Free The Last English Poachers by Bob and Brian Tovey Page B

moved into the village have cats and they might not
appreciate me killing their little moggies, but I hate the things; they’re horrible buggers, killing just for fun, not out of necessity, and I’ll shoot them any chance I get. Sometimes
I catch them in cage traps that I’ve set for a fox or a badger. If that happens, I’ll kill them and chuck them in the ditch, so it looks like they’ve been hit by a car.
    There’s several other sightings of the big black panther in the area after that and Mrs Cox, a farmer’s wife, is overheard saying to her son, ‘I hope you don’t think
I’m mad, but I seen a wildcat going across the fields.’
    ‘A wild cat?’
    ‘No, a wildcat.’
    And there’s scratches on a fowl-house door that looks like they were made with six-inch nails, with such force that they move the fowl-house two or three feet along. There’s quite a
few acres of maize round The Withybeds, so it’s safe in there, the panther. Probably has a lair, living on rabbits or muntjac; maybe escaped from a wildlife park or released by some idiot who
keeps such an animal as a pet.
    After the maize gets cut, the panther disappears and is never seen again.
     
    Young Brian with white-fronted geese, shot 25 December 1981 on the Dumbles at Slimbridge

6
Brian – The Early Years
    When I was born we lived in the butcher shop with my grandfather. My grandmother died a long time before and I never really knew my mother’s parents. I was four years old
when we moved to our own house, where we live now, and that’s when my earliest memories begin. I used to go back up to the butcher shop a lot back then and I found my grandfather dead up
there one day in 1968, when I was very young. He was sixty-nine and he’d had a heart attack or stroke or something and just fell over. I found him lying there, but he didn’t look dead
and I could hear him in my head, giving out his advice, like he used to.
    ‘Never compromise with none of the buggers, young Brian, because they’re all only in it for themselves and they’ll disappoint you in the end.’ And saying how the world
was full of unscrupulous shysters and political poltroons and sinister shadowmen.
    I was but a boy and really didn’t understand what he was saying, nor what was wrong with him now. I ran back down the road to get Bob but sometimes I think I should have said something to
him. A few final words, like, ‘Hello, why did you have to go?’ Or, ‘Goodbye, why did you have to die?’
    I was brought up poaching from when I could walk and I just wanted to be out across the fields and in the woods with Bob, hunting day and night. And that’s where it begins for me, when
I’m four years old and we’re on a right-of-way footpath with greyhounds and we’re approached by two policemen – a sergeant and a constable. We’re on public land, so
there’s nothing they can do us for, but they like to harass us every chance they get. You see, the coppers just want to wait by roads or pathways. They don’t really want to be out there
in the first place, and they don’t like getting their boots dirty running across mucky fields after poachers they won’t be able to catch. They want to get back to the warm station and
have a cup of tea. Anyway, Bob sees them coming and he whispers to me, ‘Tell ’em to piss off.’
    The sergeant’s trying to look all stern and official-like.
    ‘What have you two been doing?’
    ‘Piss off!’
    They laugh at a four-year-old like me saying something like that to them. But if Bob said it they’d probably haul him in to the station on some pretext or other and let him out of the
cells later, after wasting his time for a few hours. There’s nothing they can do to me, so they let us on our way. I told them to ‘piss off’ many times after that.
    I remember once in those days when I was young, maybe about four or five, I saw this woman pushing an old man in an invalid chair. She was struggling a bit, so I went up and asked