Nor did he. He circled and cried around us and never did a cry of pain pierce my heart like that grief-stricken sound, the sorrowful reproach of a poor creature lost now in the heavens above. At times he would flee under threat from the gun trained upon him. Sometimes he looked as though he were about to go on alone. But never could he bring himself to leave. Always he came back for the female.

‘Put her out on the ground,’ Karl instructed. ‘He’ll come back in a while.’

Heedless of danger and distraught with love for the mate I had killed, the bird approached again. Karl fired. It was as though a cord holding the bird aloft had been cut. I saw a black object fall and heard it land in the rushes. Pierrot brought it back to me.

I put them both, cold already, in the same gamebag. And that same day I left for Paris.

HAUTOT & SON

The house, half farm and half manor, was one of those combinations often found in the country of a property once vaguely seigneurial and now owned by farmers themselves rich in land. In front of it the dogs tied to the farmyard apple trees were barking and yelping as the keeper and some small boys arrived carrying gamebags.

It was the opening day of the season and in the vast kitchen which served as dining room Hautot senior, Hautot junior, Monsieur Bermont the tax-collector and Monsieur Mondaru the lawyer were having a drink and a bite to eat before setting off on the day’s shoot. Hautot senior, very proud of his property, was telling his guests ahead of time what excellent game they would find on his land. He was a big-boned, ruddy-faced Norman, the powerfully built sort of man who can carry a whole barrel of apples on his shoulders. Somewhat authoritarian in manner, he was wealthy, respected and highly influential. He had sent his son César to school up to the fourth form so that he should have some education, then removed him lest he become so much of a gentleman that he no longer cared about his land.

César Hautot was nearly as tall as his father, but leaner. He was an easy-going, happy-go-lucky young man, a good son to his father whom he greatly admired and to whose every wish and opinion he was happy to defer.

Monsieur Bermont, the tax-collector, was a stout little man on whose red cheeks a maze of violet-coloured veins looked like a network of tortuous rivers and tributaries as might be seen on maps in an atlas. He asked, ‘And hare? Will there be … hare?’

Hautot senior replied, ‘As much as you like! Specially round Puysatier.’

‘Where shall we start?’ enquired the lawyer, a portly, well-fed man trussed up now in a new shooting jacket bought the previous week in Rouen.