Julien cut the engine and went out into the pouring rain. He whistled twice. Franck got out too and Alpha rushed towards him, head lowered, and rubbed up against his legs.

‘See, your dog’s done his job. I’d better get mine back or they’ll give your boys a bit of a fright.’

Julien whistled again and the two dogs turned around, their coats drenched and their faces grim. It was now a mixture of rain and hail that hammered down on the truck.

Julien and Franck got back in the Land Rover. Suddenly, the sound of hailstones pummelling metal was all you could hear. Maurice got out a pack of tobacco and rolled two cigarettes with his fat, dry fingers. He offered one to Franck, who declined.

‘OK, so we’re not going yet?’

‘We’ll wait for it to let up a bit, because it’s gonna get heavy. Look at the dogs – you can tell it’s going to get worse.’

Julien got the dogs to climb into the truck. They looked nervous and had their heads lowered, signs indicating an imminent storm The three dogs struggled to squeeze inside, two of them taking up the floor space by pressing themselves up against the men’s legs, and Alpha sliding behind the seats, next to the guns.

‘Anyway, don’t stress. Your guys have got to be over there. See, there’s a gap at the end that looks like a path, except there’s nothing there but a kind of cave above a sheer drop. They must be sheltering there.’

‘What if they get away?’

‘They can’t go right and they can’t go left. This is their only way out, unless they jump … But hurl themselves a hundred metres into the water? They won’t do it.’

The poachers drew on their fat cigarettes, coughing up dirty brown smoke that hung in the air like a cloud. Franck sat between them, and he asked Julien to open the window a little, but a shower of rain came flying in. Then the clouds following the river got even darker, shot through with lightning. The three of them watched the spectacle, spellbound and fatalistic, at the mercy of the elements, while the dogs looked like they were trying to disappear into the ground.

‘You know the house you’re renting … Well, you’re kind of repeating the story.’

‘What story?’

‘The hundred sheep.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘An animal tamer lived there once, a real one, with lions. I mean a hundred years ago. Ask Maurice – the shepherdess was sort of related to his great-grandmother.’