Roald Dahl - Man from the South

'A hundred and seventeen, a hundred and eighteen, a hundred and nineteen, a hundred and twenty!' he cried. 'One hundred and twenty birds! It's an all-time record!'

I did not doubt it for a moment.

'The most my father ever got in one night was fifteen.'

'You're the champion of the world,' I said. 'Are you ready now?'

'One minute,' he answered, and he pulled up his sweater and began to unwind the two big white cotton bags from around his waist. 'Here's yours,' he said, handing one of them to me. 'Fill it up quickly.'

'You don't think that keeper is watching us right now, do you, from behind a tree?'

'There's no chance of that,' Claud said. 'He's down at the petrol station, as I told you, waiting for us both to come home.'

We started loading the pheasants into the bags.

'There'll be a taxi waiting for us in the road,' Claud said.

'What?'

'I always go back in a taxi, Gordon. Didn't you know that? A taxi is impersonal. No one knows who's inside a taxi except the taxi driver. My father taught me that.'

'Which driver?'

'Charlie Kinch. He's glad to help.'

We finished loading the pheasants, and I tried to carry my bag on my shoulder. The bag had about sixty birds in it and it was heavy. Very heavy.

'I can't carry this,' I said. 'We'll have to leave some of them behind.'

'Drag it,' Claud said. 'Just pull it behind you.'

We started off through the black woods, pulling the pheasants behind us.

'We'll never get them all the way back to the village like this,' I said.

'Charlie's never disappointed me yet,' Claud said.

We came to the edge of the woods and looked through the bushes into the road. The taxi was there, not five metres away. Claud said, 'Charlie boy,' very softly, and the old man behind the wheel put his head out into the moonlight and gave us a smile. We slid through the bushes, dragging the bags after us.

'Hello!' Charlie said. 'What's this?'

'Potatoes,' Claud told him. 'Open the door.'

Two minutes later we were safely inside the taxi, driving slowly down the hill towards the village.

It was all over now. Claud was very happy, full of pride and excitement, and he kept leaning forward and tapping Charlie on the shoulder and saying, 'What do you think, Charlie? What do you think about this?' and Charlie kept glancing back at the large full bags lying on the floor between us and saying, 'How did you do it?'

'There's a dozen of them for you, Charlie,' Claud said.

Charlie said, 'I think pheasants are going to be a bit scarce up at Mr Hazel's opening-day shooting-party this year,' and Claud said, 'I imagine they are, Charlie. I imagine they are.'

'What are you going to do with a hundred and twenty pheasants?' I asked.

'Put them in the freezer at the petrol station,' Claud said.

'Not tonight, I hope.'

'No, Gordon, not tonight. We leave them at Bessie's house tonight.'

'Bessie who?'

'Bessie Organ.'

'Bessie Organ!' I was absolutely amazed. Mrs Organ was the wife of the local vicar, Jack Organ.

'Bessie always delivers my birds. Didn't you know that?'

'I don't know anything,' I said.

'Bessie's a clever girl,' Charlie said.

We were driving through the village now and the street lamps were still on and the men were wandering home from the pub.

'The vicar loves a roast pheasant,' Claud said.

The taxi turned left and went in through the gates of the vicar's house. There were no lights on there, and nobody met us. Claud and I put the pheasants in the hut behind the house, and then we said goodbye to Charlie Kinch and walked back in the moonlight to the petrol station. I don't know whether or not Mr Rabbetts was watching us as we went in.

'Here she comes,' Claud said to me the next morning.

'Who?'

'Bessie - Bessie Organ.' He spoke the name proudly, as if he were a general referring to his bravest officer. 'Down there,' he said, pointing.

Far away down the road, I could see a small female figure advancing towards us.

'What's she pushing?' I asked.

'There's only one safe way of delivering pheasants,' he announced, 'and that's under a baby.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Of course.'

'That'll be young Christopher Organ in the pram, aged one and a half years. He's a lovely child, Gordon.'

I could just see the small face of a baby sitting up high in the pram.

'There are sixty or seventy pheasants at least under that little lad,' Claud said happily. 'Just imagine that.'

'You can't fit sixty or seventy pheasants into a pram,' I said.

'You can if it's got a good, deep space underneath it, and if you pack them in tightly, right up to the top. All you need is a sheet.

You'd be surprised how little room a pheasant takes up when it's asleep.'

We waited by the pumps for Bessie Organ to arrive. It was one of those warm, windless September mornings, with a darkening sky and a smell of thunder in the air.

'Right through the village,' Claud said. 'Good old Bessie.'

'She seems in rather a hurry to me.'

Claud lit a new cigarette. 'Bessie is never in a hurry,' he said.

'She certainly isn't walking slowly,' I told him. 'Look.'

He looked at her through the smoke of his cigarette. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked again.

'Well?' I said.

'She does seem to be going rather quickly, doesn't she?' he said carefully.

'She's going very quickly.'

There was a pause. Claud was beginning to stare very hard at the approaching woman. 'Perhaps she doesn't want to get caught in the rain, Gordon. She thinks it's going to rain, and she doesn't want the baby to get wet.'

'She's running', I cried. 'Look!' Bessie had suddenly started to run at top speed.

Claud stood very still, watching the woman; and in the silence that followed, I thought I could hear a baby screaming.

'There's something wrong with that baby,' I said. 'Listen.'

At this point, Bessie was about two hundred metres away from us, but was approaching fast.

'Can you hear him now?' I said. 'He's screaming his head off.'

The small, high voice in the distance was growing louder every second.

'Perhaps the baby's ill. There are a thousand and one things that can happen to little babies like that,' Claud said.

'Of course.'

'Whatever it is,' he continued, 'I wish she'd stop running.'

A long lorry loaded with bricks came up beside Bessie, and the driver slowed down and put his head out of the window to stare. Bessie ran on, and she was so close now that I could see her big red face, with the mouth wide open, breathing heavily.

Suddenly, out of the pram, straight up into the air, flew an enormous pheasant.

Claud let out a cry of terror.

The fool in the lorry going along beside Bessie roared with laughter. The pheasant flew around sleepily for a few seconds, then it lost height and landed in the grass by the side of the road. Bessie kept on running.

Then a second pheasant flew up out of the pram.

Then a third and a fourth. Then a fifth.

'My God!' I said. 'It's the pills! They've stopped working!'

Bessie covered the last fifty metres at a great speed, and she came running up to the petrol station with birds flying up out of the pram in all directions.

'What's going on?' she cried.

'Go round the back!' I shouted.

But she stopped beside the first pump in the line, and before

we could reach her she had seized the screaming baby in her arms and dragged him out of the pram.

'No! No!' Claud cried, running towards her. 'Don't lift the baby! Put him back! Hold down the sheet!' But she wasn't even listening, and as the weight of the child was suddenly lifted away, a great cloud of pheasants rose up out of the pram - forty or fifty of them at least - and the whole sky above us was filled with huge brown birds beating their wings madly to gain height.