There is a French saying which runs: ‘A dry fisherman and a wet hunter have the same sad look.’
Living Relic, Ivan Turgenev
*****
One of Turgenev’s ‘Sketches from a Hunter’s Album’: a short story that could be told on canvas, so intimate are the descriptions, so charged the emotions. The reader is pulled into the wattle hut to sit beside the narrator in an unexpected conversation with a ‘living relic’.