Welcome to May MEMOIR!
Day 20
For the entire month of May, I'll be sharing part of each chapter from my memoir, Ca va? Stories from Rural Life in Southern France.
Where there are hunting dogs, there are hunters…. and some get a little too close for comfort.
Chapter 19: The Hunters
One Saturday morning while working in the garden, Christophe and I are startled by an earth shattering “boom” that cracks through the air.
“What was that?” I bolt up.
Christophe looks in the direction of a neighboring ridge and then points out the culprit wearing a day glow orange vest. “It’s a hunter”, he says. “He shouldn’t be this close to the village; they need to keep a distance of at least 500 yards. I’d say he’s no more than 300 yards from us.”
Christophe is disgusted. “Someone is going to get hurt one day, and it’s going to be worse than just a cow.”
“A cow?” I ask a bit confused. “How is a cow involved?”
“Didn’t Monsieur Gousse tell you about that?” He asks.
Perhaps he did and I just didn’t understand, but I have no recognition of a cow in any of his stories, and curious to find out more, I murmur, “No”.
“He was out one afternoon when he saw it laying in the field. It was flat on its stomach, so he got a little closer to check it out. That’s when he saw it was shot in the back of the head”, Christophe says.
“So he went to tell the owner about it, who didn’t seemed phased at all. He knew; he said. It was his hunting battalion that shot it. He said he’d ‘take care of it later’. It was not his lack of responsibility to clean up the carcass, or even his defense of someone killing an animal like that, but what really got Monsieur Gousse upset is that it was in the field just behind their house. It was literally yards away from where Madame Gousse often plants her seedlings. Given the wrong situation, she could get hurt.”
“That’s horrible”, I gasp.
“Let’s take a break inside”, Christophe says. “I’m not too comfortable with these new hunters so close to the village.”
As if that wasn’t enough to spoil the day, we ran into more hunters that afternoon on our way to the grocery store. The first incident was when we saw a hunter sitting at the side of the road. He stood up when we past, gun loaded, and unaware he was pointing the cocked gun in our direction as he watched us drive by. Our second incident had us parked in the middle of the road for 10 minutes as a caravan of hunters maneuvered their trucks while trying to bring up a boar they just killed from the ravine below. They were in no hurry to move for us and seemed to give us a very unwelcoming “what are you doing here” look. As we waited, I see a sign hanging on a nearby tree that reads, “We hunt, we are careful, YOU be vigilant”.
“That’s not very reassuring”, I say.
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