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On Sunday right after lunch, my father began preparing muskrat skins and cut his finger on a dirty penknife An orange erythema appeared around the wound When he got a fever, his lymph nodes swelled up and purple spots spread over his back, my mother called the ambulance from the village mayor’s house It came two hours later and took him away to the hospital, sirens blaring, with a suspected case of blood poisoning My mother said they replaced all his blood and pumped medicines into his stomach with a special pump   Miraculously, he managed to turn the corner after three weeks, but when he came home I hardly recognised him: he had lost more than twenty pounds and had gone almost completely deaf His eyes had lost their brightness, and his formerly swarthy face had turned the colour of a horseradish root He was given sick leave and for the time being stopped going to the paper mill He would get up at seven, throw his camouflage jacket over his shoulders and look out of the dining room window at the pond and the beehives, which stood scattered among bare currant bushes At nine, he would wash, put on his loafers and change into a shirt and his favourite, slightly too tight jumper with a black and white diamond pattern After swallowing two raw eggs, he’d look through old illustrated books about birds and fish which he’d brought home from the recycling centre at the mill, or he’d take out an old hunting knife with a deer-hoof handle from his taxidermy box and would sit opening and closing it as if he were playing some sort of game That’s how it was almost every day: he didn’t stuff animals any more, he didn’t play poker, he didn’t go fishing and, increasingly, he hardly ever said a word to anyone   He perked up only when he read in Beekeeping magazine that over the course of the harsh winter the frost had destroyed numerous apiaries in southern Poland He jumped up from the sofa, fetched a blackened saucepan from the dresser, poured