‘It’s not for the lions.’

Wolfgang was annoyed that Joséphine had seen the cage. He would have preferred to be the only one to know about it. He especially did not want anyone in the village to know; however, now that Joséphine was there, he had no choice but to explain the trap, his method of using grain to attract animals, how the wine casks he had found in the abandoned house had holes pierced in them and were filled with grain that the boar came to eat. Then he showed her the Norwegian tar he had painted onto the base of the trees, and the seedlings for the yellow worm. Joséphine did not grasp exactly how it worked, but she understood this was how he trapped wild animals and used the cage to hold them. Since the start of the war, the hills had been awash with prey, and he had found a way to tame them. He could catch as many animals as he wanted in his zoo trap, and he would never run out of food for his wild cats.

‘So you can tell everyone in the village that you can have as much meat as you want and more; tell them that and then they won’t suspect you of stealing their sheep …’

But Wolfgang did not want anyone to know how he managed to catch so many animals without firing a rifle. Otherwise, sooner or later children or old people would try to make traps like his, but they would do it badly, and very quickly the livestock would run out and everything would be ruined.

‘Joséphine, what you see here must be a secret.’

‘Between us, everything is secret.’

He had installed the old cage at the bottom of the igue all by himself. It had taken a herculean effort to transport all the parts here and assemble them in this chasm in the middle of nowhere – the old cage was thirteen and a half metres long and nearly four metres high. This karstic well was a kind of lost territory, an ecosystem never exploited by man, never cultivated. Perhaps in the Stone Age people had lived here, but any plant or tree here now had come from him. There had never been any cultivation or sowing here, no fertiliser or tree-cutting. Since the dawn of time nature had done its best by itself. It was a world apart here, and boar and deer were attracted into the cage by the bait and the tar. Animals came in and found water, and grain in the casks. It was like heaven for the boar which kept coming, sometimes several at a time. Wolfgang used the dog to keep them in – the German shepherd never let his guard down even when faced with tusked boar. Then when Wolfgang, watching from the top of the igue, saw that the food cage was well filled, he pulled the cord and the door closed.