The minute she set eyes on him as they were taking him out of the cardboard box and examining him in the surgery, she fell madly in love with him. She came as close as she could to get a better look at him, raising her head above the level of the partition. He, for his part, as soon as he managed to get his balance, spontaneously reciprocated. Then both of them threw their heads back and clattered loudly with their beaks. After that they began tenderly to remove each other's fleas. Before long they looked as if they had known each other for years. They had become inseparable and were faithful companions for life, with the difference that rather than flying from bell towers to fields and canals, they wandered around wrapped in gauze and bandages in the intensive care ward among their fellows: other injured storks but also seagulls, herons and pelicans. Of course this didn't seem to prevent them from dreaming and making plans for the future. It may well be that in their unhappiness, pain and distress they lived their love more intensely. She had come first, from Epirus. She had a fracture in her left wing from a shotgun injury. He, sent from Thessaly a week later, had been electrocuted and had burns on his right wing and one of his feet. Every two or three days we laid them out one after the other on the operating table in the surgery and cleaned their wounds and changed their bandages. Whenever we picked him up, her concern was written all over her, unremitting. She stretched out her neck and opened her eyes to observe, or paced impatiently up and down, as far as the narrow space would allow her to. He did the same, every time we removed his beloved from his side. When finally the medical attention was at an end, they clattered their beaks from joy at being together again. The blessed event, the fruit of their love, came a little later. Among the newspapers she laid an egg. Both of them took care of it, proudly arranging it with their beaks, smoothing down the strips of newspaper around it. But its metabolism had been weakened. The calcium had been used up in healing the fracture in her wing and there wasn't enough left over to form the eggshell in the normal way. It was too thin, almost transparent. So it broke as soon as she sat on it to incubate it. To everyone's sorrow she wasn't able to give birth to her baby in the intensive ward of the wildlife hospital. To be honest, we don't know if this has been done anywhere in the world.