An important problem of Imre Oravecz’s trilogy is the relationship between man and nature. This brief analyses concentrates only on two motifs and provide a more detailed interpretation of a few short passages of the text, which show striking motivic and structural similarities and seem to be organized in a way that they interpret each other. The problem of the ’quail’, which is also the title of the volume, is one of the most important elements of a rather complex web of references. It signifies (often in a proleptic way) the changes occurring in the relationship between human and nature, domesticity and strangeness, community and individual, or even father and son. In order to gain a clearer picture of the novel’s fractal-like motivic structure, I concentrate on the episodes in which István encounters quails and point out that in each case, the birds are associated with similar feelings and emotions by the language of narration.