The Hare and the Hunter

On a Saturday in October about twenty-five years ago, my younger brother and I set out into the oilseed-rape fields behind our house to kill something with shotguns—his a 12-gauge Cogswell & Harrison my father had given him, mine a Churchill entrusted to me by our grandfather, who was too old to hunt. Edward, slight at fifteen, was apprehensive as he hefted the oversized cartridge belt onto his skinny hips. He pulled out two shells and dropped them into the black chambers of the 12 gauge, then closed the gun like a worried mother pulling shut the door to a nursery. “I think I’m ready,” he said, his hands trembling a little.

We set forth, and a heightened awareness kicked in, an atavistic instinct. Within every contour of the land, each speck in the sky or that dark patch in a copse to the west, could lie a potential target and dinner. I let Edward take the lead. I was an experienced hunter, but this would be Edward’s first time shooting wild game. He kept marveling at the gun in his hands, which slightly dwarfed him. I worried how the recoil would throttle his narrow shoulders. “After this I might even look at getting a rifle,” he said, beaming at the blue barrels but stepping with slow deliberation, like a ballet dancer. “Something to take long-distance shots.” I nodded. I was just two years older, but there seemed an insurmountable divide between us.

Our mother had suggested that I take Edward on a hunt as a way to bond, that it might help defuse some of the tension at home. Recently we had moved to a cottage in Assington, at the end of a quiet road, downsizing from a 500-acre estate we called Clock House Farm. The legend surrounding the farm was that, long ago, a former owner was lost on his horse in a thick night fog. The bells of a nearby village church helped him find his bearings. To show his gratitude, he named the farm Clock House and promised that whoever owned it would pay the church twelve pounds a year, a tradition my father kept until he sold the farm.

My parents sensed a rift between my brother and me since the move. I was flunking school, but Edward was excelling. Every night, he sat anchored in his room, poring over his schoolbooks through thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t just a bookworm, either. He played rugby with such dexterity that he was scouted for the county. My friends at school, all rebels and misfits, joked that Edward was the “perfect schoolboy.”

Hunting, on the other hand, was mine. I was good at it. It provided an escape from a school life I hated—the petty rules and arbitrary cruelty of boarding at St Joseph’s College, in Ipswich, England. I felt at peace in the wilderness, tapping a spiritual connection to the land. But apart from that elemental quality, hunting afforded me an illusion of a certain status. I enjoyed the elite connections and social life it gave me access to. Dragging my little brother, who “rescued” rats by bringing them into the house to give them a saucer of milk, was anathema.

“Oh, come on,” my mother had said, turning to face me and wagging her finger in a way that implied an order more than a favor. Then she looked at Edward, who was wrestling to keep the shotgun straight. He struggled to pull it to his shoulder, pointing the barrels, with a disturbing circular motion, at our mother. “It would be good for you both,” she said. “You can show your younger brother a thing or two.” Edward sighted down the barrel, closing one eye as he aimed at an imaginary target.

“You’re not meant to close an eye when you shoot a shotgun,” I snapped at him. If there was one thing I hated, it was my kid brother messing with guns.

Eventually, I warmed to the idea. After all, my father wasn’t...