The ObserverFoodThe ultimate stag party
Rachel Cooke thought deerstalking involved a gentle walk followed by a venison feast prepared by a posse of Conran chefs. But in the Scottish highlands, surrounded by rutting males, the cold truth was horribly differentIn 1925, John Buchan published his second most famous novel, John Mcnab, which tells the story of three metropolitan high-flyers (one is a barrister and former attorney-general, one a cabinet minister and one an eminent banker), each of whom is suffering from an indefinable boredom and lethargy.
In order to cure themselves of this ennui, they hatch a plan. Together, they issue a challenge to three Scottish estates: that they will poach from each of them two stags and a salmon in a given time, signing themselves collectively as 'John Mcnab'. 'I suppose I'm stale,' says Lord Lamancha, one of the three. 'But it's a new kind of staleness ... It's simply that the light has gone out of the landscape. Nothing has any savour.'
Cut to 2004, when I receive an email from the editor of this magazine in which she asks me, ever-so-casually, if I would like to go deerstalking in Scotland. I, too, am suffering from a kind of ennui. Yes, I am distinctly fed up. More significantly, I've yet to read John Mcnab (that comes later - too late, as it happens). So I scan her missive with mounting excitement. I see myself reclining by a roaring peat fire, glass of whisky in one hand, fat piece of shortbread in the other. As for the actual deerstalking, well, I am an urban girl and somewhat naive about country pursuits. In my mind's eye, I amble gently through a dappled forest. A burn babbles. An eagle soars. On my head is a jaunty tam-o'-shanter. I look - Lord, this is shaming - as though I am shooting an autumn/winter ad campaign for Mulberry.
Four weeks later, as I cling to the sodden side of a remote Scottish glen, I remember this feeble fantasy of mine, and blush right down to the roots of my hair (not that anyone is likely to notice - my skin is already so weather-beaten, it might as well be biltong). We have been walking for five hours. I am halfway exhausted. No matter how hard I try, I simply cannot keep up with my guide, Alistair, who scampers over the screes like some tweed-clad mountain goat. It is cold. It is wet. It is misty. I am covered in mud and sheep dung. My ankles ache. The palms of my hands are red-raw. My bum is a giant bruise. Only one thing is keeping me going: the hope that, on my return to London, I can get even with she-who-suggested-I-embark-on-this-folly. That done, I will resume everyday life (my dry, warm, cosy life) with renewed vigour. My ennui, it would seem, is already well and truly cured.
To begin at the beginning: yes, people do still deerstalk, and in relatively large numbers. The British Association of Shooting and Conservation, for instance, has 12,000 deerstalkers on its membership (it has about 120,000 members altogether). My trip is to be organised by the Conran group of restaurants and a company called Yorkshire Game, which supplies its chefs with their wild venison. The idea is that the chefs - six of them are to join the party - will get closer to the meat they use, be more inspired by it, more determined to use only the best, by learning everything about the beast: how it lives and, more crucially, how it dies.
At the end of a day's stalking, one of the directors of Yorkshire Game, Richard Townsend, will then butcher a deer that has already been hung for 10 days (here's one I made earlier ...), and the chefs, newly blooded and revved-up, will then set about dishing up a venison feast. They will cook every part, bar its pizzle.
Our stalk is to take place on one of Scotland's larger estates, the Black Mount, which lies in the west of the country, about two hours' drive north of Glasgow. The Black Mount takes in 90,000 acres of the most impossibly beautiful countryside and is owned - for love, not money, since the vast majority of Scottish estates barely break even - by the Fleming family, who made their money in banking (Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was one of their number). There are 3,000 red deer on the Black Mount and, as in the rest of Scotland, they must be culled regularly if they are not to cause serious environmental damage: deer, voracious munchers, strip the land bare.
Yorkshire Game takes 500 red deer from the estate each year (it handles around 10,000 red and fallow deer annually, all of which come from Scotland and the North, and has dealings with 30 estates).
In the party: Jeremy Lee, head chef at the Blue Print Cafe; Julian O' Neill, head chef at Quaglino's; James Walker, head chef at Le Pont de la Tour; Arnold Ivey, of Orrery; and Frances Moore and John Sarginson, who work at Zinc and the Butler's Wharf Chop House respectively. When we arrive, in the dead of night, at the Black Mount's Victorian hunting lodge, it seems all my reveries have been brought to life. It's Monarch of the Glen meets Sir Walter Scott. There are antlers. There is tartan. There are funny old prints featuring hairy types in kilts. The plumbing is endearingly ancient. More to the point, there is a big fire, a hearty young woman to make us a good breakfast, and a generous hand with the drams. I gaze contentedly around the room. Nothing I can't handle here, I think. The chefs, the estate manager, even Richard from Yorkshire Game, do not look especially lithe to me. I go to bed, dreaming of porridge.
Breakfast is taken in the dining room, which has a picture window that overlooks a sea loch and, beyond it, a Trilby-shaped mountain. The weather is stunning: azure sky, Sauternes sunshine, a gentle breeze. I'm just getting stuck into my bacon and eggs when Ben Weatherall, who also works at Yorkshire Game, says: 'You do realise that you're in the eye of the storm, don't you?' I smile, knowingly. 'Seriously,' he says. 'The barometer is forecasting a storm.'
Ben, the tallest man I have ever seen, is wearing the most extraordinary outfit: plus fours and a matching jacket in a tweed of duck-egg blue. I, on the other hand, am still in my best Topshop jeans and Neisha Crosland sweater. He looks intimidatingly 'country'. I try to think of something knowledgeable to say - the kind of reply the amateur Yorkshire weatherman Bill Foggitt might have given while sniffing sternly on a piece of seaweed. But, sadly, I am already out of my depth. 'Well,' I tell him, busily buttering toast. 'Barometers do sometimes get it wrong, you know.'
The heyday of stalking, in snob terms at least, was in the Victorian era, when the sport was the height of gentlemanly sophistication; stalking is pretty much a Victorian invention. These days, it has rather less cachet - especially compared to, say, a day on a grouse moor. For one thing, it is a relatively inexpensive activity. Bag a brace of grouse, and it will cost you about £110 (and a decent gun is unlikely to shoot less than 50 brace a day). Stalk a stag, however - and you are likely to bag only one - and it will cost £275 (hinds, the females, are even cheaper - though, in the case of both grouse and deer, bear in mind that you will have to fork out for accommodation and keeper's or gillie's tips on top). For another, it is not much of a sport for the flashy show-off helicoptered in, hot from his City bank. If you are shooting, the other guns can admire your prowess; it is a social activity. If you are stalking, the only person there to appreciate your skill is the professional stalker, the man who has led you onto the hill.
On the other hand, it still feels like an exclusive activity. There is the strangely timeless gear. There is the one-on-one attention. Most important of all, there is the skill involved. A stalker must be fit and agile. He must be quiet and cunning. And he must understand deer, which are pretty elusive creatures. 'A professional stalker is playing three-dimensional chess,' says Jonathan Young, editor of the Field. 'It takes ability to outwit the deer. So one feels this tremendous pressure not to let the stalker down. The sense of achievement is enormous.'
Young wishes more people would take up stalking, a view shared by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In Scotland, there are between 450,000 and 600,000 wild deer. Simply for these numbers to stand still, 25-30 per cent of the population must be culled each year. (Incidentally, the stag season lasts from 1 July to 20 October, the hind season from 21 October to 15 February. Males and females live separately, except during the rut, which is in September. At this time, when the stags roar spookily in the mist, the quality of venison is poor; a rutting stag is far too busy to eat.)
The Black Mount estate employs three full-time stalkers. It takes me a while to get over their look, for they might have wandered straight out of John Mcnab or, more likely, the BBC's costume department. They are in green tweed waistcoats and plus fours, they carry telescopes in conker-leather cases and, on their heads are genuine deerstalker hats. Surely someone is having a laugh. But no: this is deadly serious. My posse, to be led by the head stalker, Alistair, consists of yours truly, Richard Townsend, Jeremy Lee and Murdo, The Observer's photographer. After checking that we have our 'pieces' (sandwiches) in our pockets, Ali tells us that we must stay behind him at all times, and follow as precisely in his footsteps as we possibly can. 'If I crouch, you crouch,' he says (he is a real Mellors type - dishy, but reticent). 'If I lie down flat, you lie down flat.' Richard looks at me rather pointedly. 'And that goes for wherever you happen to be,' he adds. 'Even in water.'
It turns out that Weatherall was right. Or, as Buchan would have had it: the gods of the sky are in capricious mood. We have been walking for about half an hour when the fog descends and wraps itself like (Buchan again) a 'wet tablecloth'. The hill - the Trilby-shaped mountain that looked so serene over fried eggs and bacon - looms ahead of us, 'rough with boulders and heather, and broken with small gullies, and on its face a man might readily lose himself'. Every so often, Ali stops, dead in his tracks. Then he scans the skyline with his telescope.
It is a bloody good job he has to do this. If it were not for these pauses, I would long since have been left behind ... to DIE. The hill is steep and pitted with unseen places where the novice might very easily turn an ankle or - God forbid - break a leg. How on earth do he and Richard traverse this terrain with such dextrous ease? To watch them, they might as well be strolling across some seaside winter garden.
This goes on for hours. Some way ahead of us - some miles ahead of us - is a group of around 30 deer that includes three stags of suitable age for culling. But every time we edge towards them, they edge nonchalantly away.
It would, I think, be easier to hold a conger eel tight in the palms of your hands than catch this lot. Jeremy and I are now a long way behind the others, and in very low spirits. At one point, he takes my hand. I know he has done this, because I can see that he has. But I certainly can't feel it. My fingers are like frozen sausages.
'Courage!' I say (a bit camply). He puts his hand to his brow, in the manner of a tragic consumptive. We press on, trying hard not to dislodge the scree (which would alert the deer to our presence). A few moments later, we bump into Richard. I'm aware that an attractive dewdrop has formed on the end of my nose. 'Are you having a bad hair day, Rachel?' he asks. Forget the stag: it is now him I want to kill.
The end, when it comes, is swift. Realising that the direction of the wind is about to change - our game would then be up because the deer would smell us - Ali decides that he and Richard will go ahead alone. Jeremy and I are just too slow, too much of an encumbrance. So we sit, quietly, humbly, and wait for the sound of a shot to ring out.
When it does, we leap up, and slide down the hill - the great thing about the waterproof trousers that I am wearing is that you can toboggan in them when the grass is wet - to see our (sorry, their) catch. It is - this may sound bloodthirsty - a splendid sight. The stag, killed by a single shot to its heart, is mature, and probably weighs about 17 stone. But its antlers are uneven, mismatched; it is not, therefore, the kind of animal whose genes Ali wishes to be passed on. I reach down and touch its hide. The beast is already growing cold. I know how it feels.
Next, my Lady Chatterley moment. Believe me when I tell you that a funny feeling creeps over you when you see a handsome man in fine tweeds roll up his sleeves, take out his hunting knife, and set about his strange, bloody butchery high on a mountainside. The word that springs to mind is ... earthy.
A stag is always gralloched (has its stomach and intestines removed) before the carcass is taken down the mountain (in the old days, this was done by pony; now, it is done on a brilliant amphibious vehicle called an Argocat).
First, Ali runs his knife along the beast's belly. Then, he shoves his hands deep inside the animal, yanks out the relevant bits, and spreads them across the hillside as carrion. Above us, a large black bird has already started to circle. Weak and worn out, I look up at it and I wonder: has it come for Bambi's stomach or is it after me?
Ali radios to his gillie, who is waiting at the bottom of the hill and, 45 minutes later, Will appears, roaring towards us in the tiny but stubborn Argocat: a surreal moment. We put our stag in the back, and I jump in the front with Ali. The journey to the bottom of the glen is more than bumpy - I feel like I am shooting a scene from Platoon - but it is damn sight better than walking, and the engine warms my bottom quite toastily. En route, we pass poor Jeremy, who left us a while ago on (blistered) foot.
Somehow, we manage to squeeze him in. I am glad about this. It makes me feel better about having secured my own berth so girlishly. As dusk falls, we arrive back at the lodge. I eat two pieces of shortbread and drink two cups of tea while still standing up, and I feel pretty proud of myself until I learn that the other two parties have been back - with stags - for two hours. Worse, in these groups, the amateurs did the kill. Time for a hot bath, I think.
That night, the chefs set about cooking the venison in the lodge's Aga. They dish up a real feast: liver, kidney, some wonderful pink medallions. Venison is a low-cholesterol meat but, when wild, it tastes delicious: better than beef, I think. Yorkshire Game pays about £1.30 per kilo for the meat; a restaurant, however, will cough up nearer £8.50 for the better cuts, such as saddle. Around a drunken dinner table, the consensus is that stalking is a Good Thing (though there is some amazement at the effort involved in procuring the meat the chefs ordinarily take so for granted).
All the men, especially James, whose face is still smeared with the blood of his stag, would stalk again, given half a chance. Even Jeremy is going on about the grandeur of the mountain. Deluded fools! For my part, I am just relieved that I am not still out there in the dark, bleeding and bruised and lost. I go upstairs long before the others, take three Nurofen, and fall into an exhausted slumber.
· The Conran chefs visit to Black Mount Estate was hosted by Yorkshire Game (www.yorkshiregame.co.uk). To book a Conran restaurant go to www.conran.com.
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