Sure enough, the mouse came back. Every Sunday he would wait for it to appear; it irritated him and he came to resent it. He decided that he must get rid of it.

So, having closed the door behind him, he scattered some cake-crumbs on the altar-steps and stationed himself beside the hole with a stick in his hand.

After a very long wait, a little pink snout appeared, followed by the mouse itself. He gave it a quick tap with his stick and was amazed to see its little body lying motionless in front of him. There was a tiny bloodstain on the flagstone. He quickly wiped it clean with his sleeve, threw the mouse outside and said nothing to anyone.

The castle gardens were visited by all manner of fledglings that came to peck at the seeds. Julian devised a method of firing peas from a hollow reed. When he heard birds twittering in a tree, he would tiptoe towards it, take aim with his pipe and blow out his cheeks. The young birds would come showering down on top of him in such great numbers that he could not refrain from laughing out loud, delighted at his own mischief.

One morning, as he was walking back alongside the curtain wall, he saw a fat pigeon preening itself in the sun on top of the battlements. Julian stopped to look at it. There was a breach at this point in the castle wall and he found his hand resting on a chip of loose stone. His arm whisked round, the stone struck the bird and it plummeted into the moat below.

He scrambled down after it, scratching himself on the undergrowth and hunting everywhere with the agility of a young dog.

The pigeon had been caught in the branches of a privet bush; its wings were broken but its body was still quivering.

The child was exasperated by its stubborn refusal to die. He proceeded to wring its neck. The bird's convulsions made his heart beat faster and a flood of savage pleasure ran through his body. As the bird finally went stiff in his hands, he almost swooned.

That evening, as they were eating their supper, his father declared that Julian was now old enough to learn how to hunt and he went off to find an old copybook of his in which every aspect of hunting was explained in a series of questions and answers. In this book, a master demonstrated to his pupil the art of training dogs, taming falcons and setting traps; he explained how to recognize a stag by its droppings, a fox by its footprints or a wolf by the scratch-marks it leaves on the ground, how best to spot their tracks or make them break cover, where an animal is most likely to go to ground and what are the most favourable wind conditions. Finally, there was a list of all the different hunting calls and a set of rules for distributing the kill.

When Julian was able to recite all this by heart, his father presented him with a pack of hunting hounds.

The pack consisted of twenty-four Barbary greyhounds, swifter than gazelles but not always easy to keep to heel, and seventeen pairs of Breton retrievers, their russet coats flecked with white markings, full-chested dogs with an unerring hunting instinct and the most fearsome of barks. For tracking wild boar and for other particularly dangerous confrontations there were forty griffons with coats as shaggy as bears. A group of Tartary mastiffs, as tall as donkeys, the colour of fire, broad-backed and straight-limbed, were specially trained to hunt the wild ox. There were spaniels with black coats that gleamed like satin and talbots whose bark was as lusty as that of any beagle. In a separate enclosure, growling, shaking their chains and rolling their eyes, were eight Alani wolfhounds, huge beasts capable of savaging a man on horseback and quite fearless even in the face of lions.

All these dogs were fed on the finest wheat bread, drank from special stone water-troughs and each had its own sonorous name.

The falcons were, if anything, even more remarkable than the hounds. The noble lord had spared no expense and had managed to acquire tercel hawks from the Caucasus, sakers from Babylon, gerfalcons from Germany and peregrine falcons captured on high cliffs that brave the icy waters of far distant lands. They were housed in a shed with a thatched roof, each attached to its perch in order of size. In front of the shed was a small expanse of lawn on to which the birds were periodically released in order to give them some exercise.

Rabbit nets, hooks, wolf-traps and all manner of other hunting devices were constructed.

They would often set off into the countryside with a group of pointers. The dogs would quickly mark their prey and the huntsmen would creep forward and carefully spread a huge net over them as they lay motionless on the ground. At a word of command, the dogs would all start barking and flocks of startled quail would fly up into the net. The ladies of the neighbourhood, invited to the hunt by their husbands, the children and the maidservants would all rush forward and the birds were caught with ease.

On other occasions, they would beat a drum to start hares, dig ditches to catch foxes or set traps which would spring shut to catch a wolf by its paw.

But Julian had little taste for such easy contrivances. He much preferred to go off hunting on his own, with just his horse and his falcon. The falcon he chose was nearly always a great Scythian tartaret, as white as snow. Its leather hood was topped with a plume of feathers and golden bells jingled at the tips of its blue feet.