The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono Read Free Book Online Page B

flesh. Because the occupation of the masters of beasts is something like water which runs through the fingers and which cannot be held. Because that odor of suint and wool, that odor of man cooked in his own sweat, that odor of ram and goat, that odor of milk and of full ewes, that odor of nascent lambs rolled in their slime, that odor of dead beasts, that odor of herds in the high mountain summer pastures, that is life, like the brine of the great seas.
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    RETURNING toward Saint-Martin-l’Eau, we saw rising out of the beauty of the sunrise the perched village of Dauphin. Césaire let us wait for him by the bridge and he took the shortcut to lead Bijou back to his stable. The shepherd went into the Largue up to his knees. He bent over the water, watching the slow life below. With his hand, he fished out a barbel round as an eggplant, and then he drew from a hole a long angry eel that flipped around his arm. Césaire came back from above with fistfuls of green peppers. At that moment, the sky was milky and the day promised to be beautiful. As we arrived at the pottery, the young sorceress arrived, too, skin and bones, covered with dust, dust packed hard on her thin legs by a long night of running. Then I understood that she had run behind our cart. We skinned the still-live eel, and the skin billowed in the wind. We put the barbel on an iron grill and, over a fire of vine shoots, it all began to cook; the eel in a fennel stock, the fish on the grill. The girl carefully basted the fish with oil.
    The shepherd worked a bit. He learned with a sigh that the ewe Joséphine had given birth and he went to wipe off the lamb with swabs
of grass. Then he brought it to us, still all trembling, all sticky, all surprised. The smell of newborn lamb mixed with the smell of our soup, our fire, and then came the smell of the dawn, that scent of awakened earth and trees coming back to life. The sky began to moan again softly under the sun.
    We blamed all we had missed the night before on that fear-ridden Anaïs. It was that great drama of the earth that the masters of beasts put on every year, the night of the summer solstice.

    I RETURNED to Manosque by the most convenient route. The walking, my strength, the eel soup had given me heart and I rolled along the paths like a stone, but I was hungry for that great thing of the spirit and I couldn’t think of anything else. Insensible to the beautiful flower of sky, to all the hoopoes that were learning to fly around me, I went along and my thoughts, like a fledgling bird, learned to fly, too. They took off in the direction of that odor of newborn lamb.
    â€œNo more rest!” I had written to Césaire. This is what I said to him:
    â€œThis is what you must do, watch carefully for the date and the time for me. Try to find out, let me know exactly. Twenty opinions are better than one. Then, I put you in charge of the whole business because, you know, I am so far away from it all, I am so far from it, because, when all is said and done, I haven’t been able to completely disengage myself from the easy life, because I have a family that is used to it, because Manosque isn’t a big town, but it’s a town all the same. Do you know what I mean? I’m telling you this so that you will know that I’m putting the whole business in your hands. I know that I myself could never
learn the time and date. I would have to go spend days and days in the hills and it would be exactly the moment I close my eyes when that red scarf would pass, and once more I would miss everything. Watch well and then tell me when it is close to the time. I’ll arrange to be ready day or night. Send me a message, and I’ll come up at once. Warn Anaïs and Bartholomé and, if perhaps you could get a faster horse.... Ah yes, Césaire, if only my life were like yours. To hollow out a burrow and to live there with only those you love for company. Maybe I would have had a witch