We would shout "we are not wild boar."

Swimming, walking, avoiding being shot

I am in south-west France, and tomorrow is Saturday so France will be closed. It is closed all day Saturday, all day Sunday and all day Wednesday. These are also the days that French schoolchildren are off school. Not all of France is closed. Its urban and peri-urban areas are fine. But the countryside is closed because La Chasse has decided it is.

La Chasse. The Hunt. Capital letters to denote how fundamentally important it is to the French countryside. You know, like berets and pastis and such. The French countrymen (it’s mostly men but not entirely) insist upon the right to take their weapons, have a drink or two, and make woodland, open fields and even roads ludicrously dangerous for anyone who fancies a walk or run or cycle or drive. Mais non, Rose, you will say: hunting accidents (for “accidents'“ read murders and grievous bodily harms) have diminished hugely over 50 years. The French government says so:

“Only” 80 people hurt or killed in hunting accidents per year. Hurrah. Now let’s have a look at what these hunting accidents consist of. Most victims are hunters but not all.

In December 2020 Morgan Keane (a young French-British man) was cutting wood on his property in Calvignac in the Lot region, when he was shot in the chest. The shot had been fired by Julien Féral, who said he thought Morgan was a wild boar. This was Morgan:

And this is a wild boar.

Yes I’m being facetious but I am also according Féral’s defence the gravity that it deserves.

The court heard how the bullet passed through Keane’s heart and lungs and, his lawyer said: “he drowned in his blood … for 15 minutes he was crying out”

I have no time for crappy defences because I have walked the hills and woods of south-west France for 13 years now, and I know what the hunt is like. I know that some of them drink, for the craic. I have seen them driving with a dead wild boar spreadeagled on their car bonnet, for the craic. I have encountered them on woodland paths and hiding on the edge of fields. My friends were cycling on a converted railway line path, a popular and supposedly safe place to be, when they saw that hunters were in the fields to either side of them. Then a deer appeared, and shots were fired “all over the place.” They had two dogs with them. They said it was terrifying and the only good thing about it was that “Bambi escaped.” I used to borrow my friend Cathy’s dogs when I lived here, and Molly-dog was a black lurcher. If you think Morgan Keane looked like a wild boar, imagine a black dog. I learned to avoid anywhere that said a hunt was in progress, but often they are there with no warnings. Sometimes they hunt where they have no permit to hunt, such as in Morgan’s case. Last Sunday I went for a run up a green hill and down the other side. I saw a neighbour on the way and she urged me to stay in the village. I said, probably arrogantly, that I wouldn’t let La Chasse stop me enjoying nature, and she said, “I thought like that until a shot was fired past my head.” She said the shots can travel three kilometres and she is right. I ran up the hill but could hear the hunt dogs on the other side of the valley. Several times I stopped because I thought they were coming my way. I don’t blame the dogs, but I blame the men and women who set them loose.

People have been shot driving their cars, walking their dogs, minding their own business. Give people guns, some alcohol and a state-sanctioned right, and of course deaths will happen.

Féral had told the court of the incident: “There isn’t a day I don’t think about it, it’s marked me for life. I’m sorry.” He had admitted he had not “identified the target”. He said he had taken up hunting to “clear his head” after his young daughter was killed by a drunk driver. “I like nature and I didn’t have any other way to destress. I thought: why not?” he said.

Oui. Why not?

Yesterday I encountered Henri, a lovely man in the village who is despite being lovely a committed hunter. He said the hunt had gone badly and the boar had escaped. I said, good, I’m on the side of the boar. “But there are too many of them,” he said, still smiling, “and they will eat us all.” I don’t think he expected what I said next, because it was “the greatest pests on this planet are human beings so why don’t you hunt those?”

Because it’s not just Morgan:

In February, a hunter’s stray bullet killed Mélodie Cauffet, 25, who was walking with a friend on a forest path in Aveyron.

In October, a British woman, 67, died after her partner, a hunter, allegedly shot her during a wild boar hunt. He was alleged to have been carrying his gun over his shoulder when it went off while she was walking behind. Her death is being investigated.

In October 2018, a stray bullet hit and killed Mark Sutton, 34, a restaurant owner from Wales, while he was riding a mountain bike in Haute-Savoie.

In November 2019, Franck Jarry, 77, was shot in the back and killed while picking mushrooms in Charente-Maritime.

Two years earlier, a 69-year-old woman was killed when a hunter shot through her garden hedge while on a wild boar hunt. The hunter was given a 12-month suspended sentence and banned from hunting for 10 years.

After Morgan’s murder, sorry, accident, the French media talked again of the debate about hunting. But there really is no debate. There are calls to reduce hunting to one day a week, which is entirely reasonable. Morgan’s friends have set up Un jour un chasseur in his memory, which gathers accounts of people’s frightening encounters with La Chasse. (In French.) In this Guardian piece about the association, Morgan’s friend Léa Jaillard, one of the co-founders, said,

“After Morgan died, I remember thinking back to things we’d endured as children in the countryside. If we went out for a walk, my parents told me to sing or shout so the hunters could hear. Of course, we were children, so it was a game. We would shout, ‘We are not wild boar’.”

There is no debate because the hunting lobby is powerful and well-connected. A million people who like to terrify wild animals for fun get the right to make the countryside dangerous for the rest of us, so that we walk, run and cycle listening for a bullet.

Morgan’s killer Julian Féral was given a sentence of two years. Suspended.

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Au lac

This week I have been swimming. I could have said wild swimming or cold water swimming because it was both those things, but it was also just swimming. Or rather, what I call hairdresser swimming, from the times I would go to Dewsbury Baths for the breakfast swim (a swim and toast and tea for a few pounds), and many of the women there swam with their heads clear of the water because they didn’t want to mess their hair up. Today I was hairdresser swimming because no goddamn way was I putting my head underwater. I got some brain freeze even wearing a woolly hat.

I’ve been three times this week. The first was a moonlight swim and I lasted less than two minutes. My body exploded with cold. It was a full-body experience and the experience was my body saying GET OUT NOW. So I did. Earlier this week we went again, in daylight, and it was tolerable. I learned that if I do deep breathing, the overwhelming shock and urge to get out diminishes and eventually it feels comfortable. Swim 2: eleven minutes. The day was sunny and the water was not warm, but not all-my-cells-are-freaking-out cold. It was a lovely swim.

Today I have been again. It has been raining and it’s not warm, althought the car showed that it was 10 degrees. I got in first because I needed a pee (plus peeing warms the water), and I felt not quite the total panic of the moonlight swim, but something similar. Breathe. Keep moving. Wait it out. Breathe. And it passed, but not entirely . On this swim my feet never warmed up, and nor did I. But I stayed in, because I was in great company, with Katie and Sally and Florence, also known as the Little Mermaid (La Petite Sirêne) because she is so at home in the water, no matter what temperature. She went into the water saying she was not at all feeling it because she has just got back from the Côte d’Azur where the water was 17 degrees. Here it was probably 7. But she still stayed in longer than the rest of us, not even swimming, just delighting in being in water. Swim 3: 12.5 minutes.

I have learned this about swimming in cold water. You should pack:

• layers

• a flask of hot drink

• at least one hot water bottle

Then when you get out, it is a race against your core temperature dropping. Get clothes on as quickly as possible. Run around a bit to warm up your core. Put a hot water bottle under your jumper. Run around some more. Eat cake and drink loads of hot tea or coffee or chocolate or whatever floats your highly visible float. Do not immediately have a warm shower when you get home because that will just heat your exterior and your core will get colder. (I have learned all this swimwisdom from Katie.) Instead do as I am doing now, which is sitting about a foot from my wood burner, my towel and borrowed wet-suit top drying in the warm heat (my central heating is broken so I live in the room where the fire is). Revel in the fresh feeling and the smugness, and be pleased that there are magnificent women in the world who think swimming in a lake without wetsuits on the first day of December is entirely comme il faut.

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Animal hero of the week : The Borrowed Dog

When I lived here, I borrowed Molly and Maggie twice a day. I was writing my second book and not yet a runner, so I walked and walked. Molly and Maggie were lurchers and I loved them. They were beautiful, they ran like Olympians but faster, and they were affectionate and caring. We had a great old time, marching up through the woods and stopping in a green field for breakfast, or me doing yoga in my tiny yoga field with Molly trying to join in. They are both dead now and I miss them loads. It was a privilege to borrow them and I think The Big Necessity would not have been the book it is without them. I thought of the first sentence on a walk with M&M, for a start.

This week I’ve borrowed Freya. She is a black Patterdale/Border terrier, and a sweetheart. Except she doesn’t like hills. I have learned this from borrowing her before: take her off the lead and go uphill and it will be a constant battle of turning round, seeing her sitting unmoving and coaxing her on with words or treats. I thought I had learned my lesson, so when I took her up a hill the other day, I kept her leashed until the crest of the hill. Then she becomes a different dog. From Sulky Minx she becomes Homeward Hound. Now that the hill is crested, she runs along in front, happy as anything, because she thinks she is going home.

She is great company and the latest in my beloved Borrowed Dogs who are good for the soul.

Until two days ago. I walked her up to the Chapelle de Sainte Cécile, an 11th century chapel that is all that remains of the pre-sacked-by-the-French Cathar village. It’s rather nice:

The chapel is a ten minute walk up the hill from Freya’s house. Then, from where this photo was taken, there is a forest path that leads into the woods then circles back down into the village. We got onto the footpath and I made a stupid mistake. I thought, we’re beyond the chapel, she’ll know we’re heading home this way, and I let her off the lead. At first she was fine, and trotted along. I even gave her a treat. Good girl, Freya. Two minutes later I turned round and she was standing stock still and I knew I was doomed. But this time she didn’t wait for me to come and coax her. She turned round and legged it. Really legged it; I followed her quick-smart and never saw her again. This was alarming. Not only because I seemed to have lost someone’s dog — even though I was sure she had just legged it downhill to her house — but because there is a road between the chapel and the way down to the village, and though this is deepest countryside, and there is little traffic, there is still traffic and it only takes one car.

I got back to Katie and Paul’s house, knocked on the door and as usual that was answered by loud barking. She was back. Katie and Paul were sympathetic. She’s done it before, said Katie. How often? Once. I looked at Freya, innocently lying in her basket and changed her name. From now on, Freya, you are Shitbag to me.

(Only for a few hours.)

One of the bestselling books in France at the moment is Son odeur après la pluie, by Cédric Sapin-Defour. It’s a lovely story: a schoolteacher who loved a dog, the dog died, the man missed the dog and wrote a beautiful book about it that is a huge success.

Apparently, according to most reviews and this piece about the book (in English), it is lyrical and moving. As is the title. But I still think that once you remove the Frenchy lyricism of “His smell after rain” you get a bestselling book called Wet Dog.

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