Another encounter just then occurred. At the corner of a cross road La Trouille's geese, which she was taking back home, found themselves face to face with old Saucisse's geese on their way down to the village, unaccompanied. The two ganders, in the van, pulled up short, resting on one leg, with their large yellow beaks turned towards each other. All the beaks of each flock turned simultaneously in the same direction as the leaders', and the geese's bodies were inclined to the same side. For an instant perfect immobility was preserved. It was like an armed reconnaissance; two patrols exchanging watch-words. Then one of the ganders, with round, contented eyes, went straight on, while the other bore to the left; and each troop filed off behind its own leader, going about its business with the same uniform waddling gait.
[PART IV.]
CHAPTER I.
After the shearing and the sale of the lambs in May, Soulas, the shepherd, had removed the sheep from La Borderie. Nearly four hundred head there were, which he led away without any other assistance than that of the little swine-herd Firmin, and his two formidable dogs, Emperor and Massacre. Until August the flocks grazed in the fallows amongst the clover and lucern, or in the waste-lands along the roads; and barely three weeks had now elapsed since he had turned them out into the stubble, immediately after the harvest, in the last blazing days of September.
This was the terrible season of the year. The fields of La Beauce lay stripped and desolate and bare, without a single fleck of green about them. The torrid summer, and the complete absence of all moisture, had dried up the splitting soil, and almost all signs of vegetation had disappeared. There was nothing left save a tangle of dead grass, and the hard bristles of the stubble-fields, which stretched out their mournful, bare nudity as far as the eye could reach, making all the plain look as though some giant conflagration had swept from horizon to horizon. The soil still seemed to be giving out a yellowish glow, a weird, threatening light, livid like that of a storm. Everything looked yellow, a frightfully mournful yellow; the baked earth, the stubble, and the high-roads and by-paths, rutted and torn up by passing wheels. The slightest breeze set clouds of dust flying, and covering the banks and hedges as with cinders. The blue sky and the blazing sun only seemed to render the scene of desolation still more mournful.
Upon that particular day there was a high wind, blowing in quick, warm puffs, which brought along heavy, scudding clouds; and when the sun shone fully out, his rays seemed to burn the skin like red-hot iron. Ever since early morning, Soulas had been expecting a supply of water for himself and his flock—water which was to be brought to him from the farm—for the stubble lands where he found himself lay to the north of Rognes, far away from any pond. In the grazing ground, between the light, movable hurdles secured with staves the sheep were lying on their bellies, panting and breathing only with difficulty; while the two dogs, stretched at full length outside the hurdles, were also panting, with their tongues lolling out of their mouths. The shepherd, to protect himself from the wind and to procure a little shade, was seated, leaning against a little hut raised on two wheels—a narrow box which served him for bed, and wardrobe, and pantry—and which he pushed along at every change of the grazing ground.
At noon, however, when the sun shone down perpendicularly, Soulas rose to his feet again, and scanned the distance to ascertain if he could see Firmin returning from the farm, where he had sent him to find out why the water did not come.