Palafox by Eric Chevillard Read Free Book Online Page B

nooses, prepare ferrets, falcons, mirrors, nets, bird-traps, mousetraps, glue traps, pesticides, sulfurous wickers, poisons, gasses, fumigants. Their displeasure is no source of bafflement. Palafox pillages their haylofts, their stores of wheat, gnawing and burrowing, he empties beets from within, he parasites, perforates, grinds, weakens. He devours buds, seedlings, bulbs, rhizomes. What he doesn’t eat rots. Where he ripped the shallots from their rootlets, you see black necroses. He weaves fine tight webs which asphyxiate the young shoots, seedlings, cuttings. He stunts the growth of small trees, bores out their trunks, blocks the circulation of the sap. The damage is incalculable. On the list of natural disasters, Palafox rises through the ranks, neither drought nor hurricane ever caused as much damage as this single Colorado beetle. Nothing frightens him, neither the scarecrows in the fields, nor the aluminum ribbons in the apricot trees, not the little owls crucified to the fences, not the cries of buzzards or kites broadcast uninterrupted over loudspeakers - to complete the illusion the cries seem to come from the pumpkins themselves. Palafox remains elusive. A few dogs from the farms dispatched to pursue his scent return rabid and have to be destroyed. Now we barely get a glimpse of him if that, sometimes a red shadow, a silver shimmer, a brown shape which leaps from the ground, shaking his little pink hands like an impudent marionette, or a green tail which slides silently between stones. We immediately grab a stick, you name it, a sachet, a scythe, we rush, but are too late, again too late, the black dot on the horizon, the white dot at the zenith, Palafox remains out of reach.

5.
     
    Spaniels, beagles, bassets and border collies, a fine pack of hounds, followed by beaters, a dozen or so - all preceding Sadarnac whom we weren’t expecting and who jumped from the dog-cart, his canes fagotted on one shoulder, let him come along if he wants to. Palafox is in danger. The countryfolk are expanding their search, armed with their anger, shotguns and pitchforks in fist, it’s a matter of saving the district from a volcano, nothing more nothing less. They will not hesitate to fire. The dogs will help us to flush him out before they do, Algernon wants him alive, Algernon remains convinced that with patience, effort, work, something can be made of him. The progress the creature made in its first lessons was sufficiently encouraging. His aggression diminished, he was frequently docile around us, even affectionate, with a sweetness at first impossible to imagine, given his carapace covered with barbs, his long rostrum perforated and sharp as a saw, the foul liquid he emits when rising so as not to soil himself, his fanlike tail, or also this nasty habit he will have to lose, of swallowing his prey alive. Of course, Palafox, like ourselves, has four hands or, depending on the need and the task, like ourselves, has four feet, two magnificent almond-shaped black eyes and a jovial smile between his ears, but this wouldn’t be enough to take him in our arms - the elephant and the mosquito both have trunks, have they ever shared an embrace, a real embrace, a single brotherly embrace? Our physical similarities don’t explain everything. Look elsewhere for explanations of these crude moments of tenderness.
    The humid ground kept a record of his itinerary, straight ahead to the crossroads, then to the left, again to the left. The tracks are clear all the way to the forest. When Palafox leaps he sends his posterior paws far in front of his anterior paws, so that the oval impressions of the former always preceded those of the shallower tridactylic latter. Both come to an end at forest’s verge, as if Palafox took off for good never to return to earth or, who knows, opting for a mode of locomotion most discrete, infinitely more so, had preferred to continue by swimming.
    Fruitless morning hunt.
    Sounds of horns.
    Our guides signal us