Right place, right time, right line

A spot of pigeon decoying over the last of the year’s spring drillings provides the perfect opportunity to see if a hard lesson from the past still holds true

- SIMON REINHOLD

Hatred might be too strong, but it was pretty obvious that Wally didn’t like me, and yet he was to go on to teach me my most valuable lesson as a pigeon shooter. At the time I was 16, and he was something over 70. The summer before, we both worked ‘roguing’ — pulling weeds out of sugar beet — on the same farm.

In a clash of generations and backgrounds, it seemed he never had a good word for any of us youngsters in the roguing gang. This was the spring, though, before another hot summer spent bleeding from our soft hands as we pulled bolting beet out of ground baked solid. Unlike ours, Wally’s hands never split. It was one of the many differences between us.

Another was my habit of asking permission to shoot a field. Wally felt he didn’t need to ask permission and, with no oversight, a clash was inevitable. He had in the past felt very similarly about the pheasant drives, and the headkeeper and shoot owner were probably relieved to have got that under control by allowing him free rein to shoot pigeons in the close season.

“It seems somehow the purest form of the decoyer’s art”

Unexpected

We had both zeroed in on the same field of drilled barley, Brick Kiln’s, only I got there a little before him. This had done nothing to improve his opinion of me as I watched him march menacingly across the field. But then, when he got to me, he did something unexpected — he started giving me useful advice.