The Guns of Winter

February. The sounds of winter hush and crackle along the frozen landscape like frost patterns on windows. The cold whisperings of nature drift through the air like a mournful, cryptic sentence already hinting of spring: the ticking of woodpeckers, the dripping of dew as it thaws from the bare branches, the leaf-rustling of the blue tits and red squirrels searching for food. The crunch of frost beneath hesitant feet. And of course, the occasional staccato burst of gunfire. Winter in the Quercy means hunting season.

When we first moved here I was all about quaint rural traditions. I’d bought John Seymour’s classic guide to self-sufficiency and – okay, let’s get confessional – I had fantasies about growing our own vegetables, keeping chickens for eggs and bees for honey and home-brewing wine, beer and mead on the side. And part of those fantasies involved joining the hunt and bagging the occasional wild boar. To be fair, we have managed to tease a few tomatoes and raspberries from the soil, and I haven’t given up on producing my own bottle of wine some time before I die. But my visions of early-morning deer stalking with my farmer friends have run up against one stubborn problem. La chasse, as the hunt is called, is a little spooky.

I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting – manly adventures in the woods, I suppose, confronting and defeating a charging wild boar, perhaps roasting the thing over an open fire in the woods while the farmers taught me ancient secrets of animal tracking or local medicinal plants. Okay, maybe not, but realistically, although the only things I’ve ever hunted in my adult life were clay pigeons, I had witnessed both American and English hunting and had assumed that the French version would be some combination of the two.

American hunting, like much of American society, plays out a mythos of rugged individualism and unbounded opportunity. Rich or poor, any man can head into the woods and face his prey, engage in the eons-old quasi-spiritual dance of souls between man and beast, a ritual homage and putting off of man’s own sense of mortality. The idealized American hunter is rugged, solitary, free and sanctioned by God to kill things and talk nonsense about it afterwards. Fox hunting in England is pretty much the opposite. Ostensibly the goal is to cull foxes, but that’s merely an excuse to gather hounds, horses and upper class English people in snazzy jackets and jodhpurs for a morning of riding, eating and drinking. It’s essentially an elite social bonding ritual, and the only struggle is to look good while staying on a horse as it jumps over hedges and ditches in pursuit of a pack of dogs. The only thing he has in common with the American hunter is that he too is sanctioned by God to kill things and talk nonsense about it afterwards.

Now the French version is in a league all its own. In one sense, it’s hunting at its most pure. By and large, the hunters here are local farmers, and their goal is to cull crop-destroying wildlife – deer and wild boar – and to put a little extra meat on the table. There’s no half-baked philosophy or elitist tradition here, nor any divine sanction or silly talk. It’s a job that needs doing, so the men get together a few times a week over winter and do it.

On the other hand – Well, it’s always that pesky other hand that keeps things interesting. Unlike so much in French culture, hunting here is anything but subtle. I’ve tried to find some romance in it. Perhaps there is something beautifully primeval about hunting in packs – a long stroll down genetic memory lane inevitably takes us back to tribes with spears ganging up on mammoths – but it’s not easy to idealize dozens of men fanning out through the countryside in beat-up white hatchbacks and 4x4s hoping to gang up on Bambi with enough firepower to invade a small country. Although la chasse probably does recapture the chaotic frenzy of a mammoth hunt more closely than its Anglophone counterparts, it’s a pretty ugly affair. While one group races up and down country lanes to no clear purpose, another gang has spread out along strategically chosen roads, guns in hand, to await their prey. The third group, a pack of very hungry dogs, usually followed by a puffing paunchy Frenchman blowing a hunting horn, is busy trying to flush the deer and boar out of the woods and into the line of fire of the hunters. And when that happens, the real fun begins.

Paint the scene in your head. A line of woods, an open field, a road and a handful of armed men standing about 50 yards apart from each other. It’s a cold winter morning, the landscape dusted with the vagueness of frost and mist, the chill displaced from the hunters’ blood by a good shot or two of pastis shared that morning before they set out. The barking of dogs grows closer, the blast of a hunting horn rips the air, and suddenly a frightened, hapless deer bounds out of the trees into the open field. Does a single, well-aimed shot crack through the bitter morning air offering instant resolution of the timeless confrontation between man and beast? No, you guessed it, that quiet field ignites in a deafening unsteady barrage of gunfire. As we listen to shot after futile shot echoing through the woods, I feel grateful for France’s strict gun control laws. If these guys had access to more firepower I wouldn’t be surprised to hear machine guns and heavy mortars ripping through the forest.

It is a testament to the poor aim of these hunters that there is ever anything left of the animal once they’ve brought it down. Yet I know from experience that large chunks of deer often remain in edible condition. They show up often as Loto prizes, or sometimes as gifts to local landowners. There is something grotesquely charming about having a smiling, scruffy-looking man drive up to your house in a battered old car and offer you a clear plastic bag of unidentified bloody meat. Thank you for understanding our time-honored traditions, those bags of meat say. Don’t ever go walking through the woods in a brown sweater or coonskin cap, they silently add.

It’s easy to make fun of the hunt – stories about drunk hunters shooting each other are particular favorites of walkers and disgruntled landowners – but I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for these guys. They’re rough, they’re reckless, and they seem like exactly the sort of people who should not be running around armed. But they work hard, they believe in what they do, and they’ve done their best to be nice to us. They slow down as they pass by our house, conscious that we have a small child and that we rent cottages to families. They wave politely when they see us, and every year we get an invitation to the hunters’ association ball. But they have never asked me to join the hunt, and I’ve never asked to come along. Better for everyone, I suspect.

On the other hand, brewing mead is sounding a lot more plausible to me these days. It keeps you indoors.

The Not-so-Fine Art of Woodcutting

Winter is in full swing, and a tenacious fog has wrapped itself around the Quercy. Colored lights have been strung in all the surrounding villages, and a large Christmas tree festooned with odd bits of multi-colored tinsel has taken up residence in front of the village hall. And from every chimney, down every country road, a cheerful plume of smoke rises to merge with the low leaden sky.

It’s woodcutting season, and I’m in my element.

Honestly, there’s nothing like starting up a chainsaw to boost a man’s sense of machismo. The weight of the machine, the little jolt of torque as the chain starts to spin, the seemingly gratuitous but necessary gunning of the motor to disengage the choke – it’s all calculated to bring on a testosterone high like nothing else. For me, it’s a high that lasts right until I start cutting.

I love cutting wood, but somehow, even in my fourth winter here, I’m not very good at it. Oh, I’ve improved, no question. I’ve got a better sense of how often to pause, pull out my file and sharpen the chain’s teeth. I know just what length to cut so that it’ll fit in the wood-burner, and which logs are too knotted to bother trying to split once I’ve cut them to size. I’ve got my rhythm, and I’ve still got all my fingers, so I can’t complain.

And yet it’s always humbling. Some days the logs seem to fight back. I’ll nestle one into the V of the sawhorse, and just as I reach down to pick up the chainsaw the log will inexplicably shift its weight and hit the ground with a mocking thud. So I reposition it for better balance, but now not enough of it is protruding for me to cut the right length for our insidiously small wood-burner. So I try sliding it with one hand, I try kicking it a bit with my foot, I try invoking the spirit of the tree it once was. And all the while I’m grateful to be alone as my mojo is ground into so much sawdust.

Splitting the thicker pieces usually involves the same sort of Marx Brothers routine. No matter how carefully I set the short section of log on its end, it rarely stays there long enough for me to hammer a wedge into it and split it in half. I won’t go into the silent humiliation, rarely witnessed by others but just as poignant nonetheless, of hefting my sledgehammer and swinging at the perfectly balanced log and wedge only to miss.

All this is just shooting fish in a barrel compared to cutting down a tree. Live trees have much more creative ways of fighting back than logs. They position themselves on awkward slopes near your house. They drop dead branches on your head while you’re cutting. Even in the throes of death they will twist as they fall - see you in hell, you can almost hear the branches curse as they plummet towards you. Taking down these wily bastards is an art in itself, and although I’ve mastered it enough to tackle the smaller ones on my own, I don’t mess with any tree that’s too big for me to hug. We have a few of those that need to go this winter, and that’s where Francois comes in.

I keep putting off calling Francois. He’s a pleasant and kind man, and is one of the best tree cutters around. He doesn’t grossly overcharge me, and he is always ready with a smile, friendly conversation and expert advice. At least, I think so. I can’t understand a word Francois says.

Having trouble following all of a conversation is a pretty common problem when you live abroad and speak the language imperfectly. There are always moments when you have to ask people to repeat themselves, and the French, at least around here, are usually pretty obliging. But you can only ask for so many repetitions before people start speaking to you very loudly, which for the record really doesn’t help at all. So then you’re left with piecing together the words you do you know and filling in the gaps with your best guesses based on context.

After a while you start to watch out for the telltale puzzled looks, awkward silences and nervous laughter that warn you when you’ve guessed wrong. These looks, like the toes bruised from logs falling on them or the singed hairs on my hand after an awkward encounter with the wood-burner, are the daily reminders of how much we still have to learn here. At one time Sophia and I spent our days bringing our expensive educations to bear on the arcane complexities of corporate law. Now we find ourselves struggling for mere competence in the daily necessities of living in so raw and unmediated a place.

I’ll get around to calling Francois. I’ll ask him when he can drop by, and he’ll say something like behn, damang, fang de matinay in his gruff, rapid-fire Cassagnes farmer’s twang of which, on a good day, I can make out one word in four. And I’ll say sure, great, see you then, and be forced by my own cowardice to hang around the house for days hoping that he hadn’t actually suggested an afternoon in February.

And when he does arrive, and is in the process of pointing at various trees and emitting strings of sound that I’m sure could be resolved, with enough time, into something resembling the French language, I’ll start to feel tempted. Perhaps cutting down big trees is actually less challenging than deciphering the local dialect. Next year, maybe I can start taking a shot at the trickier ones myself.

The temptation won’t last though. A day or two later I’ll be cutting firewood again. Between bursts of sawing, the familiar sound of English expletives will drift across the fields and woodlands around our house. Francois’s work will be safe for another year.

A Visit with Badger

I walked this morning.

I do it less often than I care to admit. On the occasional winter morning, however, when feeling distracted or restless, I put on the silly hat that I can only wear because wild boar can’t laugh, grab my favorite walking stick à la Bilbo Baggins, and head into the woods.

The sheep were quiet this morning and the frost was just leaving the fields as I passed the neighboring farm. The mist seemed to block out almost all sound other than my own footsteps and the occasional rooster, and by the time I had wound down the little dirt path and reached the valley floor I felt myself in another world. The path then joins a larger track – this one just wide enough for Gerard the baker to ride his quad bike on the disturbingly rare days he leaves the bakery – and I turned left. The woods here are young, mostly hornbeam with a scattering of obligingly gnarled oaks, and visible among the now leafless trees wind rows and rows of crumbling stone. This is all that’s left of the retaining walls that would a century ago have supported the terraced plots of a thriving vineyard.

Especially in winter it’s hard not to detour now and then to explore among the old walls looking for abandoned farm equipment or hidden cave entrances. Today I found a badger set. No sign of the badger of course – he was I’m sure staunchly holed up deep in his cave, protected on all sides by cold gray stone and packed earth, wondering what strange smelling creature was lurking at the gates of his little underground kingdom. So I left him in peace and continued on my way, past the overgrown ruins of an old stone barn, skirting the edge of a young walnut grove, until the path forks. Here I examined for perhaps the tenth time a large battered stone which I am convinced is a flint core from which prehistoric men chipped the raw material for their arrow heads and scrapers (bear with me, it’s just plausible enough…).

The flint core tells me it’s time to stop. I’ve gone farther, many times, through the little hamlet I know lies ahead and beyond. I am probably no more than a mile from home as the crow flies. But here my comfort zone ends, and today I’m not up for an adventure among foreigners. They are border people – not far beyond them lies the frontier with the Dordogne. I just can’t face it.

The funny thing is that I’m only half-joking. One of the corollaries to living in such a slow and remote place is that your sense of local begins to contract. It’s not really so much a question of physical distance – in the countryside you inevitably are obliged to drive farther afield for shops and services than you would living in a city or suburb. But the psychological and cultural territory seems still to correspond to the old feudal boundaries. Like the skeletons of the old vineyards and the leftover stone-age tools, the ghosts of small scale feudalism still leave their mark on the human landscape.

Our part of the Quercy occupies the northwestern corner of the Lot, and borders on two other provinces, the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne. These new administrative borders, arbitrary though they may look on a map, have huge local significance. Our tourist information office, for example, carries almost no information about sites a mere 20 minute drive away, simply because they are on the wrong side of the border. Collecting information for our holiday cottages we must go to three different offices to get pamphlets on all the nearby happenings during the summer tourist season.

But it’s more than bureaucracy. The local economies are different. People smile less over there. And then there’s the driving - people from the Lot-et-Garonne are terrible, aggressive drivers, at least by our standards over here in the Lot. The last two numbers on French licence plates reveal which district the car is registered in, and we have learned from experience that when you see car with that tell-tale 47 plate, you’d better give them a wide berth.

Even the smaller scale feudal territories present some startling contrasts. Take language. They all speak French, right? Behn oui, any of the old timers here will tell you, but they don’t speak the same French in Cassagnes as they do in Montcabrier. Cassagnes is a small village of about 200 souls, a little over an hour’s walk away. Each of these tiny villages have their own dialect, their own character. And don’t talk to a hunter from Montcabrier about the Cassagnes hunting association. Savages, every last man of them.

It’s a contagious frame of mind, and even foreigners (I mean real foreigners, not just the ones from other villages) who have moved here find themselves acquiring both the folk-wisdom and folk-folly of their adoptive village. It is at times surreal to listen to English and Dutch people talking about the micro-climate in Frayssinet-le-Gelat just up the road (it’s too cold for wisteria to grow there, our English neighbor assured us) or the big-village airs put on by the shop girls in Prayssac. I get it most when I’m walking. On foot, every familiar tree stump or pile of rocks is a reaffirmation of belonging, and every unexplored path both an opportunity for adventure and a potential for hidden menace. As much as I enjoy exploring an unfamiliar patch of woods, I find more and more in myself a sense of fellow-feeling with that badger, snugly tucked away in his hole and reluctant to stray very far.

But times change, and younger generation, with their mobile phones and Internet access, are starting to leave some of this feudal attitude behind. Now that several villages must combine to share a school in order to have enough pupils, village cultures are beginning to blend in a sort of micro-globalization. Our own son’s two best friends are from Cassagnes. One of them is the girl he says he want to marry some day.

We’re trying to keep an open mind.

Where there's smoke...

Having grown up in LA, I have very fond memories of childhood winters. After summer’s unbearable heat and autumn’s furious winds and wildfires, I found myself yearning for cool cloudy days, for nights that closed in well before dinnertime, for the occasional rainy afternoon by the fire. I remember making popcorn to snack on while I watched the rain fall, wrapped in a warm sweatshirt and listening to the occasional sizzle of the reliable three-hour-burn Duraflame log. Mom would bake cookies while I, always the romantic, imagined our late-60’s Spanish-style house to be an ancient thatched cottage tucked away in the English countryside. In a land of endless freeways and almost no rainfall, I appreciated all things cozy.

These days I’m up to mes oreilles in cozy, and it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Cozy, in the context of a picturesque medieval farmhouse nestled among the hills and dales of the Quercy countryside, turns out to be hard work. We all picture the obvious: outside are crumbling stone walls and magnificent old trees dripping with November rain, inside it’s all hand-knit sweaters, warm cups of tea and a roaring fire comfortable filling the enormous open hearth. All great stuff, for which we are grateful every single day. But that fire…

For a start, let’s get it out in the open, fireplaces do not heat your house. Eighty percent of all the heat that’s produced goes right up the chimney, bounces off the stratosphere, and returns to Earth somewhere in the Arctic where it feebly conspires with the oil industry to discomfort polar bears. Our enormous medieval cantou, the local rendition of the Inglenook hearth, is big enough to climb into because that’s precisely what they used to do before central heating. The cantou traditionally would have had a cooking pot suspended in the middle and a chair to either side in which the grandparents could sit to keep warm. The rest of the family kept warm by working hard in the fields until they reached old age, probably at forty, and earned their turn by the fire.

Given that its nominal heat production renders it essentially ornamental, the fireplace is awfully high maintenance. We don’t need to sit by it; we can keep perfectly warm all day by ferrying in the enormous logs that it consumes like potato chips. It makes me wistful for those Duraflames.

Better, on that score, is the lovely old Godin wood-burning stove in the dining room. This quaint green-enameled piece of 19th century technology gives off much more heat with much less wood. But that wood must be cut into 45 cm sections and not be too thick; the hours I spend with a chainsaw every week sculpting little logs to fit into the Godin’s narrow jaws are gratifying to my sense of machismo and affinity for country life, but quite frankly I could do without them. At least the Godin is happy when I feed it; it thanks me by belching large quantities of smoke into the dining room.

Nonetheless here I sit, my laptop warming my legs, my clothing reeking of smoke, happily entering what will be our fourth French winter by the fire. Like every year, Sophia and I are discussing the option of using our magnificent medieval fireplace to frame a modern wood-burner that would actually keep us warm. But despite the absurdity of all this chopping, carrying and choking in homage of a romantic ideal, we won’t do it. Sitting here by the fire, sooty and reeking of smoke, watching the logs disappear as fast as the raindrops hit the drafty single-glazed window, it’s just too damned cozy.