Summary
Danny and his father sit on the grassy bank below the hedge that marks the entrance to Hazell’s Wood, waiting for darkness to fall. Rabbetts, the head keeper, walks past with a shotgun and a dog. His father greets him. The keeper recognizes them from the filling station. He tells them to leave, and mentions Danny’s father’s broken foot, insinuating that he broke it after falling into a pit.
Danny’s father is standoffish and feigns innocence, but gets up to go. They turn off the track at a gate, and then hide quickly behind another hedge. Danny’s father assures him that if they keep quiet, the keeper won’t notice. Sure enough, the head keeper lopes past them with his dog.
Danny and his father re-enter Hazell’s Wood with their torches beaming light before them. Danny’s father assures him Mr. Rabbetts won’t return. They wait at the clearing for the pheasants to fall off their roosting branches. Steadily the pheasants drop, each with a thump. Danny’s father is ecstatic as he picks up the dozing birds. He counts 120, saying it’s a world record; the most his own father collected was fifteen.
They fill flour sacks with the birds. Danny’s father says that Rabbetts, if he is anywhere, will be waiting at the filling station. After dragging the full sacks to the edge of the wood, they meet Charlie Kinch, a taxi driver and old friend, who is waiting for them.
In the taxi, Danny’s father praises his son’s brilliance to Charlie. He says: “My son Danny is the champion of the world.” The driver and Danny’s father discuss local people with whom they intend to share the pheasants.
It shocks Danny to learn that so many people in the district, including the police officer Sergeant Samways and the vicar, are in on the poaching game as well. They go to Mrs. Clipstone’s, telling Danny that you must always find a respectable woman to deliver everyone’s pheasants.
Once they leave the taxi to walk the rest of the way home, Danny’s father exclaims in excitement over the prospect of eating roast pheasant. He tells Danny they will buy an electric oven the next day just so they can roast their catch. He also wants a deep freeze to store the fifty birds he intends to keep for them. Danny’s father says his mother used to have a wood/coal-fired cast-iron cooker for their pheasants, and they would sometimes roast them on an outdoor spit.
As they approach the station, Danny’s father says Rabbetts may be watching them from a hidden place, but they have no sacks over their shoulders, so he has no reason to suspect them of anything. Inside, they make cocoa. Danny’s father says he has never had more fun in his life.
Analysis
Safely out of the forest, Danny and his father rest on a grassy bank next to the public footpath. Beyond his usual contentment, Danny’s father is elated that Danny’s plan worked; now all they have to do is wait for nightfall. However, the head gamekeeper walks right toward them.
In this instance of dramatic irony, the reader knows that Danny and his father are in the middle of executing history’s greatest pheasant-poaching scheme. The keeper suspects them of being up to no good but remains oblivious to the full truth of what is happening. Having created this dramatic tension, Dahl draws out the uncomfortable moment by having the keeper counter Danny’s father’s defiant attitude by asking Danny’s father questions about his broken ankle. With these comments, the keeper insinuates that he knows his father must have fallen into the pit he dug the previous weekend.
The theme of deception arises again when Danny and his father pretend to walk away, instead hiding behind a hedge. The gamekeeper moves right past them, on his way home for supper. Back inside the forest, Danny and his father’s faith in their ingenuity is momentarily disrupted when they realize the pheasants might continue to cling to their roosting branches even if in a deep sleep. However, the birds begin to fall as expected, soon raining down all around them.
Danny soon discovers that while he came up with the method of poaching, his father has covertly worked out the next steps of their plan with an ingenious pheasant-distribution network that relies on solidarity within their community. By transporting the birds in an anonymous taxi, Danny and his father will not arouse suspicion. And because Danny’s father knows the head keeper may be watching their caravan, expecting to see them return with pheasants in flour sacks, they will return home with nothing, as if they were merely out for an evening stroll.
Meanwhile, the taxi driver is bringing the pheasants to the vicarage. The vicar’s wife, as a “respectable woman,” is the perfect person to put in charge of their loot, because she is an unlikely suspect if Hazell were to investigate. The theme of contentment arises as Danny’s father reflects on how delicious their roast pheasants will taste. With so many, they will eat roast pheasant whenever they like using the electric oven he intends to buy. For Danny and his father, it seems everything has gone off without issue.
