Guy de la Valdène - Fragrance of Grass

Guy de la Valdne was born and raised in France. His earlier books include For a Handful of Feathers, Making Game: An Essay on Woodcock, and Red Stag. His articles have appeared in Sports Afield and Field & Stream, among other publications. He lives on an 800-acre farm outside of Tallahassee, Florida.

The wonder of the world,
the beauty of the shapes of things,
their color, light and shade, these I saw.
Look ye also while life lasts.

Old gamekeeper, Cumberland, England

My second gun was a single-shot 14mm weapon that carried a modicum of weight both in hand and in delivery. Georges, the butler with whom I had shared my first taste of partridge and female anatomy, was tasked with teaching me how to handle the hardware safely.

My first head of game was a hare, another forbidden species whose ill-advised killing resulted in the loss of my hunting privileges for a month. My mother enjoyed watching them box and preen and dance across the shadows that settled every evening on the pastures of our Norman property, and she was saddened by the death of one of the actors. I was twelve years old and mistook the hare for a rabbit, a quarry I had been encouraged to shoot since they were plentiful and tore her garden to shreds.

The unpremeditated killing occurred when a long-legged bolt of motion rushed out of a bramble thicket, encouraged by a small cocker spaniel that slept on my bed and answered to the name of Pooky. Instinctively, I swung the gun, pulled the trigger, and shot in the rear end what I took to be a rabbit. My prey came to a disjointed stop and pitched over onto its flank on a carpet of leaves. With the assistance of its front legs, the animal strained to escape and screamed through bared, yellow teeth.

I remember that for an instant the terrified black holes that were the hares eyes met mine.

I had never heard a dying animal cry, and the anguish escaping the hares clenched molars frightened me, paralyzed me, and made me sick. To the memory nothing is lost and I would think back much laterdecades laterto that moment when I read a line of Nietzsches: Without cruelty there would be no festival.

I dropped my gun and wailed.

Georges picked up the hare by its hind legs and hit it once behind the ears with the blade of his open palm. The long, tan body relaxed and stretched to the ground. Except for my snivels, the forest fell silent and, in its familiar manner, forgave the killing of one of its denizens. Louis fashioned the hare into a cold terrine that the entire family consumed a week later.

To this day, when I walk in the woods of my youth I can still find the exact spot where I killed my first hare half a century ago.

That maladroit shot was to be the first of a thousand more dreadful trigger pulls that, over time, have inflicted immeasurable pain. Since I know how well and how poorly I shoot, I can safely say that through my sporting life I have hit, with at least one pellet, 75 percent of all my targets. Drilled into the cavity of a bird, a single pellet will often kill, but not before an extended interval of time and agony. The consequences of carrying a gun is measured in the silence of the birds I have shot.

The final loneliness is that of pain.

Doomed to yearn for marvels whose time has passed, I often brood about the sobriety of the fleeting years and its effects on my friends, and the short lives of my dogs and how their deaths are as poignant to me as the loss of the people I love.

On some superficial level I understand the time it took a live oak to grow from a sparrow tree into one that manufactures shade. But I am overwhelmed when informed that the fossils of grey partridge unearthed by paleontologists in the caves and middens of France and Hungary a century ago were more than one million years old, and that those birds were a preferred food of our Cro-Magnon forefathers.

I dont know how to reconcile myself with a one-million-year calendar.

In the manner of adolescents, once the unsavory memory of the hare was forgotten, I set my sights on bigger game. With characteristic duplicity, I planned on ambushing a covey of partridge living near the buildings of our tenant farmer, M. Robert Mignon. My method was not exactly that of Mowgli, my childhood hero, but the outcome justified the meansnamely, to eat another bird.

I knew that the covey used the alfalfa field adjoining the pasture in which M. Mignon raised a litter of pigs. By January the farmers boar had the run of the place, his mate and progeny having rested since after Christmas in the farmers cellar, salted, pickled, and confit in wooden vats of fat. These were the same pigs that the farmer had sent to the castle as a meter or two of boudin noireblood sausagethat even at that tender age I adored, particularly when accompanied by roasted apples and mashed potatoes.

One morning before lunch I presented myself to the farmer and accepted a cold Orangina and some cookies from his wife. I advised him and Madame Mignon of my plan and, lying through my teeth, claimed that it met with my parents approval. The farmer, a thin man who seemed a mismatch for his agreeably overweight, always smiling mate, stood up and took a deliberate step away from the table. He ran a forefinger pensively along the side of his prominent nose. Norman farmers are known to reflect.

Ill spread corn where I usually see the covey, and dole a trail back to the shelter, he said. Once the birds get used to being fed, ambush them in the pig hut.

M. Mignon, looking down from a great height, hooked his thumbs through his suspenders. Food and sex cloak the inhibitions of every organism.

Oh, Robert! his wife exclaimed, embarrassed by her husbands remark. Not in front of the young one.

What? He knows the difference between a mouth hole and an asshole. Dont you, boy?

Robert!

How long will it take for the birds to find the food? I asked, enjoying M. Mignons attention and intrigued by his juxtaposing of food and sex. I was concerned, though, that if the farmer and his wife started fighting, M. Mignon would withdraw his invitation.

When there is snow on the ground pheasants and partridge come to the front door and steal the seeds we put out for the sparrows. The farmer sat back down at the narrow kitchen table and picked up his spoon. It may take a day or two, perhaps a week to convince them but the partridge will come. Ill get word to you.

Some days later, an overcast January afternoon found me huddled behind the pig shelter, one eye trained on the pasture and the other on the boar hog. Following M. Mignons suggestion, I had momentarily poked my head inside the lean-to that served as a dwelling for the porkers. He had said it would make an excellent blind. But the stench from years of decaying straw and smears of pig shit that reached from the floor to the corrugated-steel ceiling was more than I could suffer. In hindsight, Im certain M. Mignon had a laugh thinking of me, the son of his landlord, hiding ankle deep in manure.

I knew the partridge would not move until just before dark, but the farmer had insisted I be at the farm early. Not willing to antagonize him, I took my position soon after lunch. The sun struggled to break through Normandys ubiquitous winter cloud cover, and the temperature dropped accordingly. Two hours later I was so bored I took to counting wormholes burrowed into the pigpens wooden frame.