Danny or The Pheasant Hunt

Danny or the pheasant hunt (original title Danny - The Champion of the World ) is a 1975 children's book by the Norwegian-Welsh author Roald Dahl . The illustrations were created by Sir Quentin Blake . The German first edition in the translation used since then by Sybil Countess Schönfeldt was published in 1977 by Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek near Hamburg .

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Danny lives with his father in a small gypsy caravan behind their gas station . One day when Danny wakes up in the middle of the night, he notices that his father is not there. When the father returns, he tells Danny his secret: He was in front of Danny's birth, a poacher of passion and it has now driven the desire for this adventure into the woods of Victor hazel. He tells Danny all about pheasant poaching that same night.

Danny's grandfather was the best poacher ever. He discovered that pheasants are crazy about raisins and came up with many tricks to catch them. So he prepared raisins by sticking a horse hair through that was a little longer than the width of the raisin. This bite got stuck in the pheasant's throat and it stayed in place so that it could be caught by hand. Another method was to put the raisins in small, cone-shaped bags, the upper edge of which was coated with glue on the inside. These bags were placed very loosely in the ground with the point down. When a pheasant pecked at the raisin, the bag would stick to his head and he was practically blind. In this state, he remained on the spot.

In another attempt at poaching, the father falls into a pit that the rangers dug as a trap. Together with Danny, he decides to take revenge on Victor Hasel. Danny is thrilled and thinks up a new poaching trick that they want to try out in Mr. Victor Hasel's forest. With the help of the trick, they want to make the pheasants fall from the trees while they sleep. They sneak into Mr. Hazel's forest and feed the pheasants the raisins, which have been prepared with sleeping powder. At first the new method seems to fail, but then the pheasants fall.

They return to their gas station with rich booty. So that the missing pheasants cannot be found with Danny and his father, they bring them to Mrs. Clipstone, the wife of the village pastor. After a while, Mrs. Clipstone brings the pheasants back to the gas station in a specially made stroller, but the pheasants wake up and flutter around drowsy. At that moment, Victor Hasel also appears and accuses Danny's father of poaching. With the help of the village policeman, things are smoothed out, Victor Hasel withdraws, and it even remains to be discovered that a few pheasants have remained with the successful poachers.