Cow Boys

Late last October I found myself standing on a peg in a Somerset wood. It's different down there. Wetter, for a start. My boots do leak, I suspected this last year but now I had clear and damp confirmation. Damn. The grass is - er - well, greener. And longer. And wetter. Much much wetter. In fact, I have a suspicion that Somerset may be a detached part of the Saragossa Sea, grass floating on water. A significant quantity of which was now inside my boot.

And another thing. The cows. Serious cow country this. There's an awful lot of cows in Somerset, leering over gates at you, greasing the lanes as they pass from wet field to milking parlour, idling slowly along narrow roads flicking those curious tails, steaming heavily in open yards, their silage clamps reminding your olfactory organs of their dominant role in the local economy.

But cows are not what this is about. Birds are what it is, obscurely, about. And that is why I was standing in a line of farmers in a damp field.

I had a very nasty shock on the second drive. I was standing down by a stream, wondering if it was a bit early to have a small cigar. It was in fact 11.25am; this is a Somerset farmers shoot, a group of neighours who pool (pool! hah!) their land (or bog) and ask along a few mates. One of whom was the local auctioneer, who I happened to have been at school with and who thought it would be amusing to leaven the cow talk with a City perspective.  Prompt starts and tight timetabling do not seem to be the Somerset cow farmers' way.

So there I was, all lined up in a glade by the stream, a sloping meadow in front up to a high hedge; left to grow high, thick, and toppy for the benefit of the shooting. The hedge had grown out at the bottom, leaving a large number of bare branches and trunks. I stood, watching and listening for any sign of life, fiddling with my little cigar lighter, knowing the minute I got one alight the birds would start flopping over the hedge.  Then I noticed the hedge was busy walking off to the right.

I had been warned that Somerset scrumpy could do very odd things to the brain, but I had had only the one before dinner last night, and stuck to the beer after that. Maybe the combination could bring early onset Alzheimers? Not only was the hedge walking out on us, it seemed to be on fire as well. I vowed never to touch zoider again.

I was just about to draw my neighbours attention to this unusual activity when a cow's head appeared at a gap in the hedge, followed by forty or fifty more, and the Confused of the City moment passed. The hedge remained in place but the cows legs ambled along and carried them into the next field, or more likely, onto the lane with a large amount of Somerset mud, ready for the next cyclist.

Lawks, this drive was taking a long time to start. I lit the small cigar. I became aware of a distant shouting, getting ever nearer. My neighbouring gun started walking toward me, and then, out of the undergrowth like a Japanese survivor of the Second World War, appeared a farming type from our jolly group.

"Bill's blown it again" he said, in broadest scrumpy. "Some bugger's lost in the wood; he never pegs it properly"

I now worked out the shouting: "Number foive; where the bleeding hell is number foive?"  My neighbour raised an eyebrow at me.

"Come on, yee can't 'ave forgotten yoiur numbers already; who is number foive?"

The shouting now joined us in the clearing, sweating and red in the face, gun under arm, various pieces of card and paper gripped in hand, followed by two more of our sporting number.

"Got a problem Bill?" one of them asked.

"Why can't you lot ever recall your pegs?" Bill replied "Number foive, any of you gents?"  We shook our heads.

Another Bill bellow, honed by years of directing cows, no doubt: "Number foive, where the fxxx are you?  Who is foive?  Who is foive?"

My erstwhile neighbour looked thoughtfully at his boot and rubbed his chin.

"Well, Bxxx here is seven, and I am six, so...er...um...I think you are five, Bill"

 We maintained stiff upper lips until Bill vanished into the wood, but the racous laughter after that must have startled the cows several fields away.