Fishing & Shooting with Alastair Robertson

It's no more than an armed walk to work off the excesses of Christmas Day (Very festive, thank you. Turkey au point). The trouble in recent years, you may recall, has been the excess of other people's children and the difficulty of getting everyone in a straight line and advancing in a relatively organised manner across the countryside. I live in hope that if we can train them up now there will come a moment when they become useful beaters.

This year it snowed. And snowed, and snowed. Then defrosted minimally and froze. So when the day dawned, blue, deep and crisp and incredibly uneven, we were faced with force-marching six to 10-year-olds through thigh-deep, snow-covered stubble and boggy tussocks in the hope of winkling out a pheasant.

There was an added complication in that Crumpet, the field trial champion cocker spaniel, had elected to come on heat, and was approaching peak fertility and the last thing we need at this stage is puppies by some randy black lab. Fortunately the one other dog that was due to attend, a huge Italian thing which looks rather like a canine cart horse, had something wrong with his paw and couldn't come out. So we took the chance there were no farm collies on the loose and Crumpet came, too.

The party by now consisted of at least seven walking guns, only two of whom were likely to hit anything on purpose, and a 12 year old with an unloaded 28-bore being instructed on safety. The poor child must be terribly confused.

The first success was losing the car load of child beaters. Their mother/aunt with the Volvo estate, the most useless car ever invented for UK winter conditions, failed to make an icy slope and slid back across the road. Their father was sent back in yet another vehicle (the carbon footprint of shooting is nothing to shout about) while the rest of us decided to carry on in blazing, windless sunshine.

My unarmed brother-in-law, an artist, dubbed Captain Chaos by the children, wandered off in front of his son, who was armed with a .410, to better admire some frozen piece of foliage and had to be shouted at rather rudely to get back in line. The brilliant Crumpet, who was just light enough to run across the ice crust, disappearing every now and then beneath the surface, winkled out two hens and a cock pheasant from under some whins.

I found a bloodied weasel, frozen but perfectly preserved on the snow crust. There was no sign of a struggle, but something had killed it. A buzzard? Another weasel? The children eventually turned up for the next, easier, walk and all went "Yeugh" at the sight of the blood on the weasel, and tentatively stroked it. Total bag: three pheasants, a woodcock and weasel.

This article first appeared in The Scotsman, 16 January, 2010