He ordered the keeper to cut us some rushes. We piled them up in the middle of the shelter in whose roof a gap was left to let out smoke. When the red flames licked the clear crystal walls within, they began to melt little by little as if in a gentle sweat. Karl, who had remained outside, cried out, ‘Come and see!’

I came out and was lost in wonder. Our cone-shaped cabin looked now like a diamond with a fire at its heart crystallizing suddenly out of the frozen water of the marsh. Inside could be seen the fantastical shapes of our two dogs as they too tried desperately to get warm.

A strange cry, the cry of a lost wanderer, passed over our heads. The glow from our hearth was beginning to wake the birds of the wild. Nothing stirs me more than that first anonymous clamour of life carrying so fast and so far before the first light appears on the winter horizon. In the icy dawn, to me that fleeting cry borne on the wings of a bird becomes the sigh of the soul of the world.

‘Put out the fire,’ Karl was saying, ‘here comes the dawn.’

The sky was indeed beginning to grow pale, and across it skeins of ducks sketched long, sudden lines, which in an instant disappeared. A flash burst out in the darkness. Karl had just fired a shot and the two dogs were off. From then on, every minute or so changing position, one or other of us would aim as soon as the shadow of a flying formation appeared above the rushes. Pierrot and Plongeon, breathless and ecstatic, retrieved for us the bleeding creatures whose eye sometimes looked at us still.

Dawn had broken on a clear and cloudless day. The sun was appearing at the bottom of the valley and we were thinking of leaving when two birds with necks and wings outstretched passed suddenly over our heads. I fired a shot. One, a teal with a silvery breast, fell practically at my feet. Then from the space above my head came the terrible cry of a bird. It was a heartbreaking lament, repeated over and over. The little creature which had been spared began to wheel and circle against the blue of the sky above us looking down at his dead mate which I held in my hands.

Karl, on his knees, the gun at his shoulder and a glint in his eye, was watching, waiting for it to come close enough.

‘You shot the female,’ he said, ‘the male will never leave now.’