From the effort of staring at the long, close row of decoys far out in front of the hide, he became drowsy. He fell asleep, perhaps even dreamed. Then, coming from his left, a brief energetic whistle woke him with a start.
He looked up.
At a height of seventy, eighty metres, half a dozen ducks were crossing the sky above the hide. Ducks – they were ducks, he thought, while he slid out the double-barrelled gun from between his thighs and rested it on the hide’s edge. He could tell by the way that they flew, the sudden, urgent, pulsing rhythm of their short, stocky wings. What kind of duck were they? He’d never been that good at telling right off the various kinds of birds in the valleys. And there were dozens of different types of duck.
They were flying in formation – one at the head and the others in a triangle behind like a squadron of small fighter planes. Hurriedly, like someone running a bit late for an important appointment, and they too were headed in the direction of Romea. ‘Safe journey,’ he murmured. Unless they were suddenly to change direction they’d be arriving within range of the hunters dug in on the shoreline in front within a minute or so.
They didn’t veer. With the wind blowing behind them it was also unlikely they would turn around. But he had only just formulated this thought and replaced the double-barrelled gun back between his legs when he spotted a pair of birds – two almost imperceptible points against the dark wall of cloud growing denser over the dry land – detach themselves from the flock and, after a wide lateral shift, begin their journey back.
He took hold of the Krupp once again. There were indeed just two of them: perhaps a faithful couple, male and female. Passing, they must have spotted the decoys. And now they had returned to take a better look, to make sure of things.
Judging by the slowness with which their forms grew larger, they must have been flying with great difficulty, and you could understand why, as this time the wind was against them. But apart from the wind, might they not also have been undecided, wavering about which route to take? Perhaps, who knows, they might give it all up after a while. Another U-turn, and in a few seconds they would have disappeared …
For more than an hour he remained like this, with his gun in hand, to watch the birds flying past on their way above him. He didn’t shoot. He didn’t even try a single shot. It was Gavino alone, behind his bush, who would shoot the birds one after the other when they came within range. Bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. A series of two, of three, of four, even of five successive shots – it was rare for him ever to miss his target. And for the creatures, killed or wounded, not to fall down into the water with muffled thuds.
The first to fall were those two ducks – two mallards in all probability – which, having flown almost as far as the opposite shore, had turned back, struggling bravely against the wind. Soon after the same fate had befallen a brace of widgeons, these two having arrived from behind them, from the sea, but coming down just a bit beyond the decoys, gliding with their open wings. Next another mallard, this time alone. Then, after various pauses, a long line of coots. The number of birds Gavino had shot had quickly risen to some thirty. In the meantime, crouched within the hide, he had totted up nothing. He was just there to watch, and nothing more.
It was as though, all the while, he’d been dreaming.
The first two ducks, for example – he’d watched them advance until they were almost hanging motionless in front of the hide, at a range of little over a hundred metres. Suddenly, though, they’d plummeted down. Going at full speed, their brown beaks and their little round bloodshot eyes wide open, he had suddenly found them almost on top of him, unexpectedly enormous. He hadn’t fired at them. They had passed by, almost touching him. But a moment later – bang-bang – two shots. His stomach felt the hard recoil.
A little after that, a coot had also whizzed very close by him with the hiss of a bullet – that too had seemed part of a dream. It whistled across and past at who knows how many miles per hour. And yet he had been able to observe its every detail: exactly as though it had been motionless, photographed, stopped in mid-air for ever. The lavender-black feathers, lightly tinted a yellow-olive on its back. Its head, neck and the underside of its tail-feathers black. Its breast very slightly paler. The ends of its wings white. Its flat beak blueish. The feet green, shading into orange nearer the legs. The irises red, barred and glassy. As can happen sometimes, in nightmares, in a second – the second before the five shots fired by Gavino took it in mid-flight and made it plump down into the water like a bundle of sticks – he had been able to see and notice everything and to think about every detail except for taking up his Krupp and pulling the trigger.
Nothing else seemed real to him. Gavino, on his little islet, his forehead wrinkled in a frown and his Browning scorching his hands, was busy scanning above and around so as not to be caught unawares. The dog crouched at his feet, but ready, after each flurry of shots, to leap into the water to retrieve some fresh birds for his master, holding them tight and high in her dripping mouth, and to add them to the pile of dead birds and those in their death throes. He was sitting in his hide, with his rifle in hand, like Gavino, only frozen, unable to make a single move … The real and the unreal, the seen and the imagined, the near and the far: everything became blended, tangled up with each other. Even the normal passage of time, measured in minutes and hours, no longer existed, no longer counted.
Suddenly – it must have been one o’clock in the afternoon – he saw the heron.
It was flying there in front of him, about two hundred metres away, and once again coming from the north, with its characteristic slow and awkward progress like an old Caproni seaplane. He shook himself. ‘What an idiot!’ he exclaimed. It had very much the air of someone who, just out of curiosity, quite needlessly, would end up getting themselves into deep trouble by and by.
It began flying lower, much lower than before. How many metres high? Fifty at most. Having swung to the left a short while before, once again lured by the decoys, there was every likelihood it would soon be flying overhead. And with the choke attached to the barrel, his Browning would easily have brought it down.
He looked in Gavino’s direction. His whole head was sticking out of the bush. He seemed distracted, his head just moving about. Was it possible he hadn’t seen it? That he didn’t think it worth a single G.P. cartridge? Could well be.
But he couldn’t convince himself of that. He remembered the phrase ‘But it looks good stuffed’, and regretted not having clearly and immediately told Gavino that stuffed birds were something he’d never been able to stand.
It flew forwards, now, always further forwards, making a display of itself with extraordinary, unbearable clarity. From the back of its perfectly smooth little head sprouted something thin and wire-like, perhaps a kind of aerial. While his heart in the meantime had begun to beat hard against his ribcage, he was wondering about this, about what the devil that strange thing could be, and was screwing up his eyes to see it better when, suddenly, in the vast expanse of sunlit, windy air, he heard the echo of that now familiar double shot.