The buck stops here

When a muntjac targets his mother’s garden, there’s only one course of action for Ed Wills

Blasted thing keeps eating my roses.” I looked up from my copy of Trout & Salmon to see my mother coming in through the back door with a basket of freshly picked carrots from the vegetable garden. She was shaking her head in despair.

“Are the rabbits back?” I asked. “Not the rabbits,” she replied with a tone that implied it was an absurd suggestion. “The muntjac, of course.”

I have to say this was an error on my part. My mother had been telling the family about this mysterious muntjac that creeps into the garden and devours her plants, but no one had ever seen it for themselves, including my mother. My father had taken it one step further and set trail cameras up round the flower bed to catch the serial flower murderer in the act. No culprit had been seen.

Mystery

Since I had a bit of time on my hands now that the country was in lockdown, I thought I would solve this mystery once and for all in true Sherlock Holmes fashion only without wearing the deerstalker hat, a style that doesn’t suit me. Since the flower thief only came out at night, I decided to sit out and wait with a rifle and see if I could get lucky.

The next thing to work out was where to place myself. I am very lucky to be situated in the middle of nowhere in Hampshire with very few houses nearby. However, the land is riddled with footpaths and there was every chance someone could be taking their one form of exercise so this narrowed down the places I could fire safely.