Lamping.

My first lamp was a 500,000 candle power lamp which was quite adequate with my little 4.10 shot gun, this was aged 14. My Father was one of the more enlightened kind, who thought an air rifle was dangerous for a young lad, as the temptation was to see it as a toy. Instead he bought a 4.10 which was very definitely a lethal weapon and not a toy. With my lamp I was able to shoot rabbits at night. The best weather was a dark windy night, the wind would hide the sound of my footsteps and the dark would, of course, hide me. The lamp also had a nifty red filter which was supposedly for foxes, but this made the torch beam a lot weaker and besides I have found white light effective for most prey.

Eventually I was allowed a lurcher, who brought the lamping world to life, I moved up to a million power lamp, which with a moterbike battery would give me two to three hours lamping, which was just the right amount of time to be running the lurcher.

My lurcher; Dart, soon learnt to run down the lamp light until he saw the rabbit. He was an ideal lamping dog, he would never use his nose and would stop the chase as soon as the lamp was switched off. This made him less useful when hunting in the daylight as he was happy to let the terriers do all the nose work and would stand a watch for fleeing rabbits.

His best ever night was five hares brought to hand, his worst when he caught a fox and tried to jump the fence, but with the extra wait of the fox got caught up in the barb wire. A very expensive trip to the vet followed, and a stop to lamping for six months.

The trouble with lamping foxes is the lurcher soon learns to hit the quarry quite hard, fine for foxes but rabbits ended up crunched and useless for the pot. Perhaps I was not giving Dart enough credit as the crunched rabbits usually ended up in his or the ferrets food bowl.

There is something comforting walking about in the middle of the night, you get to trust your hearing and sense of smell as well as your eyes, and you find that there are very few nights in which you can't see, there is always some ambient light. You also get to see all those animals and birds which are nocturnal; badgers which snuffle along and owls which scare the life out of you when they ghost past your head.

The worst scare I ever had was on a really dark stormy night when walking along a hedgerow when I bumped into a black horse which had been standing half asleep by the hedge. We both jumped and frightened the wits out of each other. The horse bolted down the field and I jumped into the hedge.

I still love lamping but check that there are now no horses around when I wander in the dark.