evident as, one after the other, each of them was absolved from the challenge of having to make such an impossible shot with all eyes fastened upon him.

In the end only the tall figure at the extreme end of the line stood in their flight path.‘Your bird, sir,’ one of the other guns called mockingly, and Royan found that instinctively she was holding her breath with anticipation.

Nicholas Quenton-Harper seemed unaware of the approach of the pair of pheasant. He stood completely relaxed, his tall frame slouching slightly, his shotgun ticked under his right arm with the muzzle pointing at the ground.

At the moment that the leading hen bird reached a point in the sky sixty degrees out ahead of him he moved for the first time. With casual grace he swung the shotgun up in a sweeping arc. At the instant that the butt touched his cheek and shoulder he fired, but the gun never stopped moving and went on to describe the rest of the arc.

The distance delayed the sound of the shot reaching Royan. She saw the barrels kick with the recoil, and a pale spurt of blue smoke from the muzzle. Then Nicholas lowered the gun as the hen suddenly threw back her head and closed her wings. There was no burst of feathers from her body, for she had been hit cleanly in the head and killed instantly. As she began the long plummet to earth Royan heard the thud of the shot.

By then the cock was high over Nicholas’s head. This time as he mounted the gun in that casual sweeping gesture he arched his back to point upwards, his long frame bending from the waist like a drawn bow. Once again at the apex of the swing the weapon kicked in his grasp.

‘He has missed!’ Royan thought with the mixture of satisfaction and disappointment, as the cock sailed on seemly unscratched. Part of her wanted the beautiful bird to escape, while part of her wanted the man to succeed. Gradually the profile of the high cock altered as the wings folded back and it rolled over in flight. Royan had no way of knowing that his heart had been struck through, until seconds later he died in midair and the locked wings lost their rigid set.

As the cock tumbled to earth, a spontaneous chorus of cheers ran down the line of beaters, faint but enthusiastic on the icy north wind. Even the other guns added their voices with cries of, ‘Oh, good shot, sir!’

Royan did not join in the cheering, but for the moment her fatigue and cold were forgotten. She could only vaguely appreciate the skill that those two shots had called for, but she was impressed, even a little awed. Her very first glimpse of the man had fulfilled all the expectations that stories about him had raised in her.

 
 
 

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