Those who go to the wild to shoot should be issued with Bens. We had a Ben on Stephen's Day as we flushed the woods and the bogs of Kildare, and he was as invaluable as half-a-dozen gundogs, but marginally more hygienic. He is 14 years of age, and sturdy as a small JCB. Our technique for getting him to put up birds is to point him towards the densest undergrowth and declare that beyond it is a season ticket for Manchester United. The result is instantaneous. Ben explodes like an artillery shell through the thicket, leaving a neat Benshaped tube behind him.
The bird has not been made which could lie still while a Ben whirls past him through normally impenetrable thickets of bramble, gorse, blackthorn, barbed wire and nettle. Even the most stoical of pheasant, which can out-stare a German pointer and which sniffs superciliously at a setter, is propelled upwards by a passing Ben like a pilot in an ejector seat leaving his doomed plane.
The only problem about this particular Ben is that he sends birds shooting upwards far faster than an average gun could possibly follow. Fortunately, our guns that day were not in the least average; which was as well, for even with the assistance of a Mark I Ben to put birds up, conditions were not the best for shooting, as the numerous ESB crews around Ireland could testify.
ESB engineers
The word we hear most often in connection with the ESB is the c-word: complaint. The ESB-this and the ESB-that. But it was not the ESB which brought the winds of hell down on us on Christmas Eve, and which caused counties to swap trees and even football stadiums. It was, however, the engineers of the ESB who spent Christmas Day reconnecting the electricity cables which had overnight been transformed into the idle knitting of the gods, millions of amps twinkling into the ground.
It can't be fun messing around with bits of wire whose sole ambition is to turn any passing ESB engineer into something resembling the black, shrivelled insects you find on a spider's web. Myself, I can think of a thousand better ways of spending Christmas morning than groping around on the wet ground for a cable which contains within its modest diameter enough voltage to execute the entire population of Waterford. And I can think too of more enjoyable ways of spending the Christmas season than being perched on top of a 40-foot ladder in a 90 m.p.h. gale trying to splice together two lengths of electric cable which are just one inch short of meeting.
And just at the moment you have hauled them by hand together, and you are applying the Superglue from a tube in your mouth, back in HQ somebody presses the ON lever. There is a flash, a bang, and from that moment onward you are welded permanently by your tongue to the national grid of Ireland as a warning to future ESB engineers, just as the corpses of the executed used to be left salutarily hanging from the gibbets.
Patrolling a bog
So maybe not everybody appreciated what the engineers of the ESB did to restore the amps and the volts from their electricity factories to the rural homes of Ireland after the gales, but I did. And it was those selfsame gales that kept the ESB engineers from the turkey and the crackers which made shooting, even in the company of a Ben, so very difficult - for not even the most intrepid of birds like gales which take you in the twinkling of a wing from Kildare to the Bay of Biscay, en route for the Bosporus.
Nothing on the face of this earth clears the head like patrolling a bog with a couple of dogs looking for snipe. I was there merely as a beater. As a shot, I am poor; I could not hit a telephone booth from inside. I have missed pheasants hovering in front of me like air-sea rescue helicopters. There is simply no point in me trying to shoot birds. Not merely do I miss the birds: I miss the air too.
No matter. I was in the company of fine shots - Peter, Dick, Andrew and James - and the snipe is a most wondrous game-bird to down; it is incredibly fast, agile and elusive, and a magnificent flyer. Our first bog had been swept almost clear of birds by the wind, so even with our patent Ben there to go barrelling across the bog and rouse the birds from their sphagnous slumber, few enough birds got up.
A couple did - tiny, darting, jinking miracles of speed, wheeling and vanishing beyond the blasts of pellets fading in their wake. But then Ben put up a snipe at maximum range; it curved and flashed towards freedom, and in a single movement, Andrew had called, raised his gun and fired. The snipe plummeted to ground, and was recovered by one of the guns. As a sporting feat, it was perfection; man and gun and eye and arm and shot and bird were united in a miracle of synchronicity. The bird was alive; a microsecond later it was dead, and destined for a slice of toast.
Both barrels
Moments later another snipe rocketed up, arching through the wind, and impetuously crossing the line of guns. Peter fired both barrels and missed. Dick fired both barrels and missed. James fired both barrels and missed. The snipe danced away to liberty, chased by nothing but applause.
We left that bog and sent Ben into nearby scrubland, with the promise of Ryan Giggs on the far side. An armadillo could not have penetrated the thickets which Ben bore through in pursuit of a Giggs autograph. A she-pheasant rose amid a racket of wings and thundered across the barrels; the guns stayed silent. Pheasants are a forbidden fruit on this bog, hens enormously so.
Ben was pointed towards a thicket of sharp things, impenetrable even to a naval shell, and told the Man U midfield needed help within. He vanished into it like an eel in mud, and out burst a woodcock, the prince of game birds. Two shots, two guns, the bird was down. It rose for a moment, but then died, and was retrieved by a dog.
The sun was setting in a miracle sky as we headed homeward, and joy filled my heart. Bliss, I murmured, bliss; and promptly vanished without visible trace in a concealed hole of icy bog-water, from which I am writing this.