If it was dry enough, the farmer let you drive across the fields to some good barbel swims on the Dove that I'd never have got near on foot. I spent the day tucked away at the bottom of the flood bank, with the car out of sight on the other side. The fields around were empty of man and beast. Looking back, I did maybe hear a few odd noises, but I thought nothing of it. When I packed up and topped the bank, this is what I saw: a dozen cows all looking at me with a "how d'you like that, mate" expression; a set of hubcaps lying near the wheels; wing mirrors at crazy angles, and every panel of the car pushed in so it looked like one of those planes that defeat radar. Like John Cleese about to beat up a car with a tree branch, I shouted, armed myself and rushed the cows. The futility of smacking a cow with a rod rest kicked in, and I stopped short, and they wandered off. Even with help from my bodywork repair savvy neighbour, the giant dents and creases couldn't be pulled out, and I had to trade the car in as I couldn't bear to look at it. I gave up on the stretch - the club gave it up a couple of years later - as it was a 30m drive, and you just never knew which field the cows would be in or would be moved to during the day. A couple of blokes used to surround their cars with metal stakes and put tape around them; they believed the cows wouldn't cross the tape. I had no wish to test the theory.
An encounter that cost me nothing but embarrassment involved a moorhen chick - that cutest of little waterfowl. Naturally, I was fishing from the public path side of a local nature reserve pond. And naturally it was a Sunday morning and the path was a stream of strollers and dog-walkers. When the float dipped - single caster on a 20, on the bottom in the 2' swim, several stopped to see what I'd caught. They were as surprised as I was to see a moorhen chick being wound, thrashing and squealing, across the surface. I landed the chick, fished it out of the net, and swiftly unhooked it (beak-hooked, luckily). But as I leaned down to put it back in the pond, it leapt from my hand and dropped straight in the keepnet, where it dived to the bottom, lost its sense of direction and I and everybody else watched the tiny stream of bubbles coming up. So, I pulled up the net, grabbed the chick for the second time, and put it back in the pond. Nobody said much, but I don't think I did much for the image of angling in the eyes of the dog-walkers and strollers.