'DO YOU want to buy a fox?" asks a shifty bloke in a baseball cap, sidling up to me. "Just say the word." Echoing with gunfire and champagne corks, the air thick with hot dogs and wet dogs, the Scottish Game Fair in the grounds of Scone Palace can
be a trippy experience. It's huge, too, based around a central field in which, at any moment, sheep dogs might be put through their paces to the sounds of Danny Kaye singing 'The Ugly Duckling'. Over three days, around 35,000 will visit the hundreds of trade stands and stalls. You can buy guns and buns, hooks and crooks, green wellies and eels in jelly. You can buy stoves and stovies. Weird men may try to sell you vulpines.
Mostly, though, it's a terrific place to pick up stories. They're free if you ask around. Take Dave Hornbrook, fresh from his success at the World Taxidermy Championships in Missouri where, the only Brit to enter, he picked up first place for his tawny owl. "In America, it's all about big animals," he says. "My little stoats were competing against a bear and still beating it."
Hornbrook, 43, is wearing a pink polo shirt and sipping beer. He used to be a brickie but has a passion for taxidermy that goes back to his schooldays. He works from home where he has four chest freezers full of dead animals. People send him frozen corpses through the post, next-day delivery – roe deer heads, otters, red squirrels, grouse. Some British taxidermists enjoy working on large creatures – "I know lads who've done elephants, cows' arses, everything" – but Hornbrook is happy with home-grown work. His stall has a number of birds and animals in display cases, prices attached. A brown hare is frozen, mid-bound, and selling at £450. A beautiful jay will set you back £220. Commissions, in which the client provides the animal, are cheaper, unless he's being asked to work on a pet. Lonely widows sometimes get in touch and ask him to do this sort of work. He charges from £700 for a cat, from £125 for a budgie.
"I don't like doing pets," he admits. "Their skin is different than a wild animal's. It's fattier and greasier and not nice to work with. I have to put a lot of extra work into it. And if you're doing someone's pet, you need lots of photographs, especially facial ones so I can get it right. I don't take the animal off them and start working straight away. Most people change their minds and decide they'd rather bury it or burn it. So I'd keep it in the freezer for a few months before I'd even think about doing it." This constitutes a cooling off period.
I leave Hornbrook at his stall and wander round the site. It's a posh affair. There are more tweed breeks than you can shake an antler-handled stick at. In the Scottish Countryside Alliance marquee, a man in a camel-print tie introduces a man in a saltire tie to a man with – tut, tut – no tie. "This is a dear friend of mine," he says. "He guided my wife to her first stag." The stalls dedicated to killing animals vastly outnumber those dedicated to saving them.
Down by the river, Heather Mitchell, known as The Frilly Ghillie, is selling elaborate hats of her own creation. Her own is an olive-green tweed fedora decorated with a metre-long pheasant feather and a small mouse made from deer fur. She has recently returned to Scotland after "going down to England by mistake. I moved down with a Scotsman and then fell out with him." In her view, all the best men are taken and the single ones are too fond of the bevvy. Mitchell has worked extensively as a deer stalker on estates, working with Highland ponies. "There are some estates won't even employ a female up the hill," she says. "They think we're the weaker sex and need to be cooking pies in the kitchen."
It's a hot day, very close, and in the falconry area, birds of prey hunch parched on their perches. A barn owl peeps from its dark box and hisses like a pressure cooker. On the Scottish Hawking Club stall, Andrew Knowles-Brown, 53, is sitting with a bird on his gloved right hand. This is Isis, an African Crowned Eagle, a breed known as the leopard of the skies. In Africa, they pluck monkeys from tree tops. But Isis was the first bird of this type to hatch in Europe. Knowles-Brown has been breeding eagles for almost 20 years, and is arguably the best breeder in Europe. He can't explain quite why he has the knack, and talks about being able to "read the birds." His eagles are his life. Between February and July, the breeding season, he won't venture further than half an hour from his farm near Moffat for fear that the incubators might fail and he lose the precious eggs.
The Scottish Game Fair is full of people like Knowles-Brown. Chuck a venison burger and you'll hit an obsessive. Even Tony James, the Punch and Judy man, is passionate about his work. I catch up with him, 20 minutes before showtime, half-asleep behind his booth. Asked his age, he declares, "I was born in 1662!" – a reference to the date on which Mr Punch made his first recorded appearance. James has, in fact, been in this line since 1977. He keeps things topical, though; in his act, Punch knocks around a health and safety inspector.
I let James settle back in his seat and walk over to the Wimbledon telly tent where they are showing Murray versus Roddick (sob). The atmosphere's not very exciting, though. The real patriotic fervour is down by the ferret tent where they are staging a Scotland versus England race. I put 50p on a three-year-old ferret called Daphne to win. "3-2-1-Go!" yells Pete Campbell, the commentator. "And they're off! Have you ever seen anything so exciting in your life?"
Frankly, no. But sadly, Daphne fails to emerge from her box, and England – as represented by a ferret called Flower II – romps home. Disaster for Scotland, not for the last time today. Flower II, by the way, is owned by a 69-year-old lady called Sheila Crompton who owns 37 of the creatures and keeps them in her terraced house. "I only need one room to live in," she explains. "The rest belongs to the ferrets."
