You know when you’ve never been hunting, you kind of have this sweet conception of hunting where you’re with a few ex-marines and your faces are painted so all you can see is the whites of each others’ eyes and you have a big-ass gun and you’re all slithering around on the ground or crouching behind trees or in ditches stalking like a rhinoceros or a saber toothed tiger? And you’re wearing those sweet Aussie hats like the one Bob Peck wears in Jurassic park when he’s stalking that one dino but it turns out that the dino’s partner is actually stalking him and he says, “clever girl” and then gets eaten? (I also want to mention here how much I love and respect Miguel Sandoval and White Hertford – they will live in my heart forever, not that they’re dead or anything, maybe just to the cinematic world).
So, let’s just say I didn’t get to say “clever girl.”
A lot of other obscenities came out of me while I was tunneling my way through thick brush, blackberry brambles and trees in an attempt to sweep through the forests and scare out any bore that might be hanging out. I also learned a new French word, alé, which sounds like alay and can be said in lots of different ways including the long, sad, alaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyaaaaahhhh. You say it this way when you realize that you’re actually being consumed by blackberry tentacles and that you might have to be rescued by one of the 80 year old French men who’s easily making his way through this crap, with his 80 year old dog (in dog years) who’s scampering around your feet just teasing you. ALEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Pictures after the jump!
Anyways, so that was my job, scaring out the swine. Go figure. I was put in charge of a dog, Dina, who quickly ran away from me as soon as we entered the bush. There were about 25 dogs in total, some small pretzel like dogs and some bigger ones and of course some furry little ones that wouldn’t scare a snail. Savages, all of them.
For the first few hours, the other–for lack of a better word, I’ll call them–scarers and I pushed through brush in lines towards hunters who waited at clearings for animals to run out so they could shoot them. Awesomeness. I heard a lot of shots but saw only little dogs scampering around. When we regrouped, I found that the horns blown after the shots meant success! They had killed a wild bore. It was a nasty looking thing about 65 kilos. Then it was finally lunch time.
At this point I thought the hunt was over so I stripped off my completely torn rubber pants and my boots and settled in with a glass of something that tasted like Anise and then some white wine and then some red wine, and then some beer and then some scotch, offered to me by a wonderfully jolly Frenchman who spoke like an Englishman. For lunch, we had Choucroute, which is like sauerkraut but more close to something that the devil might feed you if he wanted you to overeat and explode. Which is pretty much what I did. Something important you need to know about me is that I eat way to much of anything I love. And I love sauerkraut and pork sausage, pork links and ham. You’ll have to look at the pictures to really understand what I was dealing with. The choucroute was followed by cheese and dessert – straight sugar caramelized on a delicious crust. Of course by that point I had had so many helpings of choucroute that I could barely move and had grown a pair of intense jowls that prevented me from opening and closing my mouth, which also prevented me from protesting (all part of their plan) when, after lunch they told me we were going for round two. Misery.
It was actually much easier than the first time round. We kind of just went for a walk through forests with red and yellow leaves everywhere and yelled our aleeeees and talked. If you ever have the chance to hunt in France with a bunch of old French men, don’t miss it.
