Check mate

Tawny is the queen of the ferreting game and knows all the right moves, allowing Simon Whitehead to harvest the bunnies

- Simon Whitehead

The Queen’s Gambit: not only an opening move in chess and a book by Walter Tevis, but also a fantastic series on Netflix. “What has this to do with ferreting?” I hear you cry. Well, for me, everything. Ever since I started ferreting, I have evaluated, scrutinised and reacted to everything that I have done. My biggest bugbear is getting it wrong but when you are dealing with the natural world, it inevitably happens from time to time. It is how you react to it that matters.

Like a ferreting Beth Harmon — Tevis’s orphaned chess prodigy — I used to visualise the mistakes, how to correct them and how it would all look when they were corrected. At the time everybody called this daydreaming because they did not understand me, but what I was doing was preparing for my future.

In my mind I would practise honing my skills and techniques, experiment with equipment and scrutinise the skeleton of my ferreting philosophy. I was preparing myself for the moment when the pressure got ramped up. You have to learn quickly when you are in the results business or else you will not succeed. And when it was time to grace the field with the ‘grand masters’ of my trade, I was instinctively on another plane. I knew how to outthink, outwork and visualise what was coming, rather than reacting to what had come and gone.

Suspicions

One stalemate arose a few weeks ago. As you may recall, my friend Shaun and I shot rabbits over his labradors on my local moor (