A Sounder of Sanglier

A Sounder of Sanglier

Finally, at last, I've seen a a wild boar or sanglier in French, not just one but about twenty of them!! Quite late last evening, driving home from a concert in a nearby village, there in the headlights appeared a huge sanglier on the road. It turned quickly away from the headlights and back into the field to the right where I could see lots of them milling about. They then proceeded to take their right of way and calmly cross in front of the car, huge females and quite tiny babies. It was so exciting and I felt quite privileged to be watching them amble down to the Cerou River which runs though our valley. I was also surprised to see they were brown and quite pale because I thought they were always black. A friend has a large male black sanglier head with tusks mounted above a door in his shop. He is called Albert but sadly no one seems to want to buy him.

A group such as this which is called a Sounder is usually about twenty animals. The male is solitary so these would all be females. I feel much happier now as it seems all my friends have a story to tell about sighting sangliers and I had never even seen one. Maddie drove smack into the middle of a sounder last summer killing one before she was able to stop. The car was pretty much killed as well. It was during the wheat harvest and the workers quickly scooped it up it for their next week's dinner.

No sooner had I set off again than I sadly realized they too, might soon be on someone's dinner table. The hunting season starts next week. In fact I heard someone practicing to-day; the first shot of many. Walking in the woods here is a precarious past time in the winter and if I hear a loud bang anywhere near I quickly abandon thoughts of a pleasant ramble and hurry back to my ittle cottage. At the end of the season it is a tradition that part of the hunt kill is given to the community. Each year the mayor of our village extends an invitation to all off us to a hunter's lunch where the menu is sanglier, deer, and other game caught during the season. Sanglier is a dark strongly flavoured meat and features on many local restaurant menus. There is no talk here of giving up the hunt, it is a long held tradition. The animal is not protected and the quota given to the hunters depends on their numbers in the area each year. They gorge themselves on the cereal crops so are not loved by the farmers as they cause enormous damage and are rigorously culled each year.

From the protection of my car I found them adorable and I find it impossible to take part in the Hunters Lunch or Dejeuner Du Chasse.

T

In the Beginning

What do you do each day? This was the question most frequently asked of me when I first came to live here. I came here to the Tarn in France to help a friend with the restoration of an enormous building which had been built as an embroidery factory around 1880. That was easy to answer; let the builders in, rush to the hardware shop three times before lunch, (because they will be closed between mid day and two o'clock),climb and descend the five flights of stairs countless times a day and then try to get some assurance from the builders at the end of each day that they would return next morning. In addition to painting,and daily cleaning up(something our French builders had never heard of)and falling into bed exhausted each night, that is what I did each day for six months over and over again with little variation. Once the building was fit for habitation we rented out apartments, ran a coffee shop and an antique centre for the summer.

After eight months hard slog at La Gaudane in Cordes sur Ciel it was time to return to Australia. But instead I rented a cottage in a tiny Hamlet nearby for six months and bought an old Peugeot 205. That was six happy years ago come next Australia Day. Now I am joinging the army of global bloggers. I hope you will enjoy sharing Time out in the Tarn with me.