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On a 1960s Extremaduran estate, the simple-minded labourer Azarías lavishes tenderness on a pet jackdaw he calls 'milana bonita'. During a bad day's shooting, the frustrated señorito Iván shoots the bird out of pique. Azarías, serving as his loader on a later hunt, hangs him from a tree with a rope, the one act of violence in a lifetime of submission.
Paco el Bajo's extraordinary nose for game makes his body the estate's most valuable hunting tool, so the señorito uses him like a tracking dog. When Paco breaks his leg, Iván presses him back into the field, and the leg heals badly. The labourer's talent does not raise his standing. It only increases how thoroughly his body is used up.
Iván displays his labourers to visitors, even having them sign their names to show they are not illiterate, as evidence that the old order is benign and the peasants satisfied. The dependants' forced deference, their 'as you wish, señorito', becomes the master's evidence that no injustice exists. The system reads its victims' learned silence as their consent.
The novel sets the señorito's casual killing of birds, and his treatment of men like hunting dogs, against the 'innocent' Azarías's care for owls and jackdaws. Moral rank inverts social rank: the person the system classes as least rational shows the only unmixed gratuitous love. Their reverse is the powerful, who treat every creature beneath them, human or animal, as disposable sport.