Nothing more than a shot in the dark... but it saw off poachers

December is the time of year that I like to exercise my imagination, drawing on my experiences to bring you something new and, perhaps, a little bit unsettling...
Jake Mann was born and bred on Dartmoor, spending all his life living and working around the village of Cornwood. Now in his 60s, he had inherited his tiny cottage from his parents when they had both passed fairly close together many years ago, one not being able to live without the other.
Being an only child, he didn’t have to share so everything they had became his which, apart from the cottage, wasn’t much. As a boy, he hadn’t been much for studying, preferring to spend his time working outdoors with his father, who was a farm labourer, going wherever he was needed, turning his hand to anything.
Jake was a fast learner when it came to practical things and made himself very useful to his father, who didn’t mind him skipping school. When he was old enough, his father got him work on the farms. Having two wages coming into the household helped greatly, but times were hard so Jake’s father taught him how to live off the land. They were ok for meat, milk and vegetables, for the farmers they worked for would often given them produce along with their weekly wages, but Jake’s father had his eyes on a bigger prize...the game that roamed on Squire Gentry’s land.
Jake didn’t regard what his father did as poaching per se. It was a case of needs must and besides the landowner was that rich he wasn’t going to miss a few pheasants or the odd deer every now and again. It wasn’t just for themselves, they were quite happy to sell it on to their neighbours, or even local butchers, no questions asked. When his father died, Jake carried on this family tradition and would regularly relieve Squire Gentry of some of his livestock.
There was nothing that Jake liked more than wandering over the vast estate, visiting the majestic standing stones on Stalldown Hill and the other antiquities, like The Dancer’s stone circle by the Erme, or the ruined cairn of Hillson’s House and then returning home with a few prizes in his knapsack. He was an avid reader of local folklore, so he knew the tale that once clocks were made at Hillson’s Hous and a tinner’s hut called Downing’s House was once used as a smugglers cache. He’d often thought about taking a metal detector and a shovel to these places to see if anything of value was still to be found there. Another money making scheme that had once appealed to him was removing standing stones and other artefacts and selling them off to collectors, but the park authority had got wise to this, so now everything that was removable had now been security tagged.
Jake was reasonably satisfied with his life, and the way he made a living, After all, he’d never known any different, but then along came Covid...
Squire Gentry suffered greatly during the pandemic, not that he or his family ever caught the disease, but the way his land and his property was treated. As part of their allowed exercise regime, throughout the various lockdowns, many locals and not so locals had chosen his land to roam on, allowing their dogs to chase and worry his livestock, some of which was poached.
He knew this went on prior to Covid. He had tolerated it then as he guessed it was part of country life, having grown up on the estate, but now it was getting intolerable.
Nearly 70 years old, he wanted something to leave to his children and grandchildren. Feeling the need to protect his land and property, he took his case to court. Having found out that the right to wild camp on Dartmoor wasn’t set in stone, he used this as leverage to get it banned, for after all this was something else that had been abused during lockdown, with uneducated campers leaving their detritus where they dropped it, making no effort to clean up after themselves. The judges listened to his case, but they also listened to the counter arguments from the park authority and in the end Squire Gentry lost.
Not best pleased with this ruling, the landowner vowed to take matters into his own hands...
Jake Mann had also survived Covid, still continuing to help himself to Squire Gentry’s wildlife, unaware that he wasn’t the only one to have taken advantage of lockdown to do so, but he was very surprised when the idea of banning wild camping went to court. He couldn’t work out what Gentry hoped to gain by keeping campers off his land at night. During his twilight excursions, he had often heard gunfire coming from various copses on the estate, this wasn’t army exercises, they were further north. Maybe having night-time game shoots was becoming a more lucrative market? Maybe the risk of shooting a wild camper in the dark was more than health and safety regulations could bear?
These were all thoughts going through Jake’s head as he made his way at dusk up the lane out of the village towards the moor gate at the old waterworks. As he approached, he was surprised to find a couple of cars parked up, practically in the hedge one almost blocking the entrance to one of Gentry’s fields. “He won’t like that!”, he muttered to himself, for parking had been discouraged in this area ever since the big gate had been securely padlocked.
He wondered if the occupants of the vehicles were there for the same reason as him. As he started to make out the gate in the dimpsy light ahead, he suddenly heard what sounded like the crackle of a walkie-talkie in the treeline on his right. Puzzled, he looked around to trace the source, but before he could investigate further his attention was drawn by the sound of raised voices from up ahead. Moving forward more stealthily, he positioned himself in the bushes on his left, giving himself a better view of the gate and beyond. He could just make out two figures standing in front of what looked like Squire Gentry, pointing a double-barrelled shotgun at them.
The two men were literally pleading for their lives, but the only words Jake could make out clearly was when Gentry shouted: “This is what happens to people who come poaching on my land!”, as he fired both barrels, and two bodies fell to the ground. Jake had seen enough. He broke cover and ran back down the lane, towards the safety of the village as fast as his sixty odd year old legs could carry him.
What he then failed to hear was the walkie-talkie crackling again, and a voice saying, “All clear now boss, he’s gone!”.
With that, the two 'corpses' sprang miraculously back to life. Gentry thanked the two men for their services and they went scuttling back to their cars, their fee tucked securely in their pockets. He then turned for home, having first pocketed the two spent blank cartridges from his gun, pleased with himself that the expense of installing the CCTV equipment, as an early warning system, was about to pay off and that now, Jake Mann was about to let every would-be poacher in the area know, that “Old Squire Gentry” was prepared to go to any lengths to protect his land.