When Danny is four months old, his mother dies suddenly, leaving Danny in the care of his father, William, who lives with Danny in a caravan behind his modest gas station and garage. William is a good and kind and creative man who teaches Danny mechanics from a young age. Danny speculates that his father lavishes him with all the love he had given his mother before she died. Danny's childhood is happy.
When he turns nine, Danny learns of his father's secret habit of poaching. He wakes up one night to discover his father is not there, and finds him out in the field, returning from the private forest of Mr. Hazell, a villainous landowner. Danny's father explains that he has loved to poach wildlife since he was ten, when his own father inducted him into the underworld of illegal animal trapping. He says that the entire town used to poach to put food on the table. Later, they do it mostly for the illicit thrill.
A week later, Danny's father goes out to Hazell's Wood again, but doesn't return home as expected. Danny drives a customer's Austin Seven down the road and walks into the forest on foot. He finds his father lying at the bottom of a pit with a broken ankle. Using a rope, Danny helps his father out of the hole and then drives him home. Upon his return from the hospital the next day, Danny's father wonders how he could exact some revenge on Hazell.
With Mr. Hazell's annual pheasant shoot coming up—an event attended by wealthy people from across England—Danny and his father plan to humiliate Mr. Hazell by capturing most of the pheasants in the forest. Danny has the idea to lace raisins with sleeping-pill powder and feed them to the pheasants at sunset. They do so, returning after nightfall to collect the birds that fall off their roosting branches. They haul the 120 birds out in flour sacks and get a taxi-driver friend to bring them to the vicar's wife, who will distribute the birds to local people.
The next morning, the vicar's wife brings the pheasants to Danny's father's filling station in a baby carriage with an extra-large cavity. The birds wake up and fly away, however, landing dozily on the station roof. Hazell stops his car and complains to a police officer about his pheasants having been lured away, although he doesn't know how Danny's father achieved it. The police officer is a friend of Danny's father and so declines to help Hazell. Hazell drives off in disgrace after the birds land on his Rolls-Royce, scratching the paint.
Danny's father and his friends discover six dead birds at the bottom of the carriage and divide them among themselves. The book ends with Danny and his father walking to town to buy an electric oven to make roast pheasant. They plan to go to a local stream afterward to try poaching trout.
