Palafox (6 page)
Authors: Eric Chevillard
Nonetheless, leaving the cave, his trail is easy to follow. Broken branches, uprooted bushes, mangled hedges, Palafox did as Palafox does, running full bore before him, straight ahead, scorning obstacles, mountains and valleys, bitter winds, thorns, his path looking like what a grouchy little blonde baby girl might do to her braids, through the wheatfields, the ponds, only giving up a tuft or two of wool here or there, stuck to the broken barbs along a fractured fence. Algernon leading the group guides us up the hill marked with the flesh-less sculpted head of a cow and bloody corpses: millers, road-workers, shepherds and goatherds, with their animals, a fly fisher whose rod had changed hands, then donkeys in the fir trees, flat dray-horses, uncountable cows bathing in their milk. To butter a bovine, we drive the thought out of mind, Palafox on the other hand cultivates it when it comes, he makes a single mouthful of the bee and its honey, the chicken and her egg, the grape-picker and his bunch. We arrive too late at the devastated farm. The dovecote has been gnawed through at one corner and is lying across the yard. Stables and sties are empty, bent bits spit onto the ground, clover and flowering alfalfa in the rabbit hutches. Not a single pig to bless himself with, nor the littlest poussin, as for the blabbing mallards, they will not go far, just to the wall, just to the pond, wherever they go they will be poorly received. Would you have happened to have seen a sort of buzzing bird? So asks Algernon tactfully. Kneeling at the edge of the well, making a megaphone with his hands, he repeats his question in other ways, you wouldn’t have happened to have seen my cat? No one answers, but what could they say? How can one scream, or even sob, without a glottis? From the bottom of the well, wounded but miraculously saved, the old peasant contents herself by throwing a clog at Algernon, and another, then a pebble, hoping he will understand.
A femur (of an ox, claims Franc-Nohain, of a pig, states Algernon, of a ram, has decided Swanscombe, of a buffalo, insists Franc-Nohain, which is not even to say peccary, underscores Algernon, or even of an ibex, argues Swanscombe - African antelope! Indonesian wild pig! Basque chamois! yak! koiropotamus! mouflon! - a femur according to Franc-Nohain, a fibula according to Algernon, a tibia according to Swanscombe) discovered in the meadow adjacent to the farm puts us back on the trail of the beast. Palafox has been delayed, is having dessert in the orchard. A handful should have sufficed, but no, not one cherry is without a cruel beak’s peck, from this one he tears a cheek, from another a thigh. There’s no excuse for it. Purest vandalism. Bad for bad’s sake. He paused at each apple, at every pear (early for the season, or else very late), in each fruit he bored a tunnel with no exit, opened a gallery to show nothing, gnawed heart and lungs, poisoned all the vital organs of the figs, and brained the nuts.
Tracks and leftovers showed us the way. Having eaten, Palafox will have smoothed his whiskers and restored his vigor. We dig in vain for scales or horsehair in the tall grass, a feather that would suggest which way he went. It would be only reasonable to assume that Palafox is busy digesting at the moment, under our noses or nowhere near at all, hiding beneath a stone or hidden in the branches. Patience, hunger, always hunger, hunger which he supposes to have gotten past and left behind will make him step from the woods on two paws and three tails, his wind-beaten side, miserable. But the wait, this time again, could be long. Palafox has had all the time in the world to stock up on provisions, grain in his belly, meat in his crop, fish in the expandable pocket of his beak, dried fruit to nibble filling his jowls - enough to endure a siege, all the more so for a reptile of his size, capable in other circumstances of incredible speed, who digests slowly, slowly, plunged into a sort of lethargic sleep which could last weeks. In all likelihood therefore, immobile as crabs mimicking pebbles, eyelids closed to avoid distraction, Palafox melds into a herd, a poultry yard, an orchard, a few feet from us or nowhere near, curled up under the shelter of a bush or pressed against the bottom of his burrow. It was he who was seen close to the bank where yesterday we spotted his tracks among those of beavers and woodpeckers. Hikers heard him knocking with violent, regular blows against the trunk of a birch - testimony corroborated by the log dike newly built across the stream and by the rise in the water level, drowning men and beasts, flooding meadows and nearby farms. In the evening, Palafox would have still attacked a family out for a walk, biting a child in the heel, stinging his mother on the lip, soiling the father’s hat, finally caught up in and struggling in the sister’s hair, the sister who hasn’t spoken since, but perhaps one day will walk again.
We are no longer the only ones on his heels. The countryfolk arm themselves, organize search posses, set traps, bird netting, set snares, nooses, prepare ferrets, falcons, mirrors, nets, bird-traps, mousetraps, glue traps, pesticides, sulfurous wickers, poisons, gasses, fumigants. Their displeasure is no source of bafflement. Palafox pillages their haylofts, their stores of wheat, gnawing and burrowing, he empties beets from within, he parasites, perforates, grinds, weakens. He devours buds, seedlings, bulbs, rhizomes. What he doesn’t eat rots. Where he ripped the shallots from their rootlets, you see black necroses. He weaves fine tight webs which asphyxiate the young shoots, seedlings, cuttings. He stunts the growth of small trees, bores out their trunks, blocks the circulation of the sap. The damage is incalculable. On the list of natural disasters, Palafox rises through the ranks, neither drought nor hurricane ever caused as much damage as this single Colorado beetle. Nothing frightens him, neither the scarecrows in the fields, nor the aluminum ribbons in the apricot trees, not the little owls crucified to the fences, not the cries of buzzards or kites broadcast uninterrupted over loudspeakers - to complete the illusion the cries seem to come from the pumpkins themselves. Palafox remains elusive. A few dogs from the farms dispatched to pursue his scent return rabid and have to be destroyed. Now we barely get a glimpse of him if that, sometimes a red shadow, a silver shimmer, a brown shape which leaps from the ground, shaking his little pink hands like an impudent marionette, or a green tail which slides silently between stones. We immediately grab a stick, you name it, a sachet, a scythe, we rush, but are too late, again too late, the black dot on the horizon, the white dot at the zenith, Palafox remains out of reach.
5.
Spaniels, beagles, bassets and border collies, a fine pack of hounds, followed by beaters, a dozen or so - all preceding Sadarnac whom we weren’t expecting and who jumped from the dog-cart, his canes fagotted on one shoulder, let him come along if he wants to. Palafox is in danger. The countryfolk are expanding their search, armed with their anger, shotguns and pitchforks in fist, it’s a matter of saving the district from a volcano, nothing more nothing less. They will not hesitate to fire. The dogs will help us to flush him out before they do, Algernon wants him alive, Algernon remains convinced that with patience, effort, work, something can be made of him. The progress the creature made in its first lessons was sufficiently encouraging. His aggression diminished, he was frequently docile around us, even affectionate, with a sweetness at first impossible to imagine, given his carapace covered with barbs, his long rostrum perforated and sharp as a saw, the foul liquid he emits when rising so as not to soil himself, his fanlike tail, or also this nasty habit he will have to lose, of swallowing his prey alive. Of course, Palafox, like ourselves, has four hands or, depending on the need and the task, like ourselves, has four feet, two magnificent almond-shaped black eyes and a jovial smile between his ears, but this wouldn’t be enough to take him in our arms - the elephant and the mosquito both have trunks, have they ever shared an embrace, a real embrace, a single brotherly embrace? Our physical similarities don’t explain everything. Look elsewhere for explanations of these crude moments of tenderness.
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.
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.
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