Fenton's voice was raised: "I hope it's what you want, but we're going into an area of unpredictability…"

It would be in the third week of its migration. The bird would have left its sub-Saharan wintering grounds around twenty days earlier, have stored weight, strength and fat in the wetlands of Senegal or Mauretania. It would have rested that last night in the southern extreme of the Charente Maritime, and hunted at dawn.

He sold insurance for a Paris-based company annuities, fire and theft, household and motor, life and accident policies, in a quadrangle of territory between La Rochelle in the north, Rochefort in the south, Niort and Cognac in the west. The trade to be gained at a weekend, when clients were at home and not tired, was the most fruitful, but in March and October he never worked weekends. Instead, early in the morning, he left his home at Loulay with his liver-white spaniel and drove a dozen kilometres into the winter-flooded marshland of the Charente Maritime. In the boot of his car was his most prized possession: an Armi Bettinsoli, over and under, shotgun. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, in the early spring and the late autumn, he parked his car and carried the shotgun, wrapped in sacking, a kilo metre away. His sport, as practised by his father and grandfather, was now opposed by the city bastards who claimed to protect the birds. It was necessary to be covert, to move after each shot, because the bastards looked for men enjoying legal sport, to interfere. In the remaining months, he shot pheasants, partridges, rabbits and foxes, but the sport he craved was in March, when the birds migrated north, and October, when they returned south to escape the winter.

That Sunday morning in late March, he saw the bird first as a speck and swung his binoculars up from his chest to make the distant identification. He had already fired and moved twice that morning. The dog had retrieved a swallow, crushed by the weight of shot, and a spotted redshank, which had been alive. He had twisted its neck.