Then Dr. Semperweiss’s gun appeared before his eyes, leaning against the desk, and it brought back images of the time when his father and uncle had taught him to shoot. They hunted pheasants, strange birds that burst out from underfoot and flew heavily into the air with a whir. Their ungainliness was annoying; it prompted one to think them to blame for their own deaths. It was not hard to shoot them, and his uncle often succeeded. But Mieczyś was quite recalcitrant about killing them, and always aimed a centimeter to the left—a minor deception, “pheasant distance” as he called it—an action that neither his uncle nor his father ever noticed, preferring to call the shot “abortive.” Pheasant distance was a defiance strategy similar to reticence, vanishing at the relevant moment or moving out of sight. Mieczysław appeared to take part in the game imposed on him but found a way of escaping it. A slight shift of the sights, imperceptible to others, thwarted the whole performance.

— The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (Page 66 - 67)