The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Read online

  And then the others are back. Now the men go over the tactics. Not once, but four, five, six times even, repeating the directions, the drill, as though it were a mantra, as though it were a mobilising force to energise them for the task in hand. Or an army manœuvre.

  ‘After Jacques and I have driven the four beasts into the trap, I’ll make my way along that upper shelf and approach the crag from behind and finish off the bleeding one with my knife.’

  ‘It’s like guerilla warfare,’ I tease nervously, because what I am hearing is making me distressed.

  ‘That’s it, precisely, Carol! It’s war.’

  I wander back to the spot where all the rucksacks have been left, astounded that they have taken me seriously, that this hunt is so important to them, and open up my bag to retrieve mineral water and take a swig. It is hot and dry up on these upper ranges now that the sun has fully risen and I am feeling nauseous.

  ‘I hope those bloody lads keep their guns quiet.’ My companions have approached and are raking through their luggage searching for chocolate.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ve gone. Carol, you will wait here with the equipment.’ I don’t want to wait with the bags. Who’s going to steal anything up here? Now they are loading their rifles with bronze cartridges the size of small fingers. Click, flick, click. Miniature missiles.

  ‘I would prefer to observe from the look-out rock where the village boys were, if that is all right with you?’ I direct my question to Alexandre because it is very evident to me that he is the commanding officer, and I feel I should ask permission; I have caused sufficient hitches for one day.

  ‘All right, if you want to, but you are to stay down. Keep low even as you settle into position and you are not, in any circumstances, to move or shift about, understand?’

  I nod.

  ‘And no camera. It reflects in the light and the animals will spot it. Are my instructions clear?’

  I nod again. Then take off, running, bent double as though with stomach ache, to my cache, which, when I reach it, is very much more cramped than it had appeared from above. I shove myself into the open hollow and wait. The men have disappeared off in their various directions. Jacky scales the vertical mountainside like a skater and I realise how much he must have held back earlier to accommodate me. I assume everyone is in position though I no longer have Jacques or Alexandre within vision. I wait, and wait, and nothing appears to be happening. I check my watch – half an hour has passed; the cold air of the early morning has long since evaporated. The sun is high in the sky; it’s blisteringly hot. I try to rearrange my legs, which are growing numb beneath me, wriggling my calves under my buttocks without really moving. Three-quarters of an hour goes by. It is a long drawn-out wait. I concentrate on the shadows, the colours, the stillness. I wonder what Monsieur Q. is up to back at the farm, battling on with the wretched shed, no doubt, and Michel in Paris, how is he today? I am achingly aware how different my life has become without him and I still feel no certainty that I can help him through this crisis or, more crucially, that he wants me to.

  Airliners, brilliantly silver and white in the warm daylight, cross the skyline noiselessly and then I lose them as they prepare for landing at sea-level, somewhere beyond the mountain ranges, at Nice Airport. Whenever I fly home, I see these southern Alps through the plane windows. This is the first time I have enjoyed the opposite aspect. I shall look out at them from the air with another eye now.

  Very distant gunshots, nothing to do with Alexandre’s band of men, explode into the silence of the late morning. Not many, but they are disturbing nonetheless in this zone of perfect tranquillity. Too remote, though, I assume, to alarm the unsuspecting antelopes we are trained upon. I have no idea what is going on. I cannot see the others, aside from Didier, who lies patiently on his belly with his weapon at the ready.

  The sun beats down upon me. Wasp-like insects buzz around my head, irritating me. I dare not wave them away. My eyes grow heavy. I try to remain attentive to what is happening. Which is nothing, as far as I can tell, besides cowbells jingling and insects zizzing.

  I have fallen asleep in the heat. When I awake the men are returning, each from his separate direction. They are empty-handed, have thrown in the towel. I am secretly jubilant and then, as I squint to look more closely, I see that Alexandre has something slung over his left shoulder. It resembles a shaggy shawl.

  The wounded chamois has finally been slaughtered and retrieved and Alexandre has humped it back to our plateau base. He lifts it from his neck and it unfolds on to the ground like an acrobat. What strikes me first is the blueness of the creature’s sightless eyes, an arresting lapis lazuli and full of surprise. One of the metal-toned, hooked horns has been wrenched from the animal’s brown furry head and I can see scarlet-red blood in the round hole where the horn had been growing.

  The beast is almost the size of a fully grown goat. She has been tagged with one of the four yellow bracelets I saw hours ago on the kitchen table. Alexandre unleashes his knife from its black leather sheath and skilfully slits open the animal’s stomach. His gesture has the ease of someone opening an envelope. Inside, at the base of the lifeless torso, are balls of chewed, damp grass; putting me in mind of generous helpings of tobacco. They have burst through the base of the stomach or were in the process of being excreted. The fetid stench of congealing blood and recently digested grass makes me want to throw up.

  If she had lived, Jacky tells me, her horns would have grown to about six inches in length and would have been more curled. She, la bête, is a female and is less than two years old, so not yet fully grown. She has not coupled yet and would have had her first chaleur, her first menstrual bleeding, and also known her first mating, this autumn. The bullet has entered her right through her sex and exited through her right side. I cannot help comparing the shot with images of sexual entry, as well as dwelling on the fact that she has taken three hours to die. Her virgin self shot through with red-hot fire and pain. I watch on as the stomach bag is cut out of her and retrieved with its various poppy-black, saggy pouched parts attached. These I take to be her liver and kidneys but apparently they are not. Alexandre flings the jaundiced, balloon-like bag and its appendages behind him into the dry grass. Within minutes it is swarming with buzzing, beavering flies. The malodour of death is overwhelming.

  The young antelope is splayed out on her back with her innards gone. She is a pretty little thing, even now, yet, strangely, I feel no disgust towards these men. I had expected to be sickened to my guts by what they have done, but I am not. I am heartbroken for the animal, for her missed opportunities, and I feel compassion as well as frustration for the pain she has suffered. Still, I watch on with dispassion. Could I do this? I ask myself, and the answer is no. Will I now be able to authorise the hunting of wild boar on our farm? And to that question, I also silently reply that I very much doubt it, but Michel was right. It was important to see this for myself before making a final decision and, in his words, ‘to challenge my preconceived judgements’.

  Suddenly one of our party spots a peregrine soaring overhead and the trio of hunters and Jacques pause to observe and discuss the falcon at its own chase. I wonder if the great bird is after the antelope’s innards but the men tell me no. These peregrines usually track smaller birds, swooping on them in flight.

  I mention that we have honey buzzards and, possibly, booted eagles nesting on our land. One evening, whilst swimming, I spotted an eagle circling overhead, I tell them. The men seem surprised and suggest that I might be mistaken, that it was probably also a buzzard. ‘They’re quite similar, you know.’

  Jacky asks me if I have ever seen a casseur d’os at work. A bone-breaker? No, I shake my head. What is it?

  ‘It’s a bearded vulture, the largest of all alpine birds. Bloody enormous and a very curious sight. There are only half a dozen of them here in the park. They were reintroduced to the Alps about a decade ago after an absence of almost a century. If we were to leave this chamois here, it’d
have it. It soars on high, patrolling the mountains for dead sheep or antelope, then it swoops down, picks up a large bone and carries it away, dropping it from a height on to a rock to splinter it, hence its nickname, bone-breaker. Extraordinary. When you watch it, it looks as though it is travelling in slow motion.’

  ‘Why would it want to break the bones?’

  ‘One of its richest food sources is the bone marrow. Once you’ve sighted one of those birds, you’ll never forget it. They are pretty spectacular.’

  Jacques remains silent and in the background, watching the sky. Like me, he listens and takes it all in but, unlike me, he does not ask questions. He films scenic moments with his video camera from time to time but he is not photographing this disgorgement. I wish Michel were here with his camera. I want to remember and share this nature reserve.

  I am disappointed to learn that we will continue. Although it is only a little before noon I had been hoping that the slaughter of this creature would be a full-stop, that now the thirst of these red-blooded men would be slaked and we would turn back for home. But, no. The animal is bagged up into a green plastic bin-liner and stuffed into Alexandre’s rucksack – everything he was carrying on the upward journey save for his precious gun, his carabine with its high-powered, detachable lens, has been transferred to Jacky’s bag – and we set off. Alexandre strides forward to take up the lead. His trousers, neatly pressed when we left his mother’s house, are stippled with blood around belt and pockets.

  The mood is highly charged now, adrenaline is coursing. There are chamois about and although the quartet of antelopes grazing in the vicinity of this dying girl have smartly escaped for the second time today, they remain somewhere in the region and that creates excitement, offering the possibility of further scores later in the afternoon for these men. But then, all of a sudden, the conversation and plans seem to change. I am not sure why. Now they are considering making a descent of several hundred metres until we return to the wooded slopes where they can also track and hunt. Their talk now is of lunch and, after, pursuit of wild boars; it is unlikely chamois will be feeding at those lower levels. There are other species of deer there, though.

  During our descent, which physically is as gruelling as the rise earlier, we encounter the shepherd, a toothless man with a navy beret. Probably in his mid-fifties, he looks to me more like a shopkeeper than a shepherd of the sierras. His opening gambit is ‘Hunting with women now, eh?’

  To which my best friend Jacky responds, ‘And why not?’ while I try to brush it off with ‘I am not here to hunt.’ But no one is listening to what I have to say, so I give up. They are wrapped up in the exchange of news. I smile to myself, remembering a story René recounted long ago of a farming family he had lived alongside in the mountains who nicknamed their shepherd ‘Auntie’.

  The berger tells us that he and his flock of 500 sheep and six dogs are ascending to the peak and from there crossing over to new pastures beyond this cime where, he hopes, remains an acre or two of edible grassland. ‘The land is desiccated,’ he moans. ‘Even at this altitude. So we must climb higher.’ During a long drawn-out conversation in the noonday sun – while we are entirely penned in by braying sheep and frisky, panting black or white dogs – I learn that he lives in the same village as Simone and Jacky and sleeps up here only from time to time. He shares his woeful tale of how an alpha male wolf sent thirty of his flock over the mountainside a few nights earlier. They had broken free of the pen and he lost the lot. Not one survived the fell.

  I had not known until recently that grey wolves (Canis lupus) inhabit these southern French Alps. They are an endangered species everywhere and I had thought they were no longer in existence in western Europe. This is not, however, strictly true. ‘The wolves crossed over into this national park from Abruzzi in central Italy during the last two decades of the twentieth century,’ explains the shepherd when I ask him. ‘There the cussed creatures are protected.’

  Although wolves adapt to change better than almost any other mammal and their survival rate here, since their arrival, has been an ecological success story, they are still rare everywhere throughout their vast range of habitats. They continue to be hunted and persecuted by man as they have been for centuries because they have always been believed to be the predominant killer of valuable livestock. Farmers detest them and claim their presence to be the return of a bygone nightmare.

  It has also been proven, and indeed this fact is borne out by the shepherd’s losses, that wolves don’t confine themselves to culling the old and sick animals in the herd, as was originally supposed. These canine predators will hit on young, strapping beasts, too, and very occasionally, they will slaughter more than they can immediately consume, though such surplus killing is unusual.

  How can you be sure that it was a wolf? I ask.

  ‘I can tell by their droppings; they contain fur.’

  The resurgence of the wolves is a heated issue and not one in which I wish to engage this working shepherd. Fortunately, this morning, he has only one stray to worry about so, accompanied by his three fabulous Pyrenean sheepdogs, he descends alongside us, talking nineteen to the dozen, to salvage the lost lamb, leaving the rest of the flock in the protection of his other three herders, lean black collies whose coats are flecked grey with age. Jacky asks if we might lunch at his cote, which he warmly offers. It occurs to me that perhaps he is hanging on to our company because his existence is such a solitary one but when the track divides, we wave our farewells and part.

  I desperately need to pee and pray that one of his two shacks will provide the necessary amenities, but as we arrive and I enquire, I am laughed at and teased. ‘No, Madam, but why worry? All of nature awaits you. Make yourself at home.’

  I drop my bag on the ground, secrete the loo paper I have brought with me up my jumper and disappear behind the two dwellings, hoping that none of the chaps will thoughtlessly follow in my direction with the same purpose in mind. Of course they leave me in peace and, when I return, they are already attacking their lunchboxes.

  Jacky has unearthed a very wobbly wooden bench which he has placed facing the three other men, who are sitting on the ground, leaning against the cabin, legs akimbo, quaffing and munching. ‘This is for Madam,’ he explains, seating himself alongside me and, together, we settle like old chums to a robust, gamey picnic.

  The men’s lunches consist of saucisson, jars of game pâtés, rosé wine, entire loaves sliced on the spot with hunting knives, massive hunks of strong-smelling cheeses, slabs of chocolate and energy bars.

  My own lunch is a far more modest, thrown-together affair. I unpack my tuna pan bagnat, which by this stage has grown soggy from the olive oil and the hours squashed in a plastic bag. Dressing the two wholemeal halves are rocket leaves from our salad patch; they look more like lifeless black caterpillars now, but I am too hungry to care. For dessert, I have two peaches given to me by Quashia, two bottles of mineral water and a bunch of delicious black grapes, also from our garden.

  ‘Anybody fancy some grapes?’ The men don’t even bother to respond. They are still stuffing themselves. They talk and eat voraciously, slapping coatings of pâté on to doorstops of bread, chewing vigorously. Jacky pours me a glass of rosé – he has carted five glass tumblers along with him as well as an isotherme bag to keep the wine chilled. I decline; he insists so I acquiesce and sip it slowly. I am exhausted and fear the wine might cause me to keel over. He offers me a slice of saucisson. This I accept, which pleases him and he cuts me a helping as thick as a club sandwich. Jacques thrusts one of his banana energy bars my way. It tastes like no fruit I have encountered, is horrendously sweet and quite disgusting. Nonetheless our swimming-pool specialist consumes three on the trot, in between mouthfuls of bread with duck in green pepper pâté, swearing that they will allay his tiredness. His eyes are bloodshot with fatigue. He also polishes off the entire pot of pâté on two chunks of bread.

  ‘Qui veut un Boonty?’ I hear. Intrigued, I look up to see them o
ffering one another milk chocolate Bounty bars.

  Alexandre jumps to his feet, produces a leather gourd or wineskin containing red wine and proceeds to consume it in a manner that I have always believed was a northern Spanish tradition. That is to say raising the flagon and holding it some distance above your open mouth and pouring the wine in a steady, arched stream down the throat. The Provençal word for this wine container, he tells me as he struts to and fro in the sunshine, is bachourle, which he pronounces ‘batcholy’. When I look it up later in my Frédéric Mistral dictionaries, I find that the root of this word appears to come from bacho, a water trough or fountain basin. It also means drenched.

  I ask if I might attempt a sip from his bachourle. My request causes much amusement which makes me a little awkward, but I do not soak myself in wine. In fact, I manage fairly successfully to train the flow directly in between my lips. Unfortunately, however, no one has explained to me that the draught is held in the mouth and not downed until the flask has been taken away, so I swallow the liquid straight away, explode in a fit of coughing and nearly choke. The wine is rough. My eyes are smarting and the men are falling about the ground with merriment.

  When the remnants of lunch have finally been packed away, and the shepherd’s open-air dining room has been tidied up – while the man himself with his flock of 500 has scaled the very pinnacle of the mountain and is now disappearing from our sight, intent on a parallel escarpment – it is decided, much to the consternation of Alexandre, that our hunt, our journée de chasse, is to be terminated. As I stuff what is left of my two squashed bunches of grapes back into my sack, I overhear Jacky whisper to the others that Madam ‘en a ras le bol’ which means Madam is fed up, has had it up to the back teeth or, literally, has overflowed the cup.

  This is not precisely true, though I do not correct him. I am physically shattered and cannot face any more clambering about in the dusty heat or the thought of stalking another unsuspecting victim even within the cooler climate of the alpine forest. Still, the weather is exceptional, the locations stunning and I am having fun, relishing the adventure.