Shooting sprites with Clint Eastwood

Being way out west – and Ireland is west to Englishmen – and that the country was a little wild, it wasn’t that remarkable that Clint Eastwood had joined our shooting party. Not the real Clint, of course, but his cinematic legend buried in our memory, the Man with No Name who’d inspirited us boys with his monosyllabic coolness, constant cheroot smoking and lethal ability to clear leather with his Colt 1851 Navy revolver before the bad guys pulled their pieces.

Now no-one could call common snipe bad guys. In fact, they’re heroic to all in love with the undomesticated remnants of the British Isles inhabited by these buff-and-brown sprites: the windy and wet, boggy and plashed, boot-sucking places where the only meetings are with stern-gazed hairy cattle. But to shoot a snipe you have to beat them to the draw, to mount and shoot before that flicker of wings jumping 40 yards out and now twisting skywards has reached another 15 yards and safety.

It’s never easy bagging when he’s doing his fandango.