Fair Game Reloaded

The pheasant was not my first attempt at harvesting road kill this last year. My first was a stag.

It was lying invitingly by the roadside, a whole truckload of venison on the hoof. All I needed was a truck.

So I called up various truck-owning friends. None of them, to my disgust, were prepared to sully their vehicles with a dead stag whose innards were in not as innard as one might wish. So much for getting down and dirty in countryside. Designer smallholders, to a man.

So I gave up, decided I could just about squeeze the corpse into my hatchback, and returned to its side.

I hadn’t realised how heavy deer actually are. They look so lightweight, flitting about on those spindly legs. I could barely lift the head of this one. I might possibly have been able to haul him into the car in stages if my back held out, but I was fairly sure what I was doing was illegal (it isn’t) so didn’t want to hang about for too long, and those bulging entrails did look rather green and viscous. So I chickened out. And when I passed the spot a few hours later, the deer had flown. Some lucky stiff had nabbed it.

My parents killed a deer once, in the middle of Guildford.

They hit it head-on and it flew right over their car, crashing lifeless onto the tarmac behind them. My parents walked up the road to phone the police and confess all. By they time they returned, the deer had vanished. The emergency services arrived speedily and in force, sirens blazing, under the misapprehension that the reported death was a human one. My poor parents didn’t even have the corpse to show them.

Venison is tricky stuff.

Fair game

He lay on the verge – young, handsome, flawless but immobile, eyes closed and neck at an improbable angle. I dared not stop on such a busy stretch of road, but I knew I could reach him on foot if I parked around the corner. I was right – the side path from the woods came out onto the roadside almost alongside him. I had taken the precaution of bringing along a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. It was the work of a moment to pick him up by the feet, pop him into it and melt back into the forest like a happy shopper, leaving behind only a perplexed motorist or two. Roast pheasant for Easter!

Back home, Number One Son was less than enthusiastic about my bag. ‘Is it okay?’ he asked, peering at the bird like the eagle-eyed physician he’s hoping to become.

‘Nope!’ I said happily.

‘What did he die of?’ the forensic scientist moved to the fore.

‘I would guess a road accident’ I said ‘Though I don’t think he was actually driving. Just an innocent pedestrian, in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

‘You’re not going to make us eat road-kill? That’s so rank!’

‘He’s not road kill, he’s game’ I said gamely ‘ I’m now going to draw his entrails, then hang him for a week till Easter’

‘I think you hang them first’ said Number One Son ‘Then draw and quarter them. We did it in History.’

Number One Son is currently revising for GCSEs.

In fact, I was also turning to History. My undergraduate studies are hardly ever useful, but medieval writers were obsessed with hunting, and with the courtly art, as they regarded it, of dismembering dead stuff. So I knew the techniques.

My idea was to cut around the back passage of the bird, and then draw out the insides in a single flowing movement.

Scrabbling amongst the still warm feathers for the anus felt disturbingly intimate and presumptuous, a feeling which increased massively when what I found looked remarkably familiar and pinkly vulnerable. Cutting around it proved harder than expected, but I managed eventually, and was rewarded, after unspeakable oozings, with a blue-grey bulge of bowel, which came away in my hands. Groping inside for more, the warmth of the interior gave me the horrors (could something that warm really be dead?), until I found a spare surgical glove (spare from what?) and with its protection fought on.

Actually, it was fascinating. The liver surprisingly large, the heart surprisingly small and heart-shaped, the bile duct slimey green and the stomach enormous. I never did find the lungs – maybe pheasants have residual gills.

The pheasant is hanging in the shed, waiting to be plucked and roasted. Now he’s cold, stiff and hollow as an Easter egg, I feel a lot better about him. Though I’m still not sure I can force myself to eat him.

Selling out

Well, we have a future, but it’s not in the countryside.

We are moving to the local market town. It’s perfect in so many ways – close to the children’s school and easy access to the rail network if I need to commute – which I may well do in order to pay for our pretty new home. It does have a garden – a house-width streak of looking green with a substantial shed at the bottom (I do love a good shed!). Not chook country, alas, though I could attempt the odd potato, I suppose. At the moment the grounds are mainly laid to Early Learning Centre plastic play equipment, and drying lines of midget pastel clothing – the present incumbents have small children.

I’ve been using the impending move as an excuse to get rid of thing the children have outgrown. Number One Son’s cast offs naturally leach down into Number Two Son’s overcrowded bedroom, so last weekend we were able to exercise Number Two Son’s passion for car boot sales with car-full of books, toys and prepubescent clutter harvested from his floor.

Not sharing Number Two Son’s passion, I had to be emotionally blackmailed into participation, particularly when I discovered it meant getting up at 5.00 am on a Sunday morning. But, came the dawn (and even before that) I found I didn’t mind nearly as much as I thought I would.

It was fun driving the empty roads under an eggshell blue sky that boded well. It was fun laying out our humble stall amongst the other car-booters, who proved a jolly, charming, helpful bunch. As not a lot happened, I lounged in the spring sunshine happily reading a book from our stock. And when the pace eventually hotted up, I had the pleasure and surprise of watching my normally quiet, thoughtful child transform himself into a red hot salesman and patter-merchant.

We ended the day £50 up and half a carful lighter. The highlight for me was the box of Pokamon cards. At 2p per card these were never going to make a hefty profit, but they proved an outstanding crowd-pleaser. Small heads were bent and grubby fingers scrabbled all morning, as eight year old Pokamon aficionados shared expertise (‘No, that’s Charmian, it evolves into Charmander’), and no doubt nits, before relinquishing their stickily warm 10 pences.

His father has been worrying lately that our second-born may not grow to be financially astute. But I detect a definite entrepreneurial streak. I’m keeping quiet, though , about his plan to supplement his future zoo-keeper’s salary by writing science fiction novels. At least he's not selling out.