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.