Days Of Deep Pleasure

A day at High Park brings together good friends and good sport — and who cares if the bag is smaller than hoped for, says Laurence Catlow

- Laurence Catlow

The night before High Park’s second shoot I got out my game diaries on a sudden impulse. While drinking the essential two glasses of sherry before dinner — pheasant casserole, of course — I looked up the record of my earliest High Park shoots more than 25 years ago.

Both Tony Smith and I were thinking it possible that our second day might just bring a bag of 50 birds; if this happened it would be a tribute to Tony’s expertise and tactical cunning. Anyway, such a bag would have been quite unthinkable in those first years, when half-a-dozen birds brought satisfaction and double figures were declared a triumph.

The bags were small but they were still days of deep pleasure, days when three or four friends tramped the fields and dogged out the gorse and were happy with two or three shots or with none. They were most richly contented if they walked down the fields at the end of the day with a dinner or two in their bags.

And now here was I, all those years later, hoping for 50 pheasants on a single day and admitting to myself, as I filled my glass for the second time, that tomorrow it would take 30 rather than five or six birds to bring contentment. High Park, it seemed, was entering the big league and its new status — as one of the kingdom’s premier driven shoots — meant that the eve of a shooting day brought a degree of anxiety. High hopes inevitably brought with them the possibility of disappointment, a possibility that made those two glasses of sherry doubly necessary.

On this particular evening, as it happened, I was even more anxious about the weather than the size of the bag. There was heavy rain forecast and I remembered High Park days that had been turned to misery and sometimes even abandoned because of raging wind and teeming rainfall.