Just My Imagination…

As another season comes to an end, what better than to relive some of the finer days on the grouse moor, even if one of them didn’t go quite to plan

February, and with game shooting over for another season — with whole months ahead of us before grouse and duck, partridges and pheasants bring us once more the sport we so love — I am tempted to escape into the past for a few hundred words. Let me take you back to the season just finished and up to the roof of England to see what we can find there.

There is heather up there, of course, lots of it, but on the day that I have in mind the purple bloom of August has long since darkened to sombre brown. The green rushes have also turned brown and the sodden black peat squelches underfoot. The air is sharp, the wind is keen and the sky is alive with the chatter of field fares.

There are other sounds up there on the moor, apart from the sighing of the wind and the restless sound of those field fares. They are strange sounds and it seems almost that they are coming out of the earth, as though the moor itself has learned some primitive and peculiar form of speech: a baffling language of gurgles and cackles and throaty trills.

I am there, listening to it and I know, of course, that it is not the language of earth or rock. It is grouse-talk and it stirs me as I stand there in my butt, thinking by way of contrast back to flanking days in August when the sun was hot and the air was thick with midges and pollen dust. It is keeper’s day; it is also the last day of the season and it feels like it. My fingers are cold in spite of the mittens half covering them.