The Heron

by Giorgio Bassani

  ‘No. In Bologna.’

  ‘Oh.’

  For some moments he was rapt, examining the various parts: the barrel, the magazine, the trigger, and mainly the trigger guard below, which was of a special quality of steel – opaque and white, like silver.

  ‘It’s new. Have you tried it out yet?’

  ‘I got it last November, and it still hasn’t been fired once.’

  ‘And what’s the other one? A Krupp?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s an old Three Rings rifle from before the war. Made in ’28 or ’30.’

  ‘I could use that if you’d prefer.’

  ‘No, no,’ he quickly replied. ‘You start with the Browning for now. And we could swap later if you want.’

  He bent down to rummage on the floor of the hide, and brought forth the leather case containing the choke and a box of cartridges.

  ‘Here they are,’ he added, holding out both.

  He seemed more interested in the cartridges than the choke.

  ‘G.P.,’ he read from the box in a muffled voice.

  But he looked worried, pensive. Having leant the rifle on his shoulder in his usual phlegmatic manner, he flicked open the lid of the box and drew out a couple of cartridges, then after weighing them distractedly on the palm of his hand, he slipped them into his trouser pocket. Finally, as he leaned down to place the half-opened box in the boat, he frowned slightly.

  Why should he do that? Was there something else wrong?

  ‘They’re meant to be better than Rottweils and M.B.s. More velocity,’ he said.

  The other didn’t reply. He had already turned to stand up. With his body three-quarters twisted round, he was looking up to the right.

  He too began to scan the sky in that direction and almost immediately spotted an isolated bird which, about a hundred metres up, was flying towards them.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It must be a heron,’ Gavino said.

  It was quite a sizeable bird – with two large, very large, wings, out of proportion with its body, which was thin and small. It advanced with some apparent effort, ploddingly. Its long S-shaped neck, drawn in to its shoulders; its huge brown wings, that seemed made of heavy fabric, opened to waft the biggest possible volume of air under its belly – it looked as though it couldn’t manage to fly against the wind and looked at any moment on the verge of being overturned, of being blown away like a rag.

  What a comical creature! he thought.

  He watched it slowly fly over the stretch of the lagoon which separated the sandbank from the hide and then hover perpendicularly above their heads: keeping practically motionless and slowly gaining a little height. It must surely have been the decoys that attracted the bird here. But before that? Just a little while earlier? What a comical creature! It was a fair question as to what had induced it to fly so far and so laboriously against or almost against the wind, what it had come in search of so very far from the shores, into the middle of the valley.

  ‘I don’t think it would be very edible,’ he said

  ‘You’re right there’ Gavino agreed. ‘It tastes of fish, or more precisely seagull. But it looks good stuffed.’

  The heron once again flew lower. Then one could clearly spot its talons, thin as sticks and tensely drawn back, its large pointed beak, its little reptilian head. Suddenly, though, as if exhausted by its efforts or as if it sensed some danger, it switched directions and, regaining height, within a few seconds disappeared in the direction of the Pomposa church tower.

  ‘It must be written on high,’ Gavino said, with a laugh. ‘Here it’s wise to give a wide berth.’

  It was amusing, he realized, but he didn’t have any desire to laugh.

  He too gestured towards the opposite shore.

  ‘What’s to stop it getting itself shot over that way?’ he grumbled.

  ‘No,’ Gavino replied, with one foot already in the boat. ‘Give it some time, and see if it doesn’t fly all the way back here.’

  He said nothing more, but pushed the boat out into the water and then, sitting in the stern and shoving off with the oar, he began to row away.

  He watched him, covering his eyes against the sun with his hand. He saw him arrive at his destination, step on to dry land, let the dog off its leash, bend down to pick up the box of G.P. cartridges from the bottom of the boat and, finally, having climbed to the top of the islet, quickly search out cover beneath a thicket of marsh reeds. Before firing at almost everything – he must have found something to sit on as only a bit of his cap appeared out of the mass of reeds – he had raised an arm as if to declare ‘I’m here’. Mechanically, he himself had responded with the same gesture.

  5

  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 thoug
h, 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.

  6

  It didn’t drop immediately. He saw it flutter upwards, beat its wide brown wings chaotically, then careen towards the islet from which the shots had issued. It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height. But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces. It was indeed just like an old-style Caproni seaplane – he had time to say to himself as it plummeted down and into the water – the type used in the First World War, all canvas, wood and wire.

  He thought it must be dead and that the dog would rush out to retrieve it. But no. As soon as it had resurfaced, it was ready to rise up on its stilt-like legs and began to turn its tiny head to and fro. ‘Where have I ended up?’ it seemed to be asking itself. ‘And what’s happened to me?’

  It still hadn’t understood a thing. Or very little, for although one wing, the right one, draped down along its side, soon after, it moved its shoulder-blade as though about to take off and fly. Only then must it have realized it was wounded. And in fact from that moment on, it gave up on any further attempt of the kind.

  Restless, unceasingly swivelling its smooth, fatuous head, which had the look of a pleasure seeker’s – elongated behind the nape by that odd, almost imperceptible spiky antenna – it was clearly trying to orient itself, to recognize at least the objects around it. Only a few yards away, half dry and half in the water, it had noticed the punt. What was it? A boat or the body of a large sleeping creature? One way or the other, better keep clear of it. Better not risk reaching the small beach of fine compact sand which that peculiar and threatening thing lay across. Much better. Besides, the stabbing pain at its side wasn’t so noticeable any more. Its wing didn’t hurt as long as it wasn’t moved. Best keep it still.

  He watched it, full of anxiety, utterly identifying himself with the creature. He too was in the dark about what had made so many things happen. Why had Gavino fired? And why didn’t he stand up now, and fire another shot, the coup de grâce? Wasn’t that the rule? And the dog? What was Gavino scared of: that the heron, not having yet lost enough blood, might defend itself with its beak? And the heron? What could it do? Waiting there was all well and good, but for how long and to what end? He felt his mind confused, befuddled, crowded with questions to which there were no apparent answers.

  Quite a few minutes passed in this state. Until, suddenly, he realized the heron had moved.

  It was steering itself in his direction – this he could verify, after raising his hand to his eyes to shield them from the water’s glare – right towards the hide. This he understood. The heron had spotted the decoys. Brightly coloured and catching the oblique sunlight, it was only natural they should have seemed a flock of real birds, busy feeding. It was worth trusting them. There wouldn’t be any danger in that neighbourhood, that was for sure.

  It moved forwards, dragging its wing in the water, with short, rapid successive spurts broken by brief pauses, carefully choosing the shallowest stretches of water. It passed beside the decoys, came on again, ever further on. And finally it was face to face with him, just a metre away from the hide, about to reach the shore. It stopped once more. All brown, except for the feathers on its neck and breast which were a faint beige and its legs which were the yellowish-brown of bone stripped of flesh, of relics, it dipped its head to one side, looking at him, with curiosity, certainly, but unalarmed. And motionless, hardly breathing – aware that the bird was losing blood from a gash halfway along the wing by the joint – he had the chance to stare back for a considerable time.

  It was now right up against the hide, just like a frozen old codger hoping to catch some sun, and although he could no longer see the bird he could sense its presence. Every now and then it shifted to find a better place or to clean its feathers with its beak. Big, bony, out of proportion, and impeded to boot, it moved clumsily and kept bumping into the hide.

  For minute after minute, though, it did the right thing and kept perfectly still. Tucked well in from the cold, whistling gusts of the sea wind, and with the warm planks of the hide at its back, what was it up to? Perhaps it had even cheered up a bit. Although even now it hadn’t understood very well, it had to keep a sharp eye out for
everything. Gather its strength: this for the moment, it was telling itself, must be the main aim. And once it had gathered its strength, whoosh, it would suddenly spread its wings and fly away.

  More time passed, who knows how much.

  All of a sudden, three shots were fired in close succession, followed by thuds which shook him with pain.

  He turned his head towards Gavino.

  ‘Isn’t that enough now?’ he said half-aloud.

  He waited for the birds to surface – all three of them coots, lifeless – and looked at his watch.

  Unfortunately, it was no later than two o’clock, and there would be light good enough to shoot in for at least another hour and a half. But even if, personally, he’d had more than enough at this point, would it be all right to lift his arm and signal to Gavino to call it a day? True, for a while the heron hadn’t budged at all. But in case it should still be alive, what could he do with it anyway? Finish it off point-blank – no, that was out of the question. Capture it, then? Lean out of the hide, gather it in his arms and then carry it back to town? In the car? And to keep it where? In a cage down in the courtyard? He could foresee Nives’ response when she saw him return with a creature like that, and wounded besides, with no end of fees to pay the vet, just for starters. He could foresee her shouting, her protests and her whining …

  The dog had ended its traipsing back and forth. He’d retrieved the last coot and carried it to his master. Then, turning by chance to the right, towards the sandbank, as if seeking a prompt of some sort from that direction, she saw the heron once more.

  It was now some ten metres away from the hide, and judging by the direction it had taken it looked as if it was heading for the sandbank. The din of the last shots just before had certainly given it a fright. Then it had seen the dog go back and forth three times, each time coming ashore with a coot in its mouth. And although wounded, although weakened with loss of blood, and so, more than ever, eager to enjoy the last heat of the sun, shielded from the wind, from one moment to the next the bird had decided it would be sensible to move somewhere safer, and quickly. The broad sandbank there, covered with thick plants more or less the same colour as its feathers, and at the same time high enough to allow a way through without being spotted, perhaps represented the best solution to all its problems. To hide in there, for the meantime, awaiting the night, which was not far off. And then, after that, to wait and see. Because it wasn’t clear that the sandbank was completely surrounded by water. Who could say whether or not it was linked in some way with dry land? And dry land within reaching distance would have meant another possibility of escape, perhaps even of safety, or if perhaps not of absolute safety, the almost certain guarantee of keeping alive at least until tomorrow.