'If the adder quest goes on for days, it is still best to preserve the mood, to think of adders all day, and when asleep to dream of them. The dreams, I have found, are of two sorts – pleasant and unpleasant. In the former we are the happy first finders of the loveliest and most singular serpents ever looked upon; in the second we unwittingly go up barefooted into a place from which we cannot escape, a vast flat region extending to the horizon, littered with adders. We have lifted a foot and don't know where to set it, for there is not one square foot of ground which is not already occupied by an adder coiled in readiness to strike."

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), an Argentinean ornithologist, naturalist and writer, was of British origin. He is a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in Great Britain, where he settled in 1869. It was his books on the English countryside which brought about a return-to-nature movement in the 1920s and 1930s and established his reputation in Europe. Among his numerous works, those translated into French are: Vertes Demeures (Seuil, 1984, out-of-print), Sous le vent de la pampa (Payot, Voyageurs, 2002), Un flâneur en Patagonie (Payot, Voyageurs, 2002), Contes méphitiques (J'ai lu, 2011) and Terre pourpre (La Table Ronde, 2012).