At night cats’ eyes shine like the lightning bolt of Zeus. Foxes’ eyes glow with an acid orange light, hares’ eyes show red and, in the moonlight, deer’s eyes look blue. In the wild, any eyes that shine in the night are hunting or fleeing and they might belong to lions, tigers, wolves or lynxes. Every night in the hills animals’ eyes gleam in the white glow of the moon which ensures that even the wild boar can see clearly. The blue-green eyes of the dogs watch over the hunting fauna, all noticing and avoiding each other. There are millions of animal eyes, rendered phosphorescent by the tapetum lucidum, all able to see in the dark so that they can find their prey.

Once winter was over, the villagers wondered if the German let his wild cats go at nightfall. The hillside looked as if it were on fire there were so many luminescent eyes. You could not tell what animals they belonged to but you could see the eyes from your window. Now that the first spring days were warming up, everyone slept with their windows open, so the lions could be heard even in the middle of the night, their sudden roaring startling the villagers from sleep. As well as those whom the lions awakened there were the women who could not get to sleep, those who found the peace of a lonely bed unsettling. Where previously desire might have prevented sleep, since the beginning of the war in Orcières everyone had been worried and exhausted, and bodies no longer touched. Now bodies worked in the day and rested at night far apart from each other. After sowing had come the planting of potatoes, tending the garden, and preparing the sheep to go up to the summer pasture. Even more than in winter, in spring the lifting, dragging, pulling and carrying went on all day, so even though the weather was better now, bodies were overcome with fatigue.