Bog Myrtle & Peat

Years ago, I was apprenticed to a wildfowler who spent most of his waking life on the Solway. A relief milker by trade, his morning’s work would often be finished by 5am, and he’d collect me from home on his way to the shore. I followed him through the darkness, and my footprints were overlaid upon his in the mud as we tried for flights in the earliest glows of the dawn. I’m older now than he was then, and I’m tickled to recall how closely I copied every gesture and comment he made on those mornings. I wanted to be him, and it thrilled me to find that in wildfowling terms, nothing came close to the value of knowledge and forethought.

I knew other men who paid through the nose for their kit and equipment, buying camouflaged jackets and multi-choked guns which they imagined would convert opportunities into success. But my mentor was generally broke, and so was I at fifteen years old. We shared out cartridges and divided them equally between ourselves; his gun was old and mine was only borrowed. We didn’t have plastic decoys or water-repellent clothing, and we probably wouldn’t have bought them if we could. Because we worked hard to ensure that we would be in the right place at the right time, and we played cheap tricks to make up the shortfall.

On one flight which stands both head and shoulders above others in my memory, we headed for a place more than a half a mile further into the marsh than we had ever dared to go before. This might have been an easy place to shoot, and below the high-water-mark, the birds are free to be gathered by anybody with a gun and the will to use it. But nothing stays the same for long in those flats, and new channels are forever being carved with the rise and fall of passing tides. What seems safe and familiar in the dust of June and July might easily have fallen into a suffering mess of instability by the time of the New Year’s moon. Nobody has drowned out there for several years, but it still makes sense to be afraid of the place. You wouldn’t go there lightly in broad daylight, let alone on the edge of darkness with snow forecast to rumble down from the north. Even the hardest fowlers pick the best from the most available places, and the heart of the marsh is normally undisturbed. But for some reason, the risk was reckoned to be worth the reward this time. If I was frightened, I refused to show it.

It was a black, bone-cold morning at the end of the season, and a vicious wind rushed across the seagrass. Navigating our way to the chosen spot, we walked until lights from farms on the shore matched up, then took new bearings from different lights which showed from the netsman’s house and the early stirrings of a hotel kitchen above the village. We smoked Regal Superking cigarettes back then – dry, chemical-infested things which we’d burn right down to the butt. I’d have the first half and he’d take the second because he was less bothered by the taste of plastic which began to melt between his knuckles by the final drag or two. They cost two pounds for a pack of twenty, and I suppose that’s laughable these days – but it’s telling that what little money we had was spent on fags and not equipment.

We arrived at last, and I lit up. My companion pulled a thin stack of paper party plates from the bag which was slung across his shoulder. They would be our decoys, and he pegged them out in a broad semi-circle of dots across the mud. He reckoned that in the half-darkness of dawn, geese are looking only for the broadest and most general markers of navigation. They can’t see other geese as birds, and a flash of white is enough to convince them they’re in company. Skeins were already moving in the gloom towards the Lake District as we crawled for the cover of a low creek nearby, pulling our legs into plastic feed bags so that we wouldn’t be instantly wet. The wetness would come eventually, just as it would for those wearing the latest gear for the highest prices. There’s no such thing as dry in the bay, and the margin between wet and wetter didn’t matter much to us.

Geese came inside of half an hour, and we’d learnt to shout them in. Of course there are calls and things you can blow to imitate the contact and discussion of geese, but in wild conditions, the sound itself is frequently lost or disturbed by the wind. The birds are simply listening for something – anything – and even a high-pitched yell is enough to draw them in. So surrounded by paper plates and the bitter snarl of a sleet-filled gale, we screamed and chattered to the geese which rode towards our guns like a regiment of heavy cavalry. By the time we saw those birds, they were already well in range, and we gave them hell across a few brief feet of ice and darkness. Four fell, and the surviving hundred rushed up and away to the dawn where silhouettes of the overstanding fells had begun to rise into the morning behind us.

That was almost twenty five years ago, and the merse has changed and reinvented itself so often since then that I could only give an approximate location for where those shots were fired. Perhaps by triangulating lights and measuring distances against trees and banks of cockleshells, I could get you close – but even the memory of that morning has shifted and been undermined by the passage of time. If I had written an account of the flight that day, I bet you’d hardly recognise the story against what I’ve written here. Small things have grown bigger, and I suppose there are several strands that I have forgotten altogether. I can only be certain that many of the moving parts of my imagination were set in stone by moments like those – and while the root of the memory itself is fastened to this bedrock, currents of tide and wind are forever blowing that flight into fresh, astounding shapes.