The humid ground kept a record of his itinerary, straight ahead to the crossroads, then to the left, again to the left. The tracks are clear all the way to the forest. When Palafox leaps he sends his posterior paws far in front of his anterior paws, so that the oval impressions of the former always preceded those of the shallower tridactylic latter. Both come to an end at forest’s verge, as if Palafox took off for good never to return to earth or, who knows, opting for a mode of locomotion most discrete, infinitely more so, had preferred to continue by swimming.
Fruitless morning hunt.
Sounds of horns.
Our guides signal us at last, with horns, after a fruitless morning hunt. A stag? A wild boar? Or, him? The dogs seem out of sorts, a rare disarray in hunting dogs, in which respect they recall the sea horse, similarly nonplussed by you-name-it. But that’s as far as the similarities go, a sea horse is less faithful, more independent, something of the cat in him, perhaps. Some among us recommend sun exposure, others blotting paper, now the conversation turns to the preservation of sea horses, knowing that the sun makes them shrivel and fades their colors but that too often, alas, they rot under the blotter — when no one is willing to alter his position the discussion bogs down. Not another word. The animal approaches, his gallop resounds in the silence, and Franc-Nohain regales us with a similar case of a foreign sovereign preceded in his travels by his drummers. A tree conceals him once again, an oak, one of these enormous oaks from which one would have the right, finally, to expect something other than acorns, better than acorns, acorns, three hundred years of acorns, nothing but acorns, acorns, acorns, why not wise maxims for example — at the foot of which families would unpack their picnics without the slightest regard, worse still without a crumb for the legendary patriarch crouched there, today having abandoned all hope of disengaging his beard from the roots, around which the family now sated dances, and, compelled in order to close their dance circle, it’s sad to say, tear the baby apart.
A wild boar would have charged. A stag would have been frozen in place and would have devoured us with his eye, incredulous, still full of love, looking to divine our intentions, judging the joke to be infantile and of doubtful taste, nonetheless ready to laugh with us, out of courtesy. Someone then would have shouldered his rifle. The stag would have stared hard for an instant to be certain to have understood, before resolving, too late, to flee. Palafox, upon seeing us, swings around us and forks off into the undergrowth. The pack of hounds takes off after him, the small group of us stays together, womanizers, pipe-smokers, lovers of billiards and old whisky, among other aptitudes. The bushes impede our progress. We move slowly (similarities end there, snails live in bunches on thistle and our efforts in this sense fail without glory one after the other), the movement that frees us from one bramble delivers us to the next and we progress in this manner, as though carried in triumph, but in actual fact skinned by the cutpurses who put on our hats, blow their noses in our handkerchiefs, under the pretext of touching us, and claw at our hands and faces. It was on a similar fine spring afternoon, in identical circumstances, that Franc-Nohain while struggling dropped his rifle and that our friend Chancelade, the father of the present Chancelade, struck right in the heart, crumpled. Among the many hypotheses mentioned in the instance of violent death — sordid settling of affairs, tragic amorous contretemps, inexplicable and momentary madness, bitter battle for power — it was the unfortunate accident model that was maintained and broadcast with a few alterations to key details, Franc-Nohain really only blamed the roe deer. We had been tracking them since dawn, sensitive to butterflies as well (not particularly credible as a metamorphosis from spineless prickly black caterpillars, come now, look elsewhere), to their furtive flight, under the spell of their days (the pretty vanessa morio and its soot-black wings rimmed with yellow which slips a poppy into the midst of its blue bouquet, periwinkle, forget-me-not, is doubtless not the most representative of country people), but stingy with our buckshot. The herd wasn’t far; the bramble presented itself to us as chaperone, and how could we refuse and under what pretext? The roes slipped away from us. In a way, the ex-Chancelade paid for their escape. A few tears, a few scratches, this time the damage isn’t as bad, repairable with a little green thread, as much rose, and some brown copper buttons tanned for our jackets.
The pack of hounds has muddied the faint trail in the humus that Palafox leaves when he soars off or lands, prints left by his wings. On the leaves and the dark mosses, on the other hand, his trail of saliva is still very clear, very white, very fine, with several variations of the scallop stitch at the end of which a basset hound is lying as if asleep, but his head is between his back paws, a spaniel’s head, he is not really asleep. In a nearby bush, Algernon finds the body of the spaniel cleaved longitudinally in two. The blood had not dribbled onto the fur, the longitudinal cut was made with care. Essentially, as we see, the biology of dog and man is not so different. There’s the heart, the intestines and the brain, less of a jumble, sure, but still complex. And the lungs, the liver, the stomach, the kidneys are all there, where they should be, we could make do. A few of the dogs, once springy and soft, henceforth stiff and stout, tongue and chops now blue, pink noses pale, eyes yellow, and yet seem not to have been touched. Some, disemboweled, disgorged and carved alive, bear marks from blows and seem truly dead, those over there, without any reservation beyond the ticks leaping and the breeze ruffling their fur. All in all, a huge sample, in fact the gamut of shrewd methods of disposing of a dog without having to resort to drowning or shooting, nothing more than the application of tentacles, fangs, horns, venom and your ten fingers. Under such conditions, following Palafox’s trail is child’s play, a real pleasure, the dog-pack does its job well. After three hours’ march, nevertheless, the traces diminish. The ear of a beagle, here. A bit farther, the other half of the animal. Night falls. We take turns by the fire. Of the single hound found alive, four paws are missing. He moans, asleep on one side, he no longer leaps up when we near. We finish him off more than once during the night, with the same seizing of our hearts each time, with a mortal blow to his neck.
Our strategy, designed for the carnage of rock partridges, a crowning success well beyond our expectations (haven’t we all pheasant feathers in our caps?) shows its limitations. With certain game, it is awkward to use the same strategy, as with killing one’s grandmother. This is the first major lesson the learning of which we owe to Palafox. And we’ll reiterate: there are many things to learn from him, certainly in the wooded domain of the hunt but not only there, not only, he knows the grasses that cure and, by instinct, before everyone, before the clouds, what the weather will be the next day. And better than anyone, adds Sadarnac — the coral massifs of the Sargasso. But do not listen to him.