By Steven Carroll
The Gamekeeper
Portia Simpson
The Gamekeeper by Portia Simpson.
Simon & Schuster, $35.99
One day when Portia Simpson was working as a deerstalker on the Isle of Rum, off the Scottish coast, she fell asleep after leading a hunter to his quarry. The disembowelled deer was beside her. Suddenly everything went black. She woke to see a golden eagle about to have her for lunch. All in a day's work for the world's first female gamekeeper. From the start she knew she didn't want a conventional life, had always been drawn to nature and animals (as a child she had a pet crow named Tennis, after the racket it made), and, encountering sexism on the way, trained in forestry, became a tree-surgeon and a gamekeeper, complete with dog and shotgun. Whether describing acting as midwife to a struggling ewe or stalking her first deer, her writing is appealingly no-nonsense and graphic in the way it evokes the job and the natural world.