Bored by the monotony of his life and worried by his conscience, he tried to clarify his thoughts in writing the first part of the present journal.

He burrowed into the sandstone to make himself a shelter and lived securely in the lane for several weeks he had as companion a cat, Asmodeus, which had also run wild and taken to the cover of the great hedge. He writes that he first discovered this lane while giving some woman ’the first sight and feeling of the land that was to be her home.’ He says little else about her except, oddly, to protest that he was not in love with her. Now that the police were after him (though without knowing his identity) as well as the foreign secret service, he had to vanish completely he secretly made his way to Dorset, and went to ground in the midst of a thick hedge through which ran a disused and forgotten lane. He escaped from his hunters in the London underground railways, but was compelled to kill one of them - an episode that lies very heavy on his conscience. He visited his attorney, whom he calls Saul, to settle up his affairs and give warning that he intended to disappear for a number of years but as soon as he left Saul’s office he was recognized and followed. While they were looking for his body he escaped to England. He fell, however, into a patch of bog, and by skillful woodcraft convinced the search parties that he had been drowned. But his captors dared not let him go they threw him over a cliff and staged his death to look like an accident. He was questioned and tortured until some official recognized the name on his passport, and his stony of a sporting stalk seemed possible, if unlikely. His claim that he never actually meant to shoot was, naturally enough, considered incredible by the secret police indeed he himself shows a reticence about his motives which cannot altogether be accounted for by his very English reserve. He was caught when his telescopic sight was coming on to the target. He does not tell us whether he went east or west from Poland, his starting point. He became obsessed with the idea of stalking the biggest game of all, a European dictator. ’Lest what I write,’ he says, ‘should ever, by accident or intention, become public property, I will not mention who I am.’ It is the confession of an English aristocrat with a name internationally known, who appears to have taken little part in politics or society, but to have earned his notoriety through exploration and big-game hunting.

Rogue male novel