Summary
Danny’s father goes again the following Saturday to Hazell’s Wood. They soak raisins and spend the day working on a customer’s 1933 Austin Seven. His father leaves at six, to be in the woods at twilight.
Alone in the caravan, Danny lights the lamp and gets on with his homework. He is distracted as he imagines his father in the woods, wearing navy blue to blend in with the darkness. Danny goes to sleep, waking at ten past two. He realizes his father is nearly four hours later than promised. A sense of doom overcomes Danny. He dresses and decides to find his father.
The woods are far away though, so Danny starts up their customer’s Austin and drives. His head is about level with the steering wheel, but it is a small enough vehicle that he can reach the pedals. He is petrified, yet excited to drive. With hesitation he changes gears, steadily increasing his speed. Headlights of another car approach. Danny realizes it is the police in the glimpse he gets as it whizzes past. He pulls off the road at a gap in the hedge and turns off the lights.
The police car turns around and speeds up past his hiding spot. After waiting, Danny starts the car again and drives up the track to Hazell’s Wood. The trees close over him like a prison roof as he enters the forest on foot. He calls for his father but hears no answer.
In the pitch dark forest, Danny turns on his torch (flashlight). He calls his father’s name until he hears a reply. His father has fallen into a twelve-foot-deep pit, and his ankle seems to be broken. Danny’s father says the keepers dug the hole on purpose, to catch poachers. They couldn’t see his face, but they know he is there and will come back in the morning with Mr. Hazell, when there is light. Danny goes to the car to get a rope from under the back seat. Danny’s father climbs the rope using just his hands. He leans on Danny and hops out of the forest to the car. Danny drives them home. Danny’s father says he’ll call Doc Spencer, his friend, in the morning.
Danny wakes up to Doc Spencer’s voice. He is in the workshop, examining Danny’s father. Doc Spencer is a tiny man with tiny hands and a tiny round face, like an elf. Danny’s father tells the truth about what happened, and the elderly doctor tells Danny he used to poach trout from the river by rubbing the fishes’ bellies until he lulled them into a defenseless state. Doc Spencer says Mr. Hazell once kicked his dog on the way into his office, so he made an anesthetic needle especially blunt before ramming it into Mr. Hazell’s backside. An ambulance arrives and Danny’s father goes to the hospital, the doctor following in his car.
Danny closes the shop, goes to sleep, and wakes to his father arriving home at 6:30 in the evening. The ambulance men put him to bed. Doc Spencer arrives to check on the patient and give Danny a delicious cold-meat pie his wife wrapped in grease-proof paper. Things soon return to normal at the filling station as Danny’s father can walk on his cast-bound leg.
However, Danny often notices his father looking up the hill toward Hazell’s Wood. Danny’s father eventually confesses to the resentment he feels for Mr. Hazell and the season-opening pheasant shooting party he hosts on the first of October. Hundreds of fancy people from around the country come to it with their guns and dogs.
Danny’s father reveals he wants to poach two hundred birds so that Mr. Hazell’s party “would be the biggest wash-out in history!” Danny’s father gets animated as he talks about it. He says the only issue is getting past the three keepers who monitor the wood. They go to bed once the pheasants go up in the trees to roost. And no one has managed to poach roosting pheasants.
Analysis
A week after Danny learns of his father’s secret habit of poaching pheasants, Danny’s father sets out again for Hazell’s Wood. However, conflict enters the story when Danny wakes in the middle of the night to realize his father hasn’t come home at ten, as promised. Suspecting something must have gone wrong, Danny uses his ingenuity to rescue his father.
Because the woods are six miles away, Danny takes their customer’s Austin Seven out of the garage and drives it down the road. Although he is only nine, he has learned how to operate vehicles when moving them in and out of the garage. Danny applies this knowledge to shifting gears in a car whose pedals he can only barely reach. The tension builds as a police car whizzes past Danny on the road. Dahl unites the complementary themes of ingenuity and deception by having Danny quickly pull off the road and switch off his lights. The cop car, having turned around, speeds past him obliviously.
The themes of deception and ingenuity arise again when Danny discovers his father has fallen in a pit. The deep pit was dug by Hazell’s gamekeepers, who then covered it with sticks and leaves. Danny’s father walked into the trap and fell far enough to break his ankle. Danny and his father put their cleverness to use, however, and remember that there is a tow rope in the Austin. Using just the strength of his arms, Danny’s father pulls himself out of the pit. Even though he is in extreme pain, he maintains a contented, positive outlook, exhibiting the virtuousness Danny earlier describes.
The theme of solidarity enters the story when Danny’s father reveals he is friends with Doc Spencer, who condones and encourages his poaching activities. Danny is astonished to learn that Doc Spencer is fond of poaching himself, and has mastered the art of trout poaching by lying next to the stream and tickling the fishes’ bellies, lulling them into a trance. Just like Danny’s father, Doc Spencer longs to defy Hazell’s authority.
Danny’s father realizes an opportunity to exact revenge against Hazell and damage his reputation is coming with Hazell’s annual shooting party. Danny’s father speculates that if only he could poach two hundred pheasants, he would deprive the gentry in attendance of their fun and humiliate Hazell. However, such an extreme act of deception will require a revolutionary level of poacher ingenuity.
