The Last English Poachers (17 page)

The best time to release hares for breeding stock is in early spring. If you net ’em in springtime when they’re in young, you get two or three animals for every one you net and they
stay around. But if you don’t relocate them far enough away from where you netted ’em, they can go back, because they got good homing instincts.

Anyway, this pest controller fella gets in touch and asks us to come up to Broughton Airfield in Chester. The airfield was overpopulated with hares and it was dangerous having them running round
all over the place with planes coming in. It’s always difficult on an airfield, because we got nowhere to hide. We can set the nets up and the hares are coming forward, but where do we hide?
If they see us they won’t come to the nets. There was some red boxes on this airfield for fire hoses or something and we set up our camouflage scrim around them and hid down behind it. The
beaters drove the hares forward and we had a successful day in the end. The local newspaper was there reporting and taking pictures, because it was a conservation thing and the hares was being
released somewhere else, where they was wanted. We relocated them to this lord’s estate at Rhyl in North Wales, which is near the sea. The hares were released into a wood but, being used to
the warm runway, seven of ’em came back out and just sat on the tarmac road, thinking they was still at the airport.

They wouldn’t move, no matter what we did, and we was worried they’d get run over by cars or lorries. In the end, the lord had to go get one of his retrievers and the dog soon drove
them back to where they was supposed to be.

We’ve also sent hares to the Middle East for falconry. We was asked to get half a dozen hares for some Arab Abdullah who intended to use ’em to populate an island in the Gulf. So we
did. We was instructed to put ’em in a pheasant release pen on land that I won’t name and the gamekeeper was supposed to look after ’em. But the stupid bugger never fed ’em
and, after a buzzard had a couple, the rest died. So we netted and boxed up some more and, this time, instead of trusting some idiot to take care of ’em, we was instructed to take ’em
to a service station in Chieveley, where we was met by this Arab sheikh and his two bodyguards in a big black Mercedes. The bodyguards were huge blokes and they were armed. But, when we opened the
van and showed them the hares in the boxes, they stood well back and one of them asked, ‘Are these creatures dangerous?’

Me and Brian nearly fell on the floor laughing – great big blokes with their guns, frightened of a few hares. The sheikh was standing there eating a McDonald’s and drinking Coca-Cola
and he wanted me and Brian to go over to Bahrain or Qatar or some other Gulf state and set up a population on an island. But things weren’t too stable in the region at the time and we
didn’t want to get stuck in some war. Besides, our van was full of red diesel and we couldn’t be driving it all the way over there and hoping not to get a pull from some Emirates plod.
The hares got sent out there in diplomatic bags in the end, rather than have them go through quarantine, and we never did get our boxes back.

We’ve netted hares for Gypsies as well. Not like the old Gypsies of years ago, the ones I went out with on that night I told you about, or who told me my fortune. These
days a lot of them go coursing in four-wheel drives and they’re very threatening to anyone who comes upon ’em. They has money and they sometimes pay for permission to use land, then
they protect that land from others and even from poachers like us. But most Gypsies has gone to bricks now, so they ain’t real Travellers no more. They course with lurchers, running their
four-wheel drives across the land and chucking the dogs out after the hares to give ’em a run.

It ain’t proper; it’s cowboy stuff and there’s no real sport in it and they bets a lot of money on their dogs. But they do a lot of damage too, going through gates and fences
and a lot of them is tough gruntys, so you don’t want to tangle with ’em. But the landowner gets protected from other gangs and they’ve always been straight with us and paid us
for the hares we netted for them. They don’t know how to do it for themselves because they’ve lost a lot of the old skills and can’t catch hares with anything other than a dog
these days. But I got no problem with Gypsies and they got no problem with me. We live and let live, even though we has a different understanding of the countryside and the animals in it.

We used to go to gamekeepers’ colleges – many of the students was city kids who didn’t have a clue about country ways. They had to learn how to beat for the shooting season,
and beating hares is just like beating partridge or pheasant. We’d take ’em out and show ’em how to beat to a set point, which would be the guns in a game-bird shoot. We netted
for Eton College and we did a five-year study with Oxford University – we caught the hares and relocated them, they tagged ’em and used tracking collars to see where they wandered and
how territorial they was and we helped many a researcher get their doctorates that way. We netted hares for J. Arthur Rank, of flour and films fame, who liked to course round Druid’s Lodge in
Wiltshire. Although it was classed as an open course, the field was hemmed in with sheep hurdles and chestnut fencing, with panels lifted out every hundred yards or so to give the hares a chance to
escape. And Rank had a Rolls-Royce with a turret built onto it and his man in the car used to have to pedal like a good ’un to turn the turret round so old J. Arthur could get a good view of
the course in any direction.

I’ve also long-netted for the Queen Mother when she was alive. The area round Stockton on the Salisbury Plain’s a bleak place in winter and it breeds hardy hares – good strong
’uns. We’ve netted ’em there and taken ’em to Windsor Great Park for Major Barrington-Browne and the Eton Beagles, before the hunting ban. We’ve netted hares from
Land’s End to Lockerbie and put down good breeding stock in many places, all in the name of conservation.

Although coursing’s banned in the UK now, it still goes on in Ireland, where they often run short of hares. We netted thousands for those events and we used to send fifty or sixty at a
time over there in the back of trucks carrying oil drums. They had canvas sides and tops and the drivers used to put the hare boxes in the middle and surround ’em with the oil drums. Irish
hares are redder and smaller than the English ones and those we sent over didn’t suit the park coursing there too well, so we stopped doing it. For all I knows, any that escaped the dogs
might have bred with the indigenous hares and improved their size and strength. Or maybe they didn’t inter-mate and just died out. But I’ve heard stories of bigger, lighter-coloured
hares being seen in the Irish countryside. If that’s true, it’s all down to me. And I can see the Irish out there, looking for their little ginger hares in springtime, with the trees
budding as the sap starts to rise, and the birds coming back from their winter holidays. The air warming up and summer waiting in the wings – and they comes across one of my big jacks and
they stops and stares at it in wonder, and a sudden shiver runs down their spines.

Sometimes you get things running into the nets that you don’t really want, like muntjac. Roe deer and muntjac come forward with the hares, in front of the beat, and we try to let ’em
out the flanks before they gets to the nets. If they do come into the nets, they can smash ’em, break a top line or take forty or fifty yards of net down and you’ll get hares coming
through and getting away because that section of the net is broken. They can be a real nuisance. The nets will stop some, but it depends on the size. If they gets caught in there, it’s a
bugger getting them out, especially if it’s a buck and the net’s all tangled round the antlers.

You’re in the middle of a drive, with hares coming through, and you has to get the deer out and the nets back up as quick as you can and everything’s frantic all around you.
That’s where the skill and experience and stamina comes in. If you ain’t got it, then don’t go long-netting.

The muntjac’s a wild deer from China that was introduced to this country in 1812 by John Reeves, the assistant inspector for tea with the British East India Company. They escaped from
Woburn Abbey Estate in 1925 and bred fast and they’re now established in the countryside all over the UK and Ireland. The males have short antlers, but they fight for territory with their
tusks – sharp canine teeth that can do a lot of damage. Bigger muntjac can sometimes be very aggressive and we’ve caught plenty of them in our long nets when we’ve been out for
the hares. Like I said, they can break a net or take it down, so we try to get ’em out the flanks before they can do too much damage. If they do get into the nets, we try to get ’em out
quickly and either let ’em go or put ’em in a cage, if we’ve got one with us, because they’re sought after for some of the smaller parks and worth a bit of money. If
they’re too tangled up and we can’t do that, we’ll break their necks to stop ’em struggling and joint up the meat later. But you got to be careful with ’em and not get
yourself hurt.

Talking of muntjac, I’ve got a friend called Ernie, a Scotsman who worked on the power stations in China during the early 1980s. When he came back, he brought me a Chinese communist hat
with ear flaps and a red star and a hammer and sickle badge on it. I wears it when I’m poaching and the ya-yas hate it when they comes upon me and I’ve outsmarted ’em and
I’m wearing this Chinese communist hat. They does be spitting nails!

I had to go long-netting on the Isle of Sheppey round about 1992 and there was a military base there. They didn’t like the hat and took it seriously and asked me if I was a communist. You
know what these soldiers are like – brainwashed to move and shit and think as one and can’t cope with anything out of the ordinary. I was worried in case they started shooting. But they
didn’t and we got the all clear.

We didn’t know the area and, if you ain’t been somewhere before, you has to use your own judgement as to how the hares will run. We set up 500 yards of long nets in this huge
sixty-acre field and were waiting for the beat when we sees these two big greyhounds chasing a hare off in the distance. The hare has a good fifteen yards on the dogs and is beating ’em easy.
But he runs straight into our nets and the dogs kill him. It just wasn’t that hare’s lucky day.

Anyway, one day later in my life, I’m out for a stroll with Ernie. We wasn’t hunting or poaching, just enjoying the countryside. I likes to be quiet when I’m out, just like my
father taught me, but Ernie was keeping on gabbing and he was getting on my nerves. We came upon a tree that had fallen down and was leaning at an angle agin’ another tree. There was some
movement underneath it, so I decided to take a look to get away from Ernie’s chatter. I moved away some of the undergrowth and, to my surprise, there’s this big buck muntjac, lying
down, hiding from us. Being the poacher I am, I start trying to get him out by kicking at him with my foot. The next thing, he charges at me and I’m telling you, as well as his sharp-pointed
antlers, he has a pair of tusks like the fangs of a tiger. I’m completely unarmed, so I grab hold of a stick and break it across his back, but it does no damage and the muntjac keeps after
me, trying to gore me with the antlers and sink its tusks into my leg. I shouts at Ernie.

‘Do something!’

‘What can I do?’

‘Get him away from me!’

‘Then he’ll come after me. You should’ve left him alone, Bob.’

Anyway, Ernie starts to throw stuff at him, stones and sticks – but he keeps chasing me around, until I climbs a tree and I’m out of his reach. Then he turns and goes after Ernie,
who runs off out of sight with the muntjac after him.

I didn’t see him again for a few days and, when I did, he was walking with a limp.

‘I’m never going nowhere with you again, Bob Tovey.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘That bloody deer . . .’

‘You should’ve left him alone, Ernie.’

Now, I’d caught plenty of muntjac in the long nets. We had six one time – we killed three by breaking their necks and let the other three go. But this buck was the biggest I’d
ever seen, and me and Ernie was getting on in years then, not as strong as we once were. If I’d been younger, I’d probably have killed him. But, on this occasion, the muntjac nearly
killed me and gave Ernie the chase of his life.

That story has nothing to do with the long-netting and I was just trying to explain why you got to be careful with the muntjac. And talking about Ernie reminds me of another Scotsman, Ian
Galbraith, who was a policeman and part-time gamekeeper up in Inveraray, a town in Argyll, on the western shore of Loch Fyne. Galbraith phoned me in 1998 and asked me if I could come up and move
hares from one part of the estate to another, where they was trying to build up a population.

‘Where will we stay?’

‘You can stay in the police cells.’

‘Is that right?’

‘They’re rarely used and comfortable enough.’

‘Alright.’

I organised for about six or seven of us to go up there and everything was going to plan and Galbraith was on the phone regularly and looking forward to seeing me. Then everything went quiet and
I never heard no more from him. I rang the police station where he worked and spoke to the sergeant.

‘Forget all about it!’

‘But, we’re all set to come up there.’

‘Forget all about it!’

He wouldn’t say no more than that. Sometime later, the story broke in the newspapers about how Galbraith’s wife had shot him dead with his own hunting rifle, while he was in bed,
after being to the pub. She tried to claim it was a break-in and she’d been raped, then she changed her story and said he was a monster who abused her for years. She was found guilty of
murder and sentenced to life, but released on parole in 2003.

And so, you see, no matter what plans you makes, you never can tell what’s going to happen – and, although some believes in fate and fortune, this world ain’t really so
rectangular after all!

Then the same pest controller who we long-netted for up in Chester contacts me again and asks me to come to RAF Mildenhall, which is an American airbase in Suffolk. When we gets there, we find
this bloke driving round in his Land Rover, setting off Harris hawks and goshawks and peregrine falcons, to scare away the pigeons and seagulls, so they don’t get sucked into the engines of
the fighter and bomber planes. They was bombing Iraq at the time and the pilots said the hares was interfering with their concentration on take-off and landing. We went there and sized the place up
and security was very tight, but a price was agreed and we were all set to do it. But then it got cancelled. I don’t know why – maybe they checked our criminal records and found we had
some previous and didn’t like that. Or maybe they didn’t like my communist hat and thought I was a threat to national security. Who knows? And to this day I don’t know either if
the hares are still there or not.