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Cooper Brown: Going shooting

Friday 04 March 2011 11:01 GMT
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Mulligan takes me out shooting today, which is a welcome relief. My Mom goes mental that I’m going to “kill things” although she’s always first in the hamburger queue.

I leave her with the Colonel who is looking suicidal– he has his first break in years because his wife is in hospital with alcohol poisoning, and then Jabba the Hutt arrives to stay from America. I can’t help laughing as we walk into the woods. Mulligan has a new gun that he is very excited about. He bought it off a man in the pub and it is clearly stolen but this is not the sort of thing that bothers Mulligan. We have a very exciting prey today.

The Colonel was given two wild boar by a Corsican friend of his. He was keeping them in the potting shed and the plan was to fatten them up and make sausages. The big one escaped however, and has been causing havoc in the woods. Mulligan and I have been sent out to kill it. This is proper man stuff and I’m really stoked. I have the Colonel’s 12-bore and there is an unspoken competitiveness between us as to who will make the kill. It doesn’t take long for us to find the boar.

They smell to high heaven and we pick his scent up and track him down to a copse near the boundary fence. It’s a feisty bastard and as soon as it notices us it charges. Mulligan raises his gun and fires but nothing happens. The moron has forgotten to load his gun. I dispatch the creature with a messy shot that does a lot of damage. Mulligan is mortified. I feel weirdly empowered. Cooper

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