This was the shooting season: on the mainland the great lake of Butrinto had a fringe of tinkling ice round its rim, and its surface was patterned with flocks of wild duck. On the brown hills, damp and crumbling with rain, the hares, roe deer, and wild boar gathered in the thickets to stamp and gnaw at the frozen ground, unearthing the bulbs and roots beneath. On the island the swamps and pools had their wisps of snipe, probing the mushy earth with their long rubbery beaks, humming like arrows as they flipped up from under your feet. In the olive-groves, among the myrtles, the woodcock lurked, fat and ungainly, leaping away when disturbed with a tremendous purring of wings, looking like bundles of wind-blown autumn leaves.
Leslie, of course, was in his element at this time. With a band of fellow enthusiasts he made trips over to the mainland once a fortnight, returning with the great bristly carcase of wild boar, cloaks of blood-stained hares, and huge baskets brimming over with the iridescent carcases of ducks. Dirty, unshaven, smelling strongly of gun-oil and blood, Leslie would give us the details of the hunt, his eyes gleaming as he strode about the room demonstrating where and how he had stood, where and how the boar had broken cover, the crash of the gun rolling and bouncing among the bare mountains, the thud of the bullet, and the skidding somersault that the boar took into the heather. He described it so vividly that we felt we had been present at the hunt. Now he was the boar, testing the wind, shifting uneasily in the cane thicket, glaring under its bristling eyebrows, listening to the sound of the beaters and dogs; now he was one of the beaters, moving cautiously through waist-high undergrowth, looking from side to side, making the curious bubbling cry to drive the game from cover; now, as the boar broke cover and started down the bill, snorting, he flung the imaginary gun to his shoulder and fired, the gun kicked realistically, and in the corner of the room the boar somersaulted and rolled to his death.
Mother thought little about Leslie's hunting trips until he brought the first wild boar back. Having surveyed the ponderous, muscular body and the sharp tusks that lifted the upper lip in a snarl, she gasped faintly.
'Goodness! I never realized they were so big' she said. 'I do hope you'll be careful, dear.'
'Nothing to worry about,' said Leslie, 'unless they break cover right at your feet; then it's a bit of a job, because if you miss they're on you.'
'Most dangerous, said Mother. 'I never realized they were so big... you might easily be injured or killed by one of those brutes, dear.'
'No, no, Mother; it's perfectly safe unless they break right under your feet.'
'I don't see why it should be dangerous even then,' said Larry.
'Why not? asked Leslie.
'Well, if they charge you, and you miss, why not just jump over them?
'Don't be ridiculous,' said Leslie, grinning. "The damn* things stand about three feet at the shoulder, and they're hellish fast. You haven't got time to jump over them.'
'I really don't see why not,' said Larry; 'after all, it would be no more difficult than jumping over a chair. Anyway, if you couldn't jump over them, why not vault over them?
'You do talk nonsense, Larry; you've never seen these things move. It would be impossible to vault or jump.'
'The trouble with you hunting blokes is lack of imagination,' said Larry critically. 'I supply magnificent ideas - all you have to do is to try them out. But no, you condemn them out of hand.'
'Well, you come on the next trip and demonstrate how to do it,' suggested Leslie.
'I don't profess to being a hairy-chested man of action,' said Larry austerely. 'My place is in the realm of ideas - the brainwork, as it were. I put my brain at your disposal for the formation of schemes and stratagems, and then you, the muscular ones, carry them out.'
'Yes; well, I'm not carrying that one out,' said Leslie with conviction.
'It sounds most foolhardy,' said Mother. 'Don't you do anything silly, dear. And, Larry, stop putting dangerous ideas into his head.'
Larry was always full of ideas about things of which he had no experience. He advised me on the best way to study nature, Margo on clothes, Mother on how to manage the family and pay up her overdraft, and Leslie on shooting. He was perfectly safe, for he knew that none of us could retaliate by telling him the best way to write. Invariably, if any member of the family had a problem, Larry knew the best way to solve it; if anyone boasted of an achievement, Larry could never see what the fuss was about - the thing was perfectly easy to do, providing one used one's brain. It was due to this attitude of pomposity that he set the villa on fire.
Leslie had returned from a trip to the mainland, loaded with game, and puffed up with pride. He had, he explained to us, pulled off his first left and right. He had to explain in detail, however, before we grasped the full glory of his action. Apparently a left-and-a-right in hunting parlance meant to shoot and kill two birds or animals in quick succession, first with your left barrel and then with your right. Standing in the great stone-flagged kitchen, lit by the red glow of the charcoal fires, he explained how the flock of ducks had come over in the wintry dawn, spread out across the sky. With a shrill whistle of wings they had swept overhead, and Leslie had picked out the leader, fired, turned his gun on to the second bird, and fired again with terrific speed, so that when he lowered his smoking barrels the two ducks splashed into the lake almost as one. Gathered in the kitchen, the family listened spellbound to his graphic description. The broad wooden table was piled high with game, Mother and Margo were plucking a brace of ducks for dinner, I was examining the various species and making notes on them in my diary (which was rapidly becoming more bloodstained and feather-covered), and Larry was sitting on a chair, a neat, dead mallard in his lap, stroking its crisp wings and watching, as Leslie, up to the waist in an imaginary swamp, for the third time showed us how he achieved his left-and-a-right.
'Very good, dear,' said Mother, when Leslie had described the scene for the fourth time. 'It must have been very difficult.'
'I don't see why,' said Larry.
Leslie, who was just about to describe the whole thing over again, broke off and glared at him.
'Oh, you dont?' he asked belligerently. 'And what d'you know about it? You couldn't hit an olive-tree at three paces, Jet alone a flying bird.'
'My dear fellow, I'm not belittling you,' said Larry in his most irritating and unctuous voice. 'I just don't see why it is considered so difficult to perform what seems to me a simple task.'