Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin Read Free Book Online Page B

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.’
    *
    U p 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