Summary
Before bed, Danny has an idea: what if they put some of the sleeping-pill powder that Doc Spencer gave his father into soaked raisins? His father is choked up with excitement at the notion of two hundred pheasants toppling off their roosting branches when the sleeping pills kick in. They call the method "The Sleeping Beauty." They make a plan to close the shop for the day and prepare the two hundred raisins.
The next day, Danny’s father walks Danny to school, discussing the nesting and mating habits of birds and frogs. During class, Danny and his friend Sidney get in trouble with their violent teacher, Captain Lancaster. He calls the boys to the front of the room and whacks their open palms with a long white cane.
After school, Danny’s father becomes enraged when he sees the mark on Danny’s hand. He says he’ll kill Lancaster. Danny convinces his father not to go to the school to beat up Lancaster, saying it’ll only make things worse.
On Friday morning, Danny wakes up with the feeling of snakes in his stomach. They eat breakfast and then prepare the soaked raisins by slitting them open with a razor. After putting the sleeping pill powder in, his father sews up the raisins with thread.
Danny’s father says Danny’s mother was a great sewer and knitter, and reveals that she used to come poaching with him twice a week. At lunch, Danny feels too anxious to eat. His father says he was the same the first time he went out poaching.
They head out that evening to get to the wood before sunset. They wear dark clothes. It is a calm, sunny evening. The snakes keep wriggling in Danny’s stomach. In the woods they stop talking and begin crawling. At a clearing they find two hundred pheasants on the ground. They also see a keeper standing still as a post with a shotgun.
Danny’s father flicks raisins into the clearing. The keeper doesn’t notice. Danny can’t believe his father’s guts, but realizes he is in a poacher’s trance. The keeper steps away. At that moment, Danny’s father tosses the rest of the raisins, which land like rain on the dry leaves.
The birds peck away at them while the keeper turns but sees nothing. Danny and his father then run out of the woods. Outside the hedge, his father is elated. He tells Danny it went marvelously and that he is proud of Danny.
Analysis
Following in his grandfather's and father’s footsteps, Danny reveals that he, too, has the capacity to be an ingenious poacher. Mere moments after his father expresses a desire to poach two hundred of Hazell’s roosting pheasants in order to damage the landowner’s social status, Danny devises "The Sleeping Beauty," a plan to put sleeping-pill powder inside raisins so that the roosting pheasants will fall off their perches and can be easily gathered.
Danny’s experience of being cruelly disciplined the following day at school contrasts with the celebratory mood he and his father enter after coming up with their poaching plan. Incensed by Captain Lancaster’s brutality, Danny’s father seeks to protect his son by returning the teacher’s violence with more violence. Danny, however, knows that it will only create more issues for him if his father defies his teacher’s authority. In this poignant scene of father-son bonding and solidarity, the roles of parent and child momentarily become inverted, and it is Danny who has to calm down his father.
The day he and his father are to put their poaching plan into action, Danny wakes up with snakes in his stomach—a metaphor for the sensation of anxiety and excitement he feels. Having spent so much of his young life in a state of contentment, Danny is unfamiliar with the physical manifestation of anxiety in his gut. The anxiety persists as they prepare the raisins. His father attempts to relate to Danny by confessing that he felt the same trepidation when his father initiated him into the world of poaching.
When they enter Hazell’s Wood at sunset, Danny’s father educates Danny in the art of deception. Knowing a shotgun-wielding gamekeeper is nearby, Danny’s father gets low on his belly to crawl over the forest floor. They approach a clearing full of pheasants—exactly what they were hoping to find. In a direct act of defiance against the oblivious keeper, Danny’s father begins tossing out the raisins.
Although Danny is terrified of the keeper standing close enough for them to spot him, Danny soon learns that the risk of being shot is part of what motivates his father. If poaching were easier and lacked the need for ingenuity and deception, it is unlikely his father would treat it with the reverence he does. Entering a trance, Danny’s father distributes the laced raisins in the clearing and they watch the game birds gobble them up. Danny’s ingenious new poaching method appears to be working.
