Friday, 14th January 2005.

Dangerous game

Last Friday, I almost killed a pheasant.

It was him or me, to be honest. Four of us were driving out of Milton, heading towards Abingdon before taking a turn for Sutton Courtenay. It's an alternative route to the pub, one that doesn't involve a mile of speed humps, and as such it's marginally faster. It was a bright, clear day, and the presence of three work colleagues in the car - none of whom had experienced my driving before - had caused me to refrain from my usual boy racer antics. I was doing just over thirty-five on a long, straight road, when the pheasant darted out from the undergrowth. It couldn't have been more than six feet away. Instinctively, my foot slammed on the brake, but it wasn't quite enough: my front bumper connected with a solid thud, and then we saw a scattering of feathers.

Pheasants, I should point out, are known for their stupidity and general lack of good manners. Emily and I encounter them quite frequently on our occasional visits to Shropshire, particularly if we end up taking a drive through the Long Mynd. Most road-squatting animals and birds, if they see you approaching them in a fast car, have the decency to get out of the way (foxes, badgers, owls) or alternatively just accept their grisly fate, instantly adopting a classic stance of blood-chilled terror, eyes glued in fascinated, riveted fear to the oncoming headlights (most rabbits). Road kills do happen quite frequently, of course, but this is often because the car is going so fast that there's no way to avoid it, and you're left with tyre tracks and a bloody mess on the road for the inbred locals to scrape up for Sunday dinner. (I'm kidding. Now, if Oxfordshire were Arkansas...)

It should also be noted that the above rules do not apply in Wales, a place where it's difficult to drive very fast for any real length of time. The sheep put a stop to that. The sheep is very like the pheasant in that it lacks any sense of courtesy when it comes to road users: it seems to lack the ability to differentiate between grass and concrete, and will sit in the middle of a tight country lane with no passing place while you stew behind the wheel, wondering whether it's worth honking your horn. Eventually, the stupid jumper-on-legs will casually amble across to the other side of the road, seemingly unaware that it was blocking anyone's way.

A few years ago, I went with my family to the Gower peninsula, the year before the oil spill. At Rhossili Bay there is a long, thin stretch of cliffs that curves out into the ocean and occasionally dips below sea level, so that when the tide has come in the very end of this natural phenomenon appears to be severed, earning the title 'The Worm's Head'. The day we went to the bay, a gale-force wind blew along the tops of the hills. It didn't seem to bother the sheep, who chose to graze precariously close to the cliff edges. Every so often one of them would adjust its footing, almost slipping down the bank and over the edge in the process. While I am aware that the domesticated sheep's evolutionary development has ensured it is more used to windy weather than your average example of homo sapiens, I couldn't help thinking that the flock perched by the cliffs were pushing their luck. Worse still, I had a horrible feeling that the poor creature who would be first to lose its grip and plunge to a watery grave would not deter the others from grazing quite so close to the edge - rather, its demise would have the opposite effect, as the remaining animals would have no doubt thought it was all a game, and quickly followed suit. I could visualise the entire flock plummeting down towards the crashing surf, committing mass suicide in the style of a religious cult, or a horde of enormous woolly lemmings.

Back to Milton. As I mentioned earlier, the pheasant is not dissimilar to the sheep in its sense of obliviousness to its surroundings - it's like an eighty-year-old behind the wheel of a Micra in a supermarket car park - but that said, it differs from the ovis in that it manages to exercise even greater stupidity when it comes to the green cross code. The sheep, when honked at, will usually amble across to the other side of the road, getting safely out of the way and leaving you to continue your journey in peace (at least until the next incident). The pheasant, however, is deaf to the piercing brass of a car horn. It sits squarely by the front bumper, preening itself happily, or perhaps examining a loose piece of gravel. Eventually it looks up and seems to notice you, and decides to acknowledge your presence by moving approximately three inches to the left, presumably under the delusion that this will be enough to let you past. Or it will remain frozen to the spot, perhaps the victim of a random spot of roadside supergluing. Sometimes - and this is the worst of the lot - it will turn round and happily waddle up the road, in the direction you were going, forcing you to follow it at an overwhelmingly low speed. It's like being stuck behind the slowest truck in the world, or a milk float, or the aforementioned eighty-year-old behind the wheel of a Micra.

Last Friday, of course, none of these things happened. I switched on the wipers to get rid of the cascade of feathers that had blocked my view, and was just wallowing in the grief of my first road kill, when I became aware of the fluttering of wings. We watched with a mixture of relief and amazement as the pheasant rose like a phoenix from the ashes, and then took flight across the road and out of my field of vision. The bird was apparently shaken but more or less unharmed, and we went to the pub.

Two days later, I was folding towels in the lounge when I looked out into the back garden, and happened to see a large creature perching on the fence a couple of houses away. It was too large for a squirrel - not to mention the wrong colour - and it didn't resemble a fox. It had to be a bird of some description, and I thought for a moment that it might be one of the local kites that have taken to congregating in fields by the river. It was only then that I noticed it was - come on, you *knew* this was coming - a pheasant. This wouldn't necessarily be unusual except that it's the first time I've seen one in our street, in almost a year of living here. I tried to fathom where it might have come from. My mind raced back to that Friday afternoon, and I realised that the poor bird I'd struck had been coming out of the fields that surround Milton Manor, and had flown off in the direction of Sutton Courtenay. Could this be the same creature? And if so, what were the implications of it being so close to our house?

I shut myself off from whatever this might mean, and returned to my folding. A couple of hours later, I took the vegetable peelings to the end of the garden to dump them into the compost bin before it grew dark. Replacing the lid, I suddenly became aware once more of the rustling of wings, and a large pheasant-shaped mass took off from the hedge, and flew out of sight. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but I began to feel uneasy. On Tuesday afternoon, my fears were confirmed: this time the pheasant was in the garden, sniffing around under the hedge.

Anyone who has a familiarity with rural law - or, come to that, anyone who has read 'Danny, The Champion Of The World' - will know that a pheasant only belongs to the owner of the land it currently occupies (unless, of course, it's been poached). As the pheasant flew into our garden (and feel free to disagree with this point if you know the law better than I do), it meant that for a couple of minutes we legally owned it. I became quite excited at this prospect, and immediately hopped online to see if Ebay had any current bids for tweed suits or antique Bentleys. I also suggested that we find ways of keeping it there, such as "raisins. Because, you know, pheasants love raisins."

I thought I saw Emily roll her eyes. "I think pheasants love pretty much everything."
"Like what?"
"Seed, for example."
"OK, you win. Hey, tell you what - raisins are just grapes that have dried out, right?"
She smiled at me, slightly concerned. "Riiiight..."
"So why don't we buy grapes from the supermarket, the way we used to, and leave them out in the sun? We never eat them anyway. That solves the problem."
"Or perhaps we won't do that."

It was at that moment that I looked out at the pheasant, and realised the horrible truth. It wasn't on the run from Milton Manor. The bastard is stalking me. My initial excitement had merely been a horrible form of denial. The pheasant had tracked my movements from the air: it knew where I lived and now it has come to exact its horrible revenge. And it's getting closer. I feel like I'm in a Hitchcock movie, and it also explains the bad dreams I've endured over the past couple of nights. I dread the prospect of finding bird excrement smeared over the roof of the my car; of discovering a vole's head in my bed - or, most fearfully of all, I dread the prospect of waking at three in the morning to find the bedroom window smashed to smithereens, and an angry flock of game perched on the end of the bed, staring at me with cold eyes, ready to strike a blow for the pheasant community to punish me for my bad driving and constant maligning of their species. It's a bloody good thing we've got a cat.