The hunt always ended up like this, with Evi and I fighting over some dead animal. Why we hunted together was a mystery, because we knew that whatever fun we had at first would turn into bitterness. Two or three months after our last dispute, I used to call him, or he used to call me, we made apologies, packed our bags and set out to a hunting ground where the game would be plentiful, dangerous, and above all talkative. Many years have passed now, and I realised that it was that last idiosyncrasy that got on our nerves eventually. The hunt itself went fine. Decoding Mother Nature's little secrets, that was really good. For instance, Evi was a scents and smells specialist. He could sniff what looked like dew drops on a twig and announce that a pregnant female had been peeing there, and that she was due in two days, so the nest couldn't be far. Do I need to say that Evi's family was totally sanitised and odourless, and that he felt utterly useless and wasted at home ?
I was more the sound man. I had the so-called perfect ear, and this came very handy when stalking preys whose only apparent activity was to imitate the rustlings of leaves, or the very murmur of growing mushrooms. Which leads us to the talking problem. After several weeks of caking ourselves with mud, we could finally point our guns to the victim, who had just made the lethal mistake of overlooking the pair of harmless, rotten tree stumps that had suddenly emerged in its front lawn. And now these very stumps had nasty smirks on their faces and big rifles in their hands. But, right after this ultimate proof of animal dumbness, the victim started talking its head off, spewing words in an unstoppable flow. Why do you want to kill me, What did I do to you, My family will sue you, things like that. Of course, the whole show was nothing but an atavistic safety mechanism activated by the blunt force of animal instinct, but it never failed to keep us from pulling the trigger longer than we