Every day the lion tamer went off into the hills and found a wonderful, endless supply of wild animals. He had learnt how to capture wild boar, deer, and all large game animals, not from the great hunters of Africa, but from his woodcutter ancestors in the forests of Bavaria. Wild boar were the master prize, and the most abundant. He didn’t want anyone to know how he snared them, because, in addition to the violence needed to kill prey without a rifle, you would also need savagery to defend the traps against the villagers down below.

As the world was sinking into an epidemic of death, here roe deer and wild boar roamed free and were proliferating. Without hunters, they had no predators, and were recolonising the hills as if they had discovered new lands. In accordance with ancient custom, the lion tamer had rigged up a store of grain at the bottom of an igue, a natural pit in the limestone deep in the woods. His trap was a round cage which he had set up there, a tall cage in which he had sunk two wooden containers. As well as putting grain in his trap he also coated the base of the trees around the cage with Norwegian tar, the pine resin that in northern countries was used to waterproof houses. This had led to the discovery that pitch attracted wild boar. As soon as a surface was coated in tar, boar would show up and rub their flanks against it. If the lion tamer found a boar trapped in the cage, with the gate closed, all he had to do was stick it with the spear. He did not kill his prey with a rifle because, first of all, he didn’t have one, but secondly, he wouldn’t have wanted the noise to attract attention. If there were several animals trapped, he needed his dog to help contain them. The dog instinctively started with the largest to neutralise the greatest danger. Nature is perverse in that way; animals that take flight are always less cunning than animals that hunt.