Palafox by Eric Chevillard Read Free Book Online

extended periods on the stores of fat in his two humps (which are also responsible for giving him the hideous appearance mentioned time and again). Contradictory information makes its way to us. A few practical jokers claim to have seen him, however incapable they are of describing him or able they are at providing pencil drawings as good as those by the proverbial police sketch artist, more or less ornithologically inspired, although somewhat anteatery, or coelacanthy, too. Algernon wastes no time confusing them. We follow other, more promising trails, the first to a fattened chicken, the second to a black sheep, the third to a coypu. We rejoin our camp as night falls. Fallen, a new character arrives, his name would mean nothing to you, and asks if he might avail himself of our hospitality as he shrugs off a heavy pack of beige sackcloth, the contents of which we will not bother listing. The darkness disorients, the only illuminated path leads to the moon - he thought it best to stop for the night. We welcome him, are you thirsty, are you hungry, might you have seen anything unusual on the road? He slakes his thirst, restores himself, and yes he did recall almost flattening a strange little luminous animal, fluorescent green, that moved out of the way just in time and then flew a zigzagging course into the night. We identified Palafox from this description, it could only be Palafox, he must have molted his winter fur.
    The sun will rise, the cock will let the cat out of the bag. Worms will eat nightingales. We set out. Our guest takes us to the very place where, last night, radiant Palafox appeared to him. We ask him to tell it to us again, and to see if there’s anything he may have forgotten. The animal whose size is close to that of a fat wasp or a little cheetah was nonetheless neither striped nor spotted, therefore there was no mistaking it. His rapid flight, without displaying his wings, sinuous and slender like a swimmer’s stroke, seemed to support professor Pierpont’s hypothesis; first filed among the fish, the mammals and the sparrows, the whale would be in reality a coleopteran insect, close cousin to the firefly, the etymologist was only waiting for proof, he nearly had it. Because our goal was in sight, in a verdant patch of black undergrowth, our guide advised us to forget the possibility that Palafox could still be there and for a good reason, as easy to understand as it is difficult to admit: the odor of man upsets the wild boar and is enough to drive them from their muddy den. Likewise, we change our sheets after a hurtling retreat of a wild sow, the last of her eight little ones evacuated as soon as possible, and don’t we also change the pillow, a little later in the night, as soon as a ninth little boar is discovered and at last flushed out? Caught once in his wallow, Palafox will not appear there again.
    Nonetheless, leaving the cave, his trail is easy to follow. Broken branches, uprooted bushes, mangled hedges, Palafox did as Palafox does, running full bore before him, straight ahead, scorning obstacles, mountains and valleys, bitter winds, thorns, his path looking like what a grouchy little blonde baby girl might do to her braids, through the wheatfields, the ponds, only giving up a tuft or two of wool here or there, stuck to the broken barbs along a fractured fence. Algernon leading the group guides us up the hill marked with the flesh-less sculpted head of a cow and bloody corpses: millers, road-workers, shepherds and goatherds, with their animals, a fly fisher whose rod had changed hands, then donkeys in the fir trees, flat dray-horses, uncountable cows bathing in their milk. To butter a bovine, we drive the thought out of mind, Palafox on the other hand cultivates it when it comes, he makes a single mouthful of the bee and its honey, the chicken and her egg, the grape-picker and his bunch. We arrive too late at the devastated farm. The dovecote has been gnawed through at one corner and is lying