After such a long walk Lise and Franck were starving by evening. When they had eaten and cleared the table, Franck lounged in postprandial contentment on an old wooden chair that he tilted backwards. Legs resting on the stone bench, he watched the dog, which was still sitting under the big tree, not moving. All through dinner they had offered it morsels of food. But nothing seemed to interest it. Nothing was right. It had barely deigned to sniff at the bits of bread that Franck had thrown after dipping them in the dressing from the tomato salad. Even then, it would lick them but wouldn’t eat them. Lise was taking advantage of the summer break to eliminate dairy from her diet and give up all animal protein, so there was nothing in the house that would appeal to a meat eater. Franck wondered what the dog could actually eat. Could a dog decide for itself what it ate and be sure of finding it? He didn’t know. Nowadays dogs just ate dry biscuits – at least, all the dogs he had seen; even the dogs he had filmed with. Dogs that had to be terrifying according to the script and had played their bloodthirsty part on camera only ate the multicoloured biscuits their handlers gave them after shooting. There was nothing wild about that. Alpha really didn’t seem bothered by hunger. He remained calm and a little weary, his head resting on his front paws, which were crossed in front of him. Maybe the long walk had tired him out as well.

‘Alpha … Alpha.’

Hearing Franck call him, the dog raised his head a little, without much conviction.

‘Bambi … Bambi.’

That name didn’t work any better. Franck reflected on Lise’s decision to call him Bambi because of the landscape, the untamed countryside that surrounded them. It was probably true that the dog was an orphan who had lost his mother or master and been left to fend for itself, eventually becoming wild again. He had chosen the name Alpha after his company, but it was also the name of the main character in the futuristic script he was reading, one of the ones that Liem and Travis had sent him. He didn’t like the script in which, yet again, he detected the influence of the fantasy world of video games, but the fact that the hero was called Alpha made him look more favourably on the text. He generally had no interest in science fiction films, apart from Blade Runner or Metropolis, Brazil or 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a few others, like Soylent Green or Planet of the Apes … In fact, now that he thought about it, there were actually quite a few sci-fi films that fascinated him, but he would never invest in that kind of project as a producer. It would no doubt be another source of conflict with Liem and Travis.