Ding dong! The guns have gone

One thing my time here has taught me about February is this: Never count your Wilfred Owens till the last shot is fired.

The arrival of the shortest month is always a cause for celebration in our house. February is no longer January – and January is for me, despite what T.S. Eliot might say about April, the ‘cruellest month’.

February represents my wife’s birthday, the imminence of spring and the month when the guns fall silent. In France, February means the end of la chasse, the hunting season. That awful time of year, which brings out the licensed hooligans, equipped with camouflaged jackets, “day-glo” caps and rifles primed for the kill.

The gunfire starts towards the end of September, putting a damper on the otherwise golden autumn in these arboreal parts, then underscoring the ponderous days and sombre mood of winter. 

The hunters get captured by the game... I wish.

Quite apart from the ethical debate, la chasse brings a number of practical considerations. You do not, for example, walk your dog in the woods at weekends. The hunters are notoriously trigger-happy and wildly inaccurate, particularly after a mid-morning snack of red wine and salami sausage. This is why they’ve taken to wearing regulation “day-glo” caps.

We and our neighbours have both lost a cat to the hunters – gunned down in cold blood. The chasseurs are renowned for shooting cats (and, frankly, just about anything that moves). The hunt is regulated and there are rules of conduct, which some no doubt will respect. But I’ve seen too many westerns to harbour illusions about men with rifles.

So, from late September to mid February, weekends are well-drilled states of red alert. First one out of bed in the morning locks the cat-flap (admittance/yes; departure/no mode), installs the litter tray and gives ‘the girls’ a full compensatory breakfast. If one of the sisters is missing, you go outside, shake the ‘munchies’ and make enough noise to alert every animal within five kilometres.

At dusk, you re-open the cat-flap and usher the cats out with an apologetic ‘it was for your own good’. After four months of this routine, they begin to display signs of acknowledging our best intentions.

Throughout the season, my blood simmers just below boiling point. Driving past menacing roadside bands of posturing armed males, I practise Ghandi-like hauteur as an example to our daughter. To be honest, though, I am concerned that a suitably rude gesture will prompt a volley of buckshot or some spiteful nocturnal act of revenge.  

I indulge in puerile fantasies involving the rifle of parquet off-cuts that my brother made me during an idle moment while laying a new floor in our former house in the Corrèze. Sampson the Avenger, who stalks hunters with his parquet rifle, boldly liberating the woods as he fearlessly trains his weapon on his prey. They drop their guns and scatter. ‘Aieee! ‘Ee’s mad, zees anglais. Run, I say! Run for your lives!’

The sad truth is that, come February, I am so inured to the echoes of rifle fire that I find myself (me, for whom every animal’s unnecessary death is another indictment of mankind) whistling ‘Whoops! There goes another…’ Perhaps it’s an early sign of madness. Perhaps villagers within earshot of the Western Front similarly dismissed each explosion. Just another unit of our nation’s finest fallen…

Ah, but when the guns fall silent at last! Ding-dong, the bells do ring! The cat-flap can be flung open. Spring must be somewhere in the air. The animals are free to reproduce in peace. The cats can wander again without fear of anything save cars, traps and poison.

And yet… there is always a certain lingering fear. Have they truly stopped? What if one lone maverick, some twisted gun-totin’ anarchist, decides ‘To hell with the regs, I’m gonna go out there an’ bag me a critter jess for the hell of it’? Thus went Wilfred Owen and all those other hapless men in khaki, gunned down in the final hours of the Great War when their comrades were already celebrating the Armistice. You cannot, in other words, be too careful.

But let’s be optimistic for once. Let’s suppose that they have called it a season. What of those yellow-livered hunters, forced to hang up their weapons till the following September? They lock up their dogs in pens, which is preferable I suppose to the unspeakable things that happen in Spain. Presumably they launder their fatigues, dust off their ‘day-glo’ caps… and get out their fishing rods.

For, yes, one sporting season segues seamlessly into another. Man the hunter-gatherer continues to do what he does best.

It’s killing.