Shooting and fishing: If anyone thinks that walking up grouse is a stroll in the heather I advise them to try it

CONSIDERING that last year I had two driven grouse days and three walked-up days things have been looking a bit thin this year.

It is feasible I have been impossibly rude or failed to write suitably entertaining thank-you letters, but I don’t think so.

Invitations to shoot grouse are a bit like fruit trees.

Considering that last year I had two driven grouse days and three walked-up days things have been looking a bit thin this year. It is feasible I have been impossibly rude or failed to write suitably entertaining thank-you letters, but I don’t think so.

Invitations to shoot grouse are a bit like fruit trees. Some years you are awash with apples and plums and some years they just don’t happen. Still by way of recompense I found myself invited by my brother to Inverness-shire where he had in turn been invited to walk up grouse near Drumnadrochit and one of the guests had dropped down dead.

Not actually on the grouse moor (my father-in-law did that at Newtonmore. “Marvellous to be back in these hills,” and down he went. Dead in the heather) this cove had been sprinting for the 6:45pm and never made the train, let alone Glenurquhart. So my brother very decently volunteered my services at short notice, along with Crumpet the cocker spaniel and Mango the golden retriever.

If anyone thinks, as I know they do, that walking up grouse is a stroll in the heather I advise them to try it; that is after spending three quarters of an hour being thrown all over the back of a Land Rover crawling up boulder-strewn tracks at 10mph. On the top we set off, eight of us and two pointers which had been brought up from Leicestershire by a keen pointer person called Ben.

There were wives and children masquerading as beaters filling in the gaps between guns and the extremely beautiful “girlfriend” of one of the older guns, who must have been 25 if he was a day under 65, known as “Miss Scratchwood Services” because she came from somewhere on the M1, but also answered to Sue.

We had been going for half an hour by which time I had a blister and an incipient coronary with only five hours to go when one of the dogs put up a rabbit which Mango went for. This was too much for Crumpet whom I thought I had trained to stop on command (It really only works on rabbits for the first ten yards.)

By luck or accident the cocker and retriever worked like a pair of lurchers in a pincer movement. Somehow I remembered to unload my gun before dropping it in the heather and struggled towards the debacle to finish off the rabbit. Mango looked stupid. Crumpet did that spaniel thing of rolling over and looking pathetic. I went through the required bollocking routine, sounding very, very cross. But they don’t really care. Other than that, it was brilliant; 15 and a half brace, all told, and Crumpet retrieved three. And I called her off a hare.