We find ourselves driving once again across the flat, gridlike scenery east of Venice, beyond the Piave, and across the Livenza, before turning off the autostrada towards the town of Caorle on the Adriatic coast.
Just before the town we turn into a narrow road which becomes a track which follows a network of irrigation ditches through an increasingly deserted agricultural landscape until it fetches up at a gabled, red-brick two-storey building that looks like a country railway station. This is the casone, the hunting lodge, at which the shooting party will soon assemble.
Before we left Venice the Barone briefed me about the formalities. Guests arrive around seven in the evening, drink and talk until it’s time to eat and drink, then, after eating and drinking, gather around an open log fire to play card games, tell jokes and drink. After that there are late-night drinks followed by various manly pranks, like making apple-pie beds for fellow guests, followed by maybe two hours’ oblivion before being woken at four for breakfast. After the morning shoot, the party returns to the casone to eat and drink before going home.
I am the first guest to arrive. The staff flit about adjusting, preparing and table-laying. I nose around. The buildings have been quite extensively tarted up in reproduction rustic style with shiny new brick and timber-clad walls on which hang old prints of hunters at work or lovingly painted depictions of the various kinds of duck they kill. The gun-rack in the hallway is predictable but not the stuffed black bear (shot in Romania) that rears up at the bottom of the stairs, nor the leopard skin stretched across one wall. I learn later that these were both victims of Alberto’s father, Nanyuki, who used to own this lodge and estate.
Car wheels crunch on the gravel outside and the guests begin to assemble. They are not as intimidatingly correct as I had feared, in fact our host is not a nobleman but a chicken millionaire from Vicenza.
There are ten of us for dinner and we barely fill half the great oak dining table. We eat by candlelight. All three courses are fish - apparently, it is not good luck to serve red meat before a shoot. Everything is locally caught and absolutely fresh, my host assures me, apart from the prawns which turn out to be from the USA. (They’re actually a lot more palatable than the rubbery local squid which defy all attempts at mastication.) The sea-food risotto and the local eel and gilt-head are beautifully prepared and Pinot Grigio is liberally poured. A local millionaire called Giuseppe, who has in his time shot everything, including polar bear, waxes wonderfully indignant about the Green movement and is apoplectic about our own royal consort.
‘Prince Philip,’ he shouts, veins bulging, banging the table, ‘head of World Wildlife Fund, kills two hundred pheasant in a day!’
By midnight the party is beginning to break up and some people are actually talking of going home before tomorrow’s shoot.
Alberto seems regretful.
‘There used to be some fun when everyone stayed here, eels in the bed, naughty pictures upstairs. No women,’ he adds wistfully.
‘No women at all.’
*
Up before dawn. It is bitterly, bitterly cold, but the skies are clear and the stars abundant.
Slip a copy of Across the River and into the Trees into my pocket, for Hemingway’s descriptions of a duck-shoot on the frozen lagoon are amongst his most unforgettable images.
Outside the casone the flat-bottomed boats are ready for the hunters. I’m to shoot with Alberto, though not literally, as I’m very fond of ducks and anyway the hunting party would surely not appreciate a novice in such a serious endeavour. Alberto shrugs. ‘Hemingway did not take it so seriously. He would bring a book to read and a bottle of whisky’
Well, now I don’t feel so bad. Alberto checks his Beretta 12-gauge shotgun one last time and we clamber into the boat. A flock of wooden decoy ducks is gathered in the bows, and our boatman sits in the stern with his dog, which will later retrieve the fallen ducks.
‘In bocca al lupo!’ they shout to each other. For an alarming moment I think they may be calling for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In fact it means ‘In the mouth of the wolf,’ the traditional duck-shooters’ equivalent of the actors’ ‘Break a leg!’
Our boats set out in convoy, through the tall grass of the marshes, towards the lakes where our hides are located. This lagoon area, called the Valle, was created and laid out for private duck-shooting and, unlike much of the Veneto, it remains unencroached, wild and mysterious.
As the sun comes up we can see the snow-covered flanks of Monte Cavallo, fifty or sixty miles north, bathed in the rich pink glow of dawn. This makes Alberto uncomfortable. The air is too still, too clear. Duck-shooting is best done in foul weather when the wind out at sea drives the ducks back inland, over the lagoon.
Meanwhile the boatmen are standing and heaving on their oars. I can see Hemingway’s words in Across the River springing to life.
It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boat-man’s oar.
I’d never been that comfortable with ‘rubbery’ ice, but this morning I can see how well the metaphor works. The new ice does indeed bend and flex, clinging on to the oar as it enters the water and sticking to it as it leaves.
Having secured footage of oars and keels and picturesquely cracking ice, the director is happy and the boatmen are able to ship their oars and pull the outboards into life. I can see this pains a traditionalist like the Barone.
‘Motor-boats only came in the late sixties, you know.’ A smile flickers at the corner of his mouth. ‘Of course we all thought it was the end of the world. Like we did when the electricity pylons came in the fifties.’
After about half an hour the narrow channel broadens into a lake, in the middle of which is a tiny artificial island with two plastic barrels sunk into it. Each one is around four and a half feet deep and allows room for the swivel-seat shooting stools.
Alberto and I are put ashore and lower ourselves into our respective barrels. Our boatman throws the decoys into the water beside us then reaches into a cage and produces a number of real ducks which he drops unceremoniously overboard. These are the vivi, live ducks, tethered in the water, whose plaintive quacks will hopefully attract their over-flying colleagues within range of Alberto’s Beretta.
Alberto is no mean gun - only last week he bagged forty or more. But today things are slow, and he produces his duck-whistle to augment the cries of the vivi. Though it looks deceptively simple the whistle can, in the hands of an expert, produce all sorts of different sounds for the different breeds.
All we need now are the ducks. Everything else flies over - geese, swans, cormorant, but the ducks are giving us a wide berth. The one promising flock swings round and heads up from the south towards us.
‘Get down!’ cries Alberto. But the flock veers away at the last minute. ‘Probably mallard,’ comes Alberto’s disappointed voice from the barrel next to me.
Apparently mallard, being a native of these parts, are canny and used to hunters, whereas other ducks, from the sticks of Eastern Europe, passing over on their annual migration to the lakes of Central Africa, are less likely to suspect the presence of men pretending to be small islands.