Item #85318 THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County"). Richard Jeffries.
THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County")
THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County")
THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County")
THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County")
THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County")

THE AMATEUR POACHER; (By the Author of "The Gamekeeper at Home' and "Wild Life in a Southern County")

London, England: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 1879. First Edition. Hardcover. Octavo, brown cloth, double-ruled in blind, with stamped design-in-blind to top and bottom of both boards, and a gilt vignette to front. A little shelfwear and rubbing, slight spine lean, but clean and tight. Dark-green clay-based endpapers. Small bookseller's ticket adhered to bottom of front pastedown: "James Miles Antiquarian Bookseller 34 Upperhead Row, Leeds". (In 1870 James Miles came to Leeds from Leamington and opened a bookshop on the Headrow. The business was moved to Woodhouse Lane around 1930.

A fascinating and highly-detailed look at the British country poacher's craft and art, including setting snares, proper use of tools like axes and billhook, techniques of netting, using ferrets to flush out hares, snipe shooting, etc. Good. Item #85318

The author was once walking on a lonely country road nearly tripped over a very intoxicated man laying across the road, and ordinarily leaving such men lying where they were, but because he knew that "the mail cart was due with two horses harnessed tandem fashion, and travelling at full speed", in this case seized him by the collar, and dragged the drunken man out of the way. Then he sat up and asked in a very threatening tone who I was. I mentioned my name: he grunted, and fell back on the turf, where I left him." Some time later, one afternoon a labourer called, asking for me in a mysterious manner...When admitted, he produced a couple of cock pheasants from under his coat...These he placed on the table remarking, 'I ain't forgot as you drawed I out of the raud thuck night.' ...and thus a species of acquaintanceship grew up and I learend all about 'Oby' (i.e. Obadiah) and was the most determined poacher of a neighbouring district -- a notorious fighting man -- hardened against shame, an Ishmaelite openly contemning authority and yet not insensible to kindness. I give his history in his own language...": "You see by going out piece-work I visits every farm in the parish. The other men they works for one farmer for twho or three or maybe twenty years; buyt I goes very nigh all round the place -- a fortnight here and a week there, and then a month somewhere else. So I knows every hare in the parish, and all his runs and all the double mounds and copses, and the little covers in the corners of the fields. When I be at work on one place I sets my wires about half a mile away on a farm as I ain't been working on for a month, and where the keeper don't keep no speciallook out now I be gone. As I goes all round, I knows the ways of all the farmers, and thm as bides out late at night at their riends' and they as goes to bed early; and so I knows what paths to follow and what fields I can walk about in and never meet nobody. //. The doges is to be always in the fields and to know everybody's ways. Then you may do just as you be a mind. All of 'em knows I be a poaching; but that don't make no difference for work; I can use my tools, and do it as well as any man in the country, and they be glad to get me on for 'em..."

Price: $125.00

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