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Kay SextonMUSHROOMS Cep appear only when the weather is perfect - such precision of circumstances is required to produce them that a whole folklore exists around their uncertain emergence. It’s true that they only grow where pigs travel, so unless the sanglier cross your land, you will not be rewarded with bowling-ball sized fungi that taste of smoked bacon but have a texture all their own; incomparable. That taste, the villagers claim, is produced – alchemically - from the dung left by the pigs....There's more of these thieving swine all over the woods... Sanglier, wild boar, do visit our land, because we are designated chasse interdit. This means that hunters are banned from our property. The truth, like all truths here, is immensely more subtle.Take, for example, the day I was walking our fences – checking for damage by wild boar, whose bloody-minded habits include digging up fence posts instead of walking round them. I’d collapsed at the top of la Garosse, a field so steep we haul new fence posts up on ropes because we can’t carry them and walk upright. I found myself with an audience of three hunters, and seven dogs. "Plouh" I said. "Plouh" is an Ariege expression of disgust or exasperation – it starts in the lower gut and ends with an explosive snort through the nostrils, and is deeply insulting. "Our land is chasse interdit, we are a tourist site, there are signs posted everywhere." "Eh bien …" said the leading hunter, "well; we were following Nino and as you well know, Nino can’t read French." It’s true, Nino not only cannot read French, he cannot even speak it – he uses the local dialect which is a variant of Langue d’Oc. Nino is seventy-eight years old and walks eight miles a day with the sheep from Barré, our local cheese-makers. Right now he is helpfully testing the fence-posts, trying to rock them back and forth in their sockets. He looks relaxed, as though the hike to the top of la Garosse is a stroll across a driving range. I am pleased to see the other hunters are panting as much as I am. "Plouh!" says Nino, then, in lieu of a shared language, he uses energetic mime to show me that one post is shaky and will bring down the fence in the next snowstorm. He takes the mallet and wooden wedges from me and smartly bangs wedges into two sides of the post, then hands me back the mallet. The post is immovable. So are Nino and the hunters. I offer grudging thanks and head back down ‘my’ mountain. Nino and his companions ostentatiously move to the other side of our boundary fence and watch me go. As soon as I am out of sight they will be back on our land, hunting the sanglier that loosened the fence-post. There is nothing I can do to stop them. My journey back down is accompanied by vicious imaginary scenes in which they rouse a hibernating bear and get mauled. The rare Pyrenean bears have never come down from the mountains onto our land, but I can dream... Because we have sanglier in our woods, we also have cep. And that is where the cultural chasm emerges. My father believes that a man’s land is sacrosanct, and good fences make good neighbors. Every Ariegious also believes both those things to be true, unless one’s neighbor has something like cep, or cherries, or wild strawberries, or chestnuts or walnuts… at which point, the rules change. If you have a wild crop and you don’t appear to be harvesting it, or it is obvious that you can’t use all of it yourself, or if your land was once owned by a distant cousin of theirs, then the average Ariegious feels they have a sacred duty to uphold the proverb "waste not, want not" and to help you out with the harvesting, storage and consumption of that produce. Between September and November we hear regular bellows from the woodlands that surround our house, "What the hell do you think you’re doing? Did I give you permission to come here and scavenge in my woods? No, I did not! Kay – get down here now, I’ve caught some more of them! What have you got in the basket? Right, those are my cep, thank you very much, I’ll have those back for a start! Kay – get down here, there’s more of these thieving swine all over the wood! Come and give them hell!" My father has never mastered the French language. Like Nino, he relies on powerful pantomime to convey his feelings, and no mushroom hunter who has confronted his stick-waving, roaring, red-faced fury, has failed to get the message. The first year I ran down every time to explain politely to the mushroom marauder that we did indeed know what cep were, we did eat them when we found them and yes, we did know that these woods were ours, so would they please leave? I did this to save my father’s heart, which seemed likely to explode in fury at every trespass he discovered. "Eh bien," the trespasser would concede, handing over the mushrooms, "bon appetite!" The second year, I just yelled - from wherever I happened to be - that we were not as stupid as we looked, and if the unwelcome visitors didn’t leave immediately and mushroom-less I would call the Mairie and subject them to an embarrassing public telling off. My father’s heart seemed to hold up pretty well under this rather distant threat process, so I spent the third short summer teaching my father to say "Plouh! Les donnez moi!" This simple message, repeated at full volume, rang through our third autumn, scaring fledgling birds from the trees and causing guiltless campers to jump from their skins. I’m sure it’s good for my father to speak for himself in these matters, he gets to meet many of our neighbors and engage with them in their own tongue, and it’s certainly improved his French accent.  Pushcart nominated Kay Sexton is an Associate Editor for Night Train journal who has had more than seventy short stories published. Sarah Hall chose her as runner-up in the ESSP short story contest in 2005, and Kay was runner up in the 2004 Guardian Short Short Fiction contest judged by Dave Eggers in 2004 and her work is widely anthologised and published in magazines like FRiGG and three candles journal. Her current focus is "Green Thought in an Urban Shade" - a collaboration with the painter Fion Gunn to explore and celebrate the parks and urban spaces of four cities in words and images. One story written as part of the project has been accepted for Tell Tales III and another was a finalist in the 2006 SLS/St Petersburg Annual Literary Contest judged by Margaret Atwood. Her blog is Writing Neuroses and she writes a regular column for Moondance.
7:38 PM - 3/7/2006 - post comment
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