Palafox by Eric Chevillard Read Free Book Online Page A

across the yard. Stables and sties are empty, bent bits spit onto the ground, clover and flowering alfalfa in the rabbit hutches. Not a single pig to bless himself with, nor the littlest poussin, as for the blabbing mallards, they will not go far, just to the wall, just to the pond, wherever they go they will be poorly received. Would you have happened to have seen a sort of buzzing bird? So asks Algernon tactfully. Kneeling at the edge of the well, making a megaphone with his hands, he repeats his question in other ways, you wouldn’t have happened to have seen my cat? No one answers, but what could they say? How can one scream, or even sob, without a glottis? From the bottom of the well, wounded but miraculously saved, the old peasant contents herself by throwing a clog at Algernon, and another, then a pebble, hoping he will understand.
    A femur (of an ox, claims Franc-Nohain, of a pig, states Algernon, of a ram, has decided Swanscombe, of a buffalo, insists Franc-Nohain, which is not even to say peccary, underscores Algernon, or even of an ibex, argues Swanscombe - African antelope! Indonesian wild pig! Basque chamois! yak! koiropotamus! mouflon! - a femur according to Franc-Nohain, a fibula according to Algernon, a tibia according to Swanscombe) discovered in the meadow adjacent to the farm puts us back on the trail of the beast. Palafox has been delayed, is having dessert in the orchard. A handful should have sufficed, but no, not one cherry is without a cruel beak’s peck, from this one he tears a cheek, from another a thigh. There’s no excuse for it. Purest vandalism. Bad for bad’s sake. He paused at each apple, at every pear (early for the season, or else very late), in each fruit he bored a tunnel with no exit, opened a gallery to show nothing, gnawed heart and lungs, poisoned all the vital organs of the figs, and brained the nuts.
    Tracks and leftovers showed us the way. Having eaten, Palafox will have smoothed his whiskers and restored his vigor. We dig in vain for scales or horsehair in the tall grass, a feather that would suggest which way he went. It would be only reasonable to assume that Palafox is busy digesting at the moment, under our noses or nowhere near at all, hiding beneath a stone or hidden in the branches. Patience, hunger, always hunger, hunger which he supposes to have gotten past and left behind will make him step from the woods on two paws and three tails, his wind-beaten side, miserable. But the wait, this time again, could be long. Palafox has had all the time in the world to stock up on provisions, grain in his belly, meat in his crop, fish in the expandable pocket of his beak, dried fruit to nibble filling his jowls - enough to endure a siege, all the more so for a reptile of his size, capable in other circumstances of incredible speed, who digests slowly, slowly, plunged into a sort of lethargic sleep which could last weeks. In all likelihood therefore, immobile as crabs mimicking pebbles, eyelids closed to avoid distraction, Palafox melds into a herd, a poultry yard, an orchard, a few feet from us or nowhere near, curled up under the shelter of a bush or pressed against the bottom of his burrow. It was he who was seen close to the bank where yesterday we spotted his tracks among those of beavers and woodpeckers. Hikers heard him knocking with violent, regular blows against the trunk of a birch - testimony corroborated by the log dike newly built across the stream and by the rise in the water level, drowning men and beasts, flooding meadows and nearby farms. In the evening, Palafox would have still attacked a family out for a walk, biting a child in the heel, stinging his mother on the lip, soiling the father’s hat, finally caught up in and struggling in the sister’s hair, the sister who hasn’t spoken since, but perhaps one day will walk again.
    We are no longer the only ones on his heels. The countryfolk arm themselves, organize search posses, set traps, bird netting, set snares,