Wood Doves

girollesThe dirt path through the woods is shaded and quiet. My sister and her family are ahead of me as I poke along slowly, looking for birds and other creatures. I pass the woods where the night before Claude Lucantis took me looking for mushrooms. I have an uncanny ability to find the most poisonous ones. But I did find a few girolles, golden orange, fluted, which we ate in a delicious omelet, and Claude found some cepes, which we fried up with garlic and duck fat.

The dirt path is bumpy and barely used by farmers coming to cut wood. A few open fields deep in the woods are used to graze cattle. The woods are filled with chestnut trees, the green spiny fruit dangling, beech trees, some holly. The land in the woods is often terraced, a reminder that this region was mostly vineyards until phylloxera destroyed the vines in the late nineteenth century.  

Near the house that is now owned by two Dutch women, we turned right. The day before we had visited the women, who have set up shop to make cheese here in this isolated patch of French soil. We had heard of these two for the ten years since they moved in—that they are Dutch is a novelty in an area where the British have come to settle. But more, that they are a couple has pretty much everyone talking. “We’ve seen everything here in Estampes,” Odette says clapping her hands and laughing. But newcomers to the area are scrutinized. Odette knows this as her husband Stanis, came from Polish stock: Baczkowski. She was ostracized from her family for marrying a Pole, who was more French than some Frenchmen.

cepesWhen I was a kid, people would ask to touch me, saying they had never met an American. Those days are over, as the town has seen an influx of many new people. But a few years ago, my Benin-born friend Senami came for a short stay. One night we stayed up late, playing cards and sampling various Armagnac. Around three in the morning we remembered that Senami had agreed to help Odette with her rabbits and chickens in the morning (8 am sharp!). “You have to wake me up,” she implored all of us. “You know I’m representing my entire country,” Senami joked. But we knew it wasn’t entirely a joke.

The one Dutch woman was wearing trendy glasses and almost clean jeans. She speaks both French and English well and told us she was an optician, her partner an architect. “It’s good to do something new with your life,” she said in her lilting accent. This I agree with. But this change of country and of career seemed dramatic. The house they bought had been abandoned for ten years. They wanted something inexpensive, and they found it. Her partner emerged, broader in the shoulders, her short blond hair unkempt, a light powder coating her arms. She was off to feed the happy pigs we’d seen in the fields. We bought a quarter of a round of cheese, and went on our merry way.

Today we didn’t stop for cheese, but rather continued through the woods, the dry, blond soil rutted by tractors. It’s hot out. I lose sight of my companions and at intersections in the woods they put up cairns and sticks as arrows to point me in the right direction. It’s easy to get lost in the maze of trails through these woods.

ladder up the palombiereI pass a palombiere, an elaborate hunting stand in the woods used for shooting the palombe, the fat, blue wood doves that appear in the fall. There’s a ladder made from tree limbs that rises high into the trees—I want to say fifty feet it looks so high. And then a contraption suspended from lines where a decoy balances. It all sits quiet, waiting for the fall hunt.

Earlier Odette had told me about the palombe, and how much Stanis liked to shoot them. They would be in the fields, bringing in hay, when he’d see a flock of doves overhead. “Don’t move,” he yell at her. He’d stop the tractor, pull out his gun and down a few birds. She’d wait for him to finish his hunt. “I was so stupid, standing there in the field,” she laughed. Stanis liked to hunt and had hunting dogs he prized. He went after woodcock, quail, partridge. But he was most excited by the wood dove. Odette tells me that cooked in a little white wine, they are delicious.  

Estampes, part five

Sunday morning. It rained in the night, so it’s cool in the morning when I head out south on the main road, intending to drop down one of the narrow roads that take farmers to their fields. Corn and sunflower fields give over to empty fields, filled with birds lively in the cooler air: the great tit, swallows decorating the power lines that seem to run everywhere I look, tree sparrows.  I flush a pair of woodcocks, who sail off in a flurry of wings. Then I cross a small bridge, and on the other side am in a new department, the Haute Pyrenees. When I was a child, we often walked to the bridge after dinner, hopping from one side to the other, saying, “now I am in the Gers, now in the Haute Pyrenees.” There was no difference, the line entirely political. But we loved it, as we loved those evening walks.

 I look down a narrow passageway, between two corn fields, and spy two fox trotting toward me. They don’t see me right away, so I watch them through my binoculars, their long legs taking light, wary steps. And then they turn sharply and vanish into the corn.

As I near the Boues, the river that carved this valley, the land flattens out. This is an area that Odette refers to as La Plaine. The plains. It is where they grew their hay and wheat. In the summer Becky and I would help Stanis and Odette bring in the small bails of hay and straw. We’d shove in a pitchfork, then in a swoop, lift them above our head to land on the wooden cart pulled by the tractor. Stanis would arrange the bales of straw or hay, as we walked by the slow moving tractor. In the evenings, we’d return home, our hair speckled with straw, straw down our backs and in our bras. And happy.

I come to a stand of trees. I have been hearing woodpeckers on this trip, but had yet to lay eyes on a bird. There was a time when I wasn’t fond of the woodpecker in Estampes, as they drilled holes in our wooden shutters, slowly destroying them.  But now, of course, the woodpecker—a favorite. And there in this small area of dense oak trees, with its bright red flanks is the great spotted woodpecker (wish I had a photo!). Soon after in a field I spy more cattle egret, and one lone grey heron (very much like our blue heron) hunting in a field.

I pass three farmhouses, all beautifully fixed up, new shutters still closed on this Sunday morning. The tractors sit idle; not even the resident dog is there to bark at me as is usually the case. A few collared doves flutter about.

These roads I’m walking are the same roads I taught my niece and nephew to drive on. They were perfect learning roads in that 99% of the time there are no other cars. The downside is that when there was a car, there was little room for two cars to pass. So Alice or Thomas would stop, let me take over the wheel as I inched by the other car. On both sides dramatic ditches threatened to swallow a car.

I spy a hen harrier, grey-white high on a pole, then it swoops off. In a field to my right, a deer, the fifth one I’ve seen on this walk. I have seen deer in the past, but not so many. So the question is: are there more deer, or am I simply seeing them?

My return is quiet until a falcon comes zipping in overhead and slams into a magnolia tree. There’s a rumpus of squawks, then quiet. The falcon got its meal.

And I’m thinking about my lunch as well. So I drive into Mielan, the nearest town to Estampes, where there is a small Sunday market. I tell the melon man from Lectour that I want three melons, one for tonight and two for Monday. He numbers them in black ink so I’ll know which one is ripest.

I arrive at a small vegetable vendor just as he sells off the last of his lettuce. “Come to my house,” he says, “I have lots more lettuce.” So I get in his car and he takes me to his spread of a garden, overflowing with flowers, melons, tomatoes, and lettuce. He’s  retired, so this is a bit of a hobby, but he’s a gardener who likes to experiment. There are some peanut plants he hopes will grow and five corn stalks from seeds he found down by the river. I tell him he should grow sweet corn. He can’t, he tells me. When he was young, he worked inspecting farmer’s milk machines. Often the farmers would invite him for lunch. They would kill a chicken and serve it to him. Sometimes he’d find grains of corn in his chicken (someone should have cleaned their chickens better!). Corn is for chickens, he explained, handing me two large bouquets of flowers: dahlias, marigolds, black eyed Susans, gladiolas.  Flowers, whether in the US or in France, are always beautiful.

Bicycling the Gers

The road that leaves the D 146 and climbs west, uphill, is narrow and steep. It is there that Olivier and Becky are waiting for me, resting against their bicycles. “You missed seeing a Hen Harrier,” I tell them. They look less than interested as they stand in the shade of a farmhouse, a bit red from exertion and the sun. “The thing is,” I say, by way of trying to get them to care about my excitement, “is that my life is better for seeing this bird.” I’m joking and they laugh, but the truth is I kind of believe what I’ve just said.

I saw the Harrier hovering over a wide field. It looked like it was suspended from the sky itself, staying miraculous in place as it targeted the ground. There was a glint of red, and a fanned tail. Then it dropped, like a ball dropping from the sky and vanished into the grass. I figured it would take a while for it to conduct its killing business so I bicycled on, not wanting to keep my sister and brother-in-law waiting too long. 

We all shift into low gears as we prepare for the steep uphill ride that will take us up and over into the neighboring valley. The road is narrow, one-lane, gravelly, and winding. As we bike—slowly—I admire the pink and white cosmos in bloom by the side of the road, the queen anne’s lace that spreads across fields, and the acacia trees with their wispy red flowers. To our left, in the distance, we see the outline of the Pyrenees, especially the dramatic rise of the Pic du Midi. The houses of Antin thin and we’re soon surrounded by woods. There is a false summit, with a miniature valley positioned high in the hills. A few houses sprinkle the landscape, so isolated from the rest of the world. “It’s these inter-valley communities that interest me,” Becky says. And me too. The people who live here speak their own patois, live with little contact with their neighbors. It’s amazing to think of the isolation in such a busy country. Every small farm house that we pass has its own odor depending on what they are raising: Geese and ducks, an odor that is sharp in the back of the nose; beef cows, a flatter smell that mixes with the earth; milk cows, all sweetness.

Soon, we are sailing downhill, the breeze cooling the sweat under my helmet. We stop at the bottom of the hill to sit on a bench by l’Arros, a stream that flows out of the Pyrenees. We’re in the town of St. Sever, known for its Abbey.

St. SeverOn the return we take the D38 toward Villecomtal, then head back east on narrow back roads. I see a buzzard soaring over a field. It’s possible to get lost in these back roads, some of which dead end in fields. But we’ve all biked and driven them enough that we know to turn left or right at the statue of the virgin Mary, or at the grey house.

My grandmother loved taking this road through the woods to visit Villecomtal. They went with horse and buggy, she would tell me, taking the whole day for the visit. And then an uncle of hers owned a small shop in town, a shop that sold bonbons. There, she would get to eat as many candies as she pleased. What would she think of her grandchildren bicycling this same route in the heat of day? She would think we were nuts.

At a turn in the road, Olivier and Becky are waiting for me, though I had told them to go on, so I could stop and look at birds. They are snacking on blackberries, growing by the side of the road. And, Becky wanted to be sure that I saw the lamas in the field, napping in the sun. Lamas, like the donkey, are new to the area.

Becky leaves her bike and wanders to the side of the road to pee. She unzips her pants, and begins to crouch when she leaps into the air, screaming. In all the acres of land, in all the miles of road, she has decided to crouch to pee, right over this:

Fox and Chickens

Francis Morlass arrives in the morning to check the trap he has set for the fox, which has killed a few of Odette’s chickens. The plan is to catch it in a have a heart trap and then shoot it. I’m on the side of the fox, of course. Not that I want it to take Odette’s chickens, but I want it to live, to thrive. So to rid me of my wild animal love Odette tells me stories of how destructive the fox can be. There was the time she came into the chicken coop and found all nineteen of her chickens dead. “A massacre,” she explains. I get it that tending to chickens every day would make me want to protect them, but more—they are worth something, as a meal for Odette.

Almost every morning on my walk I see fox. They work the freshly cut fields of hay. I stood and watched one stalk and pounce, all four feet lifting off before it landed on its prey. But so far the chicken-stealing fox is not trappable. He’s sprung the trap twice but has not yet been taken. I’ll continue to quietly side with the fox and publicly hope that Odette’s chickens are safe. Both of these things can be true.

Francis is outdoors a lot and loves the natural world. He’s about an inch shorter than I am, but square, like he was built to move things around. He has a quick smile and like most Gascons, can stand and chat forever. Odette tells him I am looking for birds, and right away  he says: we see birds here that we never saw before. He is not the first to say this to me, so I’m beginning to think there’s a real shift in the area. I ask if there is a reason for this. They both agree that it is because there’s less use of pesticides in the fields. Neither say anything about global warming.

find the foxWhat is new is the cattle egret that I see accompanying the cows in the fields. Francis tells me that Damian shoots at the egrets (one explanation for why I find the birds here so skittish) to scare them off. But Francis likes them: they eat flies. He has a lot less flies since the egrets have arrived. The other new birds are the kingfisher, a bright blue, practically turquoise on the back. There’s the Hoopoe, he tells me. I look it up later and see a black and white bird with a long bill and a dramatic crest.  I want to see one! And the oriole. As he tells me this, the bright yellow bird lands at the top of the fig tree in front of us. I point it out to them, and they both say, “yes, the oriole loves to eat figs.” So do I. So I walk over to the tree and take a fig to eat as I begin my morning walk.