John Butleron the cold reality of duck hunting
Do people still believe in vegetarianism for reasons other than disliking the taste of meat? If you threw a rock in the air when I was younger, it would have landed (with luck) on the head of a whey-faced youth who had succumbed to the persuasive lyrics of Morrissey, and now subsisted on a diet of French-bread pizzas and baked beans.
Where have all these people gone? Perhaps they've all expired from malnutrition. Perhaps, and more likely, the force of their argument has been supplanted by that of the organic-food movement. Vegetarianism seems to have suffered the same fate as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Nuclear weapons are still a grave and gathering danger, but I can't remember the last time anyone announced to me that they don't eat anything with a face. It's ironic. In these times of mad cows and great salads, it's no hardship to avoid eating meat.
I think it's just as well that popular vegetarianism has bought the farm, too. It always struck me as a clear sign that we had lost our connection to nature. My heart strings are tugged by news footage of cows being led to slaughter, but the distance we have left between us and the nasty process of hunting and gathering food has made us soft.
I'm not suggesting we should all take off our shoes and beat a path back into the woods, but the influence of civilisation can take you only so far. Before long you can get queasy about perfectly natural occurrences in nature. I would probably abstain from eating eggs if I watched a hen a-laying. And sometimes, when I am hungover, I can't eat prawns, because they remind me too much of insects. Continuing this train of thought, yogurt is bacteria, slugs sleep on vegetables and fish urinate in water. Where does it end?
To put things in perspective, I feel that if you're willing to eat it, you should be made to shoot it, at least once. My go-to dish in Chinese restaurants is shredded-duck pancakes with plum sauce. Looking at this insanely delicious meal, I have to remind myself that it once flew, ate worms and quacked. My brother-in-law shoots these birds in a natural environment with preserved stocks, and my brother and I tagged along with him one day.
The alarm woke us at 5am, and we met a convoy of jeeps heading out to the reserve. It was still dark as we barrelled along the narrow country roads, lending this (perfectly legal) activity an air of danger. The dog we had known as a docile pet back in my brother-in-law's house was now a different animal, pacing the back of the truck, sensing the feral energy of the outing, sensing blood.
We parked at the reserve, jumped out and posted ourselves at the most remote blind, at a bend in the icy stream. It was crunchy underfoot, and for 30 minutes we huddled there, smoking, our rifles splayed tamely across the crook of our arms - just as we had been taught to do. I'm not a big talker in the mornings, and my brother was quiet, understanding this, and the fact that I had a gun. We had been told to pray for rain and fog, but as 30 minutes became an hour, then two hours, without sight of a bird, dawn began to break. Now I knew how Dick Cheney felt: I was ready to shoot my brother, out of boredom.
Quack.
We each heard it at the same time, and thought the other one had made the noise. But then once again. Quack. We spun around, locked the barrels on to the butt of our guns, and hauled them on to our shoulders. We each shut an eye and, scanning the field, glimpsed a lone mallard flapping across the stream in front of us. Inland, ducks tend to follow the path of a stream, and the hunting blinds are built along the banks to take advantage of this navigational quirk.
With controlled hunting like this, your time is limited. If the duck passes your section of the stream and enters the sights of the next blind, 100 metres further down, your chance has been lost. We had been taught to trace a line from behind the flight of the bird, across its body, and shoot when our sights had cleared its beak.
My brother and I tracked the bird across the line of the stream. We each pulled the trigger, and two pellets exited our barrels at exactly the same time. Something hit the bird, and it plunged unceremoniously down, into the icy lake. The dog jumped in after.
Immediately, the inquest began. Surely I had landed the fatal pellet, yet my brother was convinced it was him. Short of an autopsy, we would never know. We claimed the bird equally, and though others went on to shoot more birds, we never got another one. We had to split a bird between us. It seemed we had been given the dud blind.
As with many sports, the best part came after we finished. We drove to a nearby farmhouse, ate soup and rolls and drank whisky. It was only 11am, but drinking the Famous Grouse seemed to be the right move after standing for hours in a field, thinking about birds.
When it came time to leave, we walked down the driveway, and there on the ground was our kill from the morning. Laid out in a neat row of two by 10 were the limp bodies of 20 ducks.
We stood over them for a minute, and then, and only then, did I concede to my brother that it was his pellet that took our bird down. He killed the duck, not me, and this is why they have more than one gunman in a firing squad. It gives you reasonable doubt. And reasonable doubt is what helps you sleep at night.
John Butler blogs at http://wordpress.lozenge.com