Hunting in our part of the valley started shortly after seven o'clock one Sunday morning, with salvos coming from either side of the house and from the mountains behind. It sounded as though anything that moved would be at risk, and when I went out for a walk with the dogs I took the biggest white handkerchief I could find in case I needed to surrender. With infinite caution, we set off along the footpath that runs behind the house toward the village, assuming that any hunter worth his gun license would have moved well away from the beaten track and into the tangled undergrowth farther up the mountain.
There was a noticeable absence of birdsong; all sensible or experienced birds had left at the sound of the first shot for somewhere safer, like North Africa or central Avignon. In the bad old days, hunters used to hang caged birds in the trees to lure other birds close enough for a point-blank shot, but that had been made illegal, and the modern hunter now had to rely on woodcraft and stealth.
I didn't see much evidence of that, but I did see enough hunters and dogs and weaponry to wipe out the entire thrush and rabbit population of southern France. They hadn't gone up into the forest; in fact, they had barely left the footpath. Knots of them were gathered in the clearings-laughing, smoking, taking nips from their khaki-painted flasks and cutting slices of saucisson-but of active hunting-man versus thrush in a battle of wits-there was no sign. They must have used up their ration of shells during the early morning fusillade.
Their dogs, however, were anxious to get to work. After months of confinement in kennels, they were delirious with liberty and the scents of the forest, tracking back and forth, noses close to the ground and twitching with excitement. Each dog wore a thick collar with a small brass bell-the clochette-hanging from it. We were told that this had a double purpose. It signaled the dog's whereabouts so that the hunter could position himself for the game that was being driven toward him, but it was also a precaution against shooting at something in the bushes that sounded like a rabbit or a boar and finding that you had shot your own dog. No responsible hunter, naturellement, would ever shoot at anything he couldn't see-or so I was told. But I had my doubts. After a morning with the pastis or the marc, a rustle in the bushes might be too much to resist, and the cause of the rustle might be human. In fact, it might be me. I thought about wearing a bell, just to be on the safe side.
Another benefit of the clochette became apparent at the end of the morning: it was to help the hunter avoid the humiliating experience of losing his dog at the end of the hunt. Far from the disciplined and faithful animals I had imagined them to be, hunting dogs are wanderers, led on by their noses and oblivious of the passage of time. They have not grasped the idea that hunting stops for lunch. The bell doesn't necessarily mean that the dog will come when called, but at least the hunter can tell roughly where he is.
Just before noon, camouflage-clad figures started to make their way to the vans parked at the side of the road. A few had dogs with them. The rest were whistling and shouting with increasing irritation, making a bad-tempered hissing noise-"Vieng ici! Vieng ici!"-in the direction of the symphony of bells that could be heard coming from the forest.
Response was patchy. The shouts became more bad tempered, degenerating into bellows and curses. After a few minutes the hunters gave up and went home, most of them dogless.
We were joined a little later for lunch by three abandoned hounds who came down to drink at the swimming pool. They were greatly admired by our two bitches for their devil-may-care manner and exotic aroma, and we penned them all in the courtyard while we wondered how we could get them back to their owners. We consulted Faustin.
"Don't bother," he said. "Let them go. The hunters will be back in the evening. If they don't find their dogs, they'll leave a coussin."
It always worked, so Faustin said. If the dog was in the forest, one simply left something with the scent of the kennel on it-a cushion or, more likely, a scrap of sacking-near the spot where the dog had last been seen. Sooner or later, the dog would come back to its own scent and wait to be picked up.
We let the three hounds out, and they loped off, baying with excitement. It was an extraordinary, doleful sound, not a bark or a howl but a lament, like an oboe in pain. Faustin shook his head. "They'll be gone for days." He himself didn't hunt, and regarded hunters and their dogs as intruders who had no right to be nosing around his precious vines.
He had decided, he told us, that the moment had come to pick the table grapes. They would start as soon as Henriette had finished servicing the camion. She was the mechanically minded member of the family, and every September she had the job of coaxing another few kilometers out of the grape truck. It was at least thirty years old-maybe more, Faustin couldn't remember exactly-blunt-nosed and rickety, with open sides and bald tires. It had ceased to be roadworthy years ago, but there was no question of buying a new truck. And why waste good money having it serviced at a garage when you had a mechanic for a wife? It was only used for a few weeks a year, and Faustin was careful to take it on the back roads to avoid meeting any of those officious little flics from the police station at Les Baumettes, with their absurd regulations about brakes and valid insurance.
Henriette's ministrations were successful, and the old truck gasped up the drive early one morning, loaded with shallow wooden grape trays, just deep enough for a single layer of bunches. Stacks of trays were placed along each line of vines, and the three of them-Faustin, Henriette, and their daughter-took their scissors and set to work.
It was a slow and physically uncomfortable business. Because the appearance of table grapes is almost as important as their taste, every bunch had to be examined, every bruised or wrinkled grape snipped off. The bunches grew low, sometimes touching the earth and hidden by leaves, and the pickers' progress was in yards per hour-squatting down, cutting, standing up, inspecting, snipping, packing. The heat was fierce, coming up from the ground as well as beating down on the necks and shoulders. No shade, no breeze, no relief in the course of a ten-hour day except the break for lunch. Never again would I look at a bunch of grapes in a bowl without thinking of backache and sunstroke. It was past seven when they came in for a drink, exhausted and radiating heat, but satisfied. The grapes were good and three or four days would see them all picked. I said to Faustin that he must be pleased with the weather. He pushed back his hat and I could see the line sharp across his forehead where the burned brown skin turned white.
"It's too good," he said. "It won't last." He took a long pull at his pastis as he considered the spectrum of misfortunes that could occur. If not storms, there might be a freak frost, a plague of locusts, a forest fire, a nuclear attack. Something was bound to go wrong before the second batch of grapes was picked. And, if it didn't, he could console himself with the fact that his doctor had put him on a diet to reduce his cholesterol level. Yes, that was certainly a grave problem. Reassured at having remembered that fate had recently dealt him a black card, he had another drink.
IT HAD taken me some time to get used to having a separate purpose-built room devoted exclusively to wine-not a glorified cupboard or a cramped cavity under the stairs, but a genuine cave. It was buried in the bottom of the house, with permanently cool stone walls and a floor of gravel, and there was space for three or four hundred bottles. I loved it. I was determined to fill it up. Our friends were equally determined to empty it. This gave me the excuse to make regular visits-errands of social mercy-to the vineyards so that guests should never go thirsty. In the interests of research and hospitality, I went to Gigondas and Beaumes-de-Venise and Chateauneuf-du-Pape, none of them bigger than a large village, all of them single-minded in their dedication to the grape. Everywhere I looked, there were signs advertising the caves that seemed to be at fifty-yard intervals. Dégustez nos vins! Never has a invitation been accepted with more enthusiasm. I had dégustations in a garage in Gigondas and a château above Beaumes-de-Venise. I found a powerful and velvety Chateauneuf-du-Pape for thirty francs a liter, squirted into plastic containers with a marvelous lack of ceremony from what looked like a garage pump. In a more expensive and more pretentious establishment, I asked to try the marc. A small cut-glass bottle was produced, and a drop was dabbed on the back of my hand, whether to sniff or to suck I wasn't quite sure.