DEPARTURE
There is a huge buzzing at the chateau. The messenger has just brought word from the keeper, half in French and half in Provencal, announcing that there had already been two or three fine flights of herons, and water-fowl, and that the season's first birds weren't in short supply.
"You're coming hunting with us", my friendly neighbours wrote to me; and this morning, at the unearthly hour of five o'clock, their large wagon, loaded with rifles, dogs, and provisions, came to pick me up at the bottom of the hill. Off we go on the road to Arles, which is a bit dry and the trees have mostly lost their leaves by this time in December. The pale green shoots of the olive trees are hardly visible, and the garish green of the oaks is a bit too wintry and artificial. The stables are beginning to stir into life, while very early risers light up the windows in the farms before day break. In the gaps in the stones amongst the ruins of Mont-Majeur abbey, the sea eagles, still drowsy, stretch their wings. Despite the hour, the old peasant women are coming from the Ville-de-Beaux, trotting along in their donkey carts. We pass them alongside the ditches. They have to go six country kilometres to sit on the steps of St. Trophyme to sell their small packets of medicinal herbs collected on the mountain….
The low, crenellated ramparts of Arles appear, just as you see them on old engravings, which show warriors with lances larger than the talus they are standing on. We gallop through this marvellous, small town, surely one of the most picturesque in France, with its rounded sculptured, moucharaby-like balconies, jutting out into the middle of the narrow streets. There are old black houses with tiny doors, in the Moorish style, gothic and low-roofed, which take you back to the time of William the Short-Nose and the Saracens. At this hour there's nobody about yet, except the quay on the River Rhone. The Camargue boat is steaming up at the bottom of the steps and is ready to sail. The tenant farmers are there in their red serge jackets. So are some young women of La Roquette, out looking for farm work, and standing on the deck amongst us, chatting and laughing, with their long brown mantles turned down because of the sharp morning air. The tall Arles' headdresses makes their heads look small and elegant with an attractive pertness, and they feel the need to stand on tip toe, so that their laughter and banter can be heard by everybody. The bell rings and off we go. What with the fast flow of the Rhone, the propeller, and the mistral, the two river banks speed by. On one side, there is the Crau, an arid, stony plain. On the other we have the Camargue, much greener, with its short grass and swamps full of reeds stretching all the way to the sea.
From time to time the boat pulls in at a landing stage, on the right or left bank, or on the Empire or the Kingdom, as it was known in the middle ages, in the time when Arles was a Kingdom. The old Rhone sailors still use these same words today. At every stop there was a white farm, and a clump of trees. The workmen getting off with their tools, and the women with their baskets under their arms, go straight onto the gangway. Little by little the boat empties, first on the Empire side and then on the Kingdom, and by the time we get off at Mas-de-Giraud, there's hardly anybody left on board.
The Mas-de-Giraud is an old farm of the Lords of Barbentane, and we went in to await the keeper appointed to come and meet us. In the main kitchen, all the farm hands, ploughmen, winegrowers, and shepherds are sitting at the table, solemnly, silently, and slowly eating their meal and being served by the women who have to wait to eat until the men are finished. Presently the keeper arrives with the cart. He is a real Fennimore-Cooper type, a trapper on land and water, fish-warden, and gamekeeper, known locally as the Stalker, because he can always be found in the morning mists or at nightfall stalking amongst the reeds, or stock still in his small boat watching over his keep nets on the open water and the irrigation channels. It may be this work of perpetual lookout that makes him so silent and focussed. And yet, as the cart full of rifles and baskets trundles along in front of us, he gives us news of the hunt, the number of over-flights, and the location where the birds of passage have been brought down. As he talks, he melts into the landscape.
The cultivated earth gives way to the true, untamed Camargue, amongst the pasture and the marshland, and the irrigation channels shine in amongst the goose-foot plants as far as the eye can see. Bunches of tamarisks and reeds form little islands on a calm sea. There are no tall trees; the immense evenness of the plain is unbroken. The animal sheds have roofs that slope down almost to ground level. The roaming flocks, lying in the salt grass or making their way as they nuzzle around the shepherd's red cape, don't disturb the landscape's regular flow, dwarfed, as they are, by the endless space of blue horizons and open sky. Just as a rough sea is still the sea, so a sense of solitude and immensity emerges, heightened by the relentless mistral, which, with its powerful breath, seems to flatten yet enlarge the landscape. Everything bows down before it. The smallest shrubs bear the imprint of its passage, and stay twisted and bent over southwards in an attitude of perpetual flight….
II
THE SHACK.
The roof and walls consist of dried, yellowing, reeds. This is the shack, which is to be our meeting place for the hunt. A not untypical house of the Camargue, it has a single, vast, high room with no window, getting its daylight through a glass door kept fully shuttered at night. All along the huge, rendered, whitewashed walls, the gun-rack waits for the rifles, the game bags, and the wading boots. At the back, five or six bunks are placed round an actual boat mast which is stepped into the soil and reaches the roof which it supports. During the night, while the mistral is blowing and the house is creaking everywhere, the distant sea seems nearer than it is, its sound carried by the freshening wind, and gives us the impression of being in a boat's cabin.