I Know How I React When I’m at Gunpoint Now
By: Em Unravelling
Tags: Personal Essay, Experience, This Happened To Me, Life, Fear

We didn’t need telling twice. The gamekeeping story was not a convincing one; the area has farmland around it, but no estates, and the land we were running through was agricultural, with nowhere for pheasants to hide. Everything about the encounter felt sinister. We decided to take a different route back, one that wouldn’t come back past the car, which had now been parked on the headland of a field and sat, squat and menacing, in the inky dark. And full — apparently — of guns.

I live in the middle of nowhere in England and I can count on both hands the number of times I’ve actually seen a gun. Most of those sightings have, I’ll be honest, been of the weapons slung on the belts of airport guards. Guns are…other. They’re from films and television, really. Dangerous, deadly props. They don’t feel like a real thing.

They’re a classic trope though, aren’t they? Who hasn’t wondered how they’d react if they came face to face with the barrel of a gun?

In the dark last night, my friend and I kept running for another 3 miles and then we looped back towards our cars. Again, the expanse of fields we’d crossed earlier loomed, but we deliberately took a different route to skirt its edges rather than cross the middle. We would not pass the car again.

And yet, of course, we did. As soon as we entered the paddock we were caught in the beam of its headlights. It had moved to block the path we needed to take to cross the field back to our cars and again, the window slid down.

This time, the passenger of the car was not the first thing we saw in the gap of the lowered window. This time, we came squarely face-to-face with a rifle. It was set up on a stand to fit the car window and it was huge and blackly metallic, with a delicate sight through which the passenger’s eye glared at us coldly.

“We’ll get nothing tonight, will we, not with you two crisscrossing the place all sparkly. You want to be getting yourselves home. You shouldn’t be here.”

I thought: Here I am, quite literally at gunpoint. I also thought: the absolute cheek of you, dude, coming at me with your vaguely threatening talk when we’ve actually got more right to be here than you. I said something like “Don’t worry, we’re going now!” in a breezy voice at exactly the same time my friend said belligerently “This is public land and we run here a lot. We don’t have to go anywhere because you tell us to!”

What was she thinking? They had a weapon.

But it was fine. We ran the fastest half-mile we’ve ever run on that field, no one shot at our ankles, and then we were back in our cars and safely on the road home. My friend called the police and the police said that what the men were probably doing is called “lamping”, which we hadn’t heard of before, so it turned out to be quite an educational evening. (The police also said that there was no point making any kind of formal report because nothing would be done, so that was educational too. Government cuts, man).

And then I got home and tried to tell the story to everyone around the dinner table in an archly amused tone but suddenly I couldn’t stop crying for about five minutes. I didn’t feel sad or frightened; the tears were like a thunderstorm, a panicked reaction to the adrenaline I hadn’t realized I’d accrued, presumably in the face of that surreally dramatic-looking rifle.