Who let the dog out?

Caroline and I are just back from a weekend break in Scotland and, nice though it was, I hadn’t realised how difficult travelling anywhere is at the moment. We had originally planned to drive, but the fuel crisis put paid to that, so we had to book a last-minute flight. EasyJet from Luton to Edinburgh was £475.92 for the two of us — ye gods! — and three days in the mid-stay car park was a whopping £128. To cap it all, the bus that takes you from the car park to the airport wasn’t running — Covid, obviously — so we had to walk about half a mile carrying our luggage.

We stayed with some friends in the Highlands for a couple of days and I went stalking — but needless to say I buggered that up. I went out with an experienced stalker called Richard and after a four-hour walk in the wind and the rain he got me lined up on an elderly stag that was lying down in the middle of a group of hinds. All I had to do was watch him through the telescopic sight, wait for him to get up and pull the trigger.

‘You’ll need to be patient,’ said Richard, noticing how excitable I was and anxious that I didn’t take a shot before the beast had got to his feet. The worst thing you can do on a stalk, short of shooting yourself or someone else, is to wound a stag instead of killing it. That will mean it suffers unnecessarily and can result in a lengthy pursuit as you track the animal to put it out of its misery. A clean shot through the heart is what’s required and anything less is a grave error.