Où est Pookie?

Marguerite Bunce

Word Count 1895

One day on our morning walk in the forest, we went to a new place, 'las naos peyrous' or the nine stones. It's a prehistoric landmark like Stonehenge, with the stones arranged in a small circle. The stones are about hip height. One of our dogs, we had six last year, Pookie, is wilful, and despite her age, when we least expect it and even when we do and think we can catch her, decides to head off, taking the others with her. She took off that Saturday morning. The others eventually came back, but she didn't.

Pookie was named after a flying rabbit. She looked just like him with her angelic white face and wonky ears. I had recovered my Pookie books when all my belongings were shipped to France, where I'd finally bought my first house. These books – there are only three – are the fertile hot beds from which my life grew. Ivy L. Wallace's illustrations for Pookie entered my unformed brain and took it over. Pookie rescues forest animals after a terrible storm – there's an open fire in the rustic kitchen, and in front of it are boxes with small animals of all sizes, tucked in - they cover the floor; Pookie saves the bluebell wood from workmen building a road – a long line of miserable little animals leave their hollow trees, their toadstools, to camp for the night around a caldron of soup; Pookie is captured by the circus and made to perform – behind bars, paws in chains, crying.

I live in La France Profonde on the edge of Europe's largest forest, Les Landes. It was wonderful, at first. The big stone house with the huge open fireplace; the garden lined by old oak trees; the history which had happened here. Just across from my front door, the Romans had marched past during the Gallic wars, the Nazis had gunned down a member of the Resistance, and a plaque hangs on my barn wall honouring his death. There are red squirrels in the walnut trees, tiny bats in the house, swallows nesting in the barns and in the kitchen, hedgehogs in the leaf litter, voles, moles and campagnols making holes in the clay soil, pine martens in the plum trees, owls everywhere at night, frogs in the pond and whooping cranes on migration high overhead, day and night, twice a year. It was my chance to introduce a dog to this sanctuary. And then another. Perhaps a few more.

I admit that having a lot of dogs contributed to problems which arose. While there were just two dogs, I was able to give them exercise by riding my bike in a circuit – taking quiet roads for sixteen kilometres every morning. Swiftie had been trained to stop beside the bike as soon as we saw a car, and some people were impressed and were friendly. The English were welcome in this corner of France. They bought the old houses and spent lots of money employing local tradesmen, selling them back later at a considerable loss. English saved the dead centres and outskirts of little villages like mine. People waved. People said 'bongjaw' in the street, and after a while, we worked out that it meant 'bonjour'; that 'matang' was 'matin', 'demang' – 'demain' etc.

It was thrilling to live in an agricultural community. The machinery hammering along the road gave a sense of tanks rolling in – benign monstrosities used for tiny pockets of land. Great cylinders of hay filled with weeds fell from their rear, like a dinosaur hen dropping egg bombs in the field opposite. But we were shy and didn't go along to communal dinners raising funds for the local sports associations, or regimental reunions. A new mayor has changed the tone. He owns the chateau, which sits above the village like a collapsed wedding cake. He is the major landowner, and his fields are worked by the second largest landowner. Meanwhile, the third largest landowner has taken control of the field opposite my house. Their machines churn and cut the land, scraping, clearing claws work like sideways guillotines on the trees. A landmark avenue of elegant poplars went in one day, so sun can beat down on corn. Lies are told and spread. The mayor, a vindictive man, uses the gendarmes and the court to prove he's not the liar some might claim. Around my property, the bushes were scraped, and the trees were felled, so the climbing running nesting animals are all pushed away for a development which is said will never happen.

To own dogs like border collies, you have to enjoy exercise. Because it's what you spend much of your time doing. That and visiting the vet because they've run too fast and hurt their leg, need tick repellent, need urgent attention because you've not given them the tick repellent in time, and they've caught one of the many diseases carried by ticks. It's important that your dogs can run. There's no exercising a border collie on a lead, but in the country, there are wide open spaces, I thought, and we live where people are few. The largest forest in Europe is a grid of pine trees and underbrush, a crop, like all the rest. The shade and depth, the cool and thrum of cicadas and crickets, the pockets of pure warm air, can be erased in a day. Like the pollarding of plane trees and clipping of topiary hedges, the French penchant for human dominance leaves natural growth and animal exuberance beyond their pale. Dogs must be on leads, they tell you. You must stick to the designated path. And the sign nailed to the trees: 'Reserve de Chasse' is a threat.

I've fired a .22 rifle and shot a bird dead. I'm ashamed to say, but my father had the gun, and I wanted to do what he did, what men did. My father had been in the war. He'd worked on large properties. My mother, too, had used rifles. Shooting rabbits was a thing to do. She skinned and ate them too. I have some understanding and sympathy for rural life, but I have fallen out with la chasse in France.

We spent hours calling Pookie. The morning had moved on to well after lunchtime, and we'd been over, repeatedly, the territory we thought her old arthritic legs could carry her. It was winter, and the light wasn't going to last forever. Reluctantly, we left the forest, just as the hunters were marching towards us. There were at least fifty middle-aged men and a woman all dressed in orange with brown camouflage stains – like the new camouflage which had been introduced for desert storm warfare in Iraq – only orange for visibility. The woman stepped onto the road in front of us, waving her arms, menacing. I thought she wanted to look tough for the boys. The men looked blank-faced angry. It was a phalanx making the forest theirs, again. The hunt welcomes all the local men, from the rheumy-eyed, stiff moving, to the belligerent farmers and their cowed sons, who've not had the ability to go somewhere else and do something different. They all have their parts to play in a 'battu'. The old men line the roads, while the younger form a perimeter and close in with their dogs. The panicking boar or deer rush to break the circle, shots are fired, dogs gored. The old men get the word it's over on walkie-talkie.

They shoot each other, on occasion. The local hunt had a bad accident. A young man had been hit by a ricochet, and paralysed. Subsequently, he'd had trouble getting insurance to pay up because no one admitted firing the bullet. Everyone knew it was the head of the hunt. The hunters have been drinking, especially on weekends, at lunch, then again at night when they gather at their 'maison de la chasse'. It's a social/paramilitary kind of party which sometimes ends in court. A recent renowned case in the Dordogne, involved a man chopping wood in his garden one afternoon. He was killed by a hunter who claimed he mistook him for a boar. They knew each other and did not get on. The hunter was found not guilty, but a law was introduced that hunting should no longer be mixed with alcohol. The head of the hunt in France, M. Schoene, is on record as saying he couldn't give a fuck about the new law, and that when the hunters are in the woods on weekends, people should stay indoors. Then there was the one about the hunter whose wife was walking behind him... somehow she was shot and killed.

We spent the entire weekend searching for Pookie. I discovered ravines and looked for her body near water. At night I lay in bed thinking how cold she'd be, if she was alive, as the temperature fell to -3 degrees. She was old and reckless, but she always managed to find her way out. It didn't make any sense for her to vanish like this. There are stories of people losing dogs, and never knowing what has happened. You pity the owners driving around in their cars, always going slow, straining. Their eyes are tired from the constant headache. They ask, have you seen a dog, so high, this colour. So old. On my ride, I had passed the slowly decaying body of a dog in a ditch, until only its collar remained. When a dog goes missing, there's always the chance of a heart attack or a broken leg. The world is wrong for the entire time your animal is gone. It seems, though, for the last few years, that the world is simply wrong.

Monday morning, after another long search, the phone rang. The neighbouring mayor had Pookie. She was alive. He waited for us to collect her. The hunters had found her that Saturday afternoon. She'd been on her way home and had already travelled a few kilometres. She must have been just behind us, but they found her wandering, and had taken her into custody. Someone had slashed her harness across her chest, with a knife used for gutting animals. There would be a fine to pay. She'd been held in a room for two nights, and if we'd driven anywhere near, we would have heard her enraged and increasingly desperate howls. She had been treated with cold disdain.

The hunters keep their dogs locked up. They get out only during the season of la chasse, which lasts from Autumn to early Spring. The mayor of the neighbouring village said I had no control over my dogs, which was only sometimes true, that they were vicious, which was not true and added that I would need to watch out. He suggested I use an electric shock collar to control them – like he did. The mayor of my village made a law that all dogs should be on short leads at all times in the land he presided over. After that, I wasn't able to ride with Swiftie. The mayor recruited my neighbours to inform on me, waiting outside in the morning, with wives in dressing gowns to witness, or a phone to photograph my passing. I find them strange, but I am l'etranger.

Rural France has lost its charm.

Marguerite grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she published poetry in some anthologies and won a couple of prizes. When her poems became too long for traditional publication, she wrote a libretto for an opera based on a Bocaccio story from the Decameron. “The Remedy” was performed by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera company. Short films she wrote were shown at the National Film Institute in London and elsewhere. She currently lives in the south of France where she is experimenting in new forms of writing, such as the essay published here.