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It's that time of the year again and Barry Unsworth is trying to keep the hunters off his property in Umbria

Magione

HERE in Umbria the hunting season is again upon us. Black Sunday - the first Sunday in September - has been and gone. From now until the end of January the hills around us will resound with gunfire. Seven years ago, just at this time of year and impelled by much the same stress of feeling, I wrote a newspaper article about Italian hunting (which means shooting creatures, mainly small) from the point of view of one living in rural Italy and so seeing, and suffering from, the business at first hand. We still live in the same, very beautiful place; and the fact that it is autumn now and was autumn when I wrote before is not really a coincidence, because it is then that the season is in full flush, the ardour of the hunters hasn't been dampened by rainy mornings, there hasn't yet been time for us to develop even a partial resignation to the loud reports of the rifles, the killing and wounding in our immediate vicinity.

In those days we were recent arrivals; there was much that was unfamiliar to us. There were things we should have made sure about in advance and somehow didn't: whether there was enough water, for example; whether there was any de facto right-of-way through our land. We were lucky in these respects - luckier than we deserved. But it did not occur to us to ask about the hunting; and in any case we could hardly have known that our four acres were on an ancestral hunting route, that generations of men with guns and dogs had come down through these terraces of olive and wine, down into our little wood and along our stream, shooting at practically anything that moved.

# posted by Medical Information : 4:17 AM