The Beast of the Camargue
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Authors: Xavier-Marie Bonnot
THE BEAST OF THE CAMARGUE
Xavier-Marie Bonnot
Translated from the French by Ian Monk
An imprint of Quercus
New York ⢠London
© 2009 by Xavier-Marie Bonnot
Translation © 2010 by Ian Monk
Originally published in French as
La Bête du Marais
by L'Ecailler du sud in 2009
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2013
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ISBN 978-1-62365-277-7
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To my father, who first told me the story
of the Tarasque when I was his little boy.
The characters and situations in this novel are the product of my imagination, and are not based on reality.
Some sections will probably bring a smile to the lips of specialists in prehistory or members of the Marseille murder squad. I have intentionally altered places, transformed research laboratories, shifted around hospitals, upturned hierarchies and metamorphosed the murder squad's offices. I have also taken liberties with a number of official procedures.
Without asking a single word of permission â¦
My sincere thanks go first to Maurice Georges and Jérôme Harlay, two friends who spent many hours correcting this text and who have enriched it with their always pertinent remarks. My gratitude also to Michel Emerit, formerly professor of animal ecology at the University of Montpellier and correspondent for the Museum of Natural History, who was of great assistance thanks to his knowledge of the environment of the Camargue, and the documentation he supplied about its flora and fauna.
In the original French, a large amount of Marseille slang is used. No attempt has been made to imitate its probably inimitable presence.
⦠Alabre
De sang uman e de cadabre,
Dins nòsti bos e nòsti vabre
Un moustren, un fléu di diéu, barruolo ⦠Agués pieta!
La bèsti a la co d'un coulobre,
A d'iue mai rouge qu'un cinobre;
Sus l'esquino a d'escaumo e d'à sti que fan pòu!
D'un gros lioun porto lou mourre
E sièis pèd d'ome pèr miés courre;
Dins sa cafourne, souto un mourre
Que domino lou Rose, emporto ço que pòu
.
⦠Thirsty
For human blood and corpses
In our woods and our ravines
Roams a monster, a scourge of the gods ⦠Have mercy!
The beast has a dragon's tail
And eyes redder than cinnabar;
On its back, its scales and spikes are terrifying!
It has the muzzle of a great lion,
And six human feet, to run faster;
Into its cavern, under a rock
Overlooking the Rhône, it carries all it can
.
Frédéric Mistral,
Mireille
1.
Last night, the mistral had stopped suddenly, just after nightfall. There had then been a moment of delirium, the bars had turned into bodegas full of heady music, gleaming faces and sleepless eyes.
The police patrols cruised around in second gear, laid back and bored to tears. A few brawls broke out between gypsies, Arabs and gorillas from the town hall outside a gaudy fairground. But the national police force turned a blind eyeâno treading on the toes of the boys from the municipal brigade.
The last crackers had exploded far away, in the hidden nooks and crannies of the town, before the sun came up: the last fireworks of a party that weariness had now put to bed.
That morning, liquid heat poured down from the sky.
The man was lying on the riverbank, in the fetal position, arms wrapped round his knees. He opened his eyes and, through his twitching eyelids, saw the white shape of the towers of the castle above him, melting into the saturated light.
The man was drenched in sweat, his raven hair stuck to his forehead like strips of cardboard. In the distance he could hear vague noises, presumably the last party animals stumbling home. But he very soon changed his mind: it was the baying of an angry crowd that was echoing off the walls of the fortress.
The clamor made his head spin. He closed his eyes again.
The man had hardly slept for three days. Three days of solitude. A taste of acid bile twisted his lips and flared his nostrils. The pastis he had drunk had now worn off. Time to get going.
He sat up. In front of him, the Rhône flowed calmly by. A few crooked roots scratched at the placid surface like monsters, as though
trying to hold back the river's regal progress. He tried to stand, but then realized that his legs would not hold him for a while, so he lay back on the warm, dry grass and stared at the powerful branches of the acacia that clawed at the sky above him.
It was time to think, to go over the past three days.
On the first day, as soon as the sun rose over the Camargue, he had started watching out for white spoonbills, spending hours hidden like a crocodile in the rock samphire across the marshland, a few meters from the Redon lagoon.
He had been waiting for months for the spoonbills, since March, when thousands of gray mullet gather in the placid waters of the delta, within easy swimming distance of the empty beaches, still shivering with cold; the time of year when the cormorants and herons come to gorge themselves on the surface fish.
For some time he had been studying the habits of spoonbills, and the places where they came to rest on their way back from Africa. This was often at the foot of clumps of tamarisks. He wanted to be able to observe them in the dawn's golden light, but spoonbills are capricious as well as rare. That year, he had had to make do with the gluttonous antics of the cormorants and herons.
That morning, those large birds had still not appeared. He had waited until noon before finally deciding to change his vantage point and heading further west, toward the Capelière nature reserve. He had exchanged a few words with the keeper. Chitchat, nothing more.
During the afternoon, he wandered around for some time, his loaded camera in one hand and his binoculars in the other, stopping now and then to observe.
He had walked to the ends of the earth. Then the first spoonbill appeared, immaculate, stretching its long neck through the reeds, at the edge of the marsh. A second came to rest on a half-submerged tree trunk, in the middle of the dark waters. The ground, cracked in places and spongy in others, led away toward the setting sun, the flat horizon and the sea, which the mistral was furrowing.
The spoonbills had then flown back into their mysterious habitat, and night fell on the tip of the Camargue. In the distance, beyond
the straight lines of the marshland, the flames of the great Fos oil terminal rose red into the dark sky, like proud banners. At one in the morning, he went back to his car and drove home, further north in Provence.
Day two was the day of the beast.
He had decided not to take his car and to hitchhike instead. He had waited a good hour for a friendly driver to pick him up at the Tarascon exit. It was a solitary tourist, an Englishman burned by the wicked sun, who had said, in perfect French:
“I've been living in Mouriès for three years now.”
“Really?” he had replied, pretending to take an interest in his driver. “I come from Eygalières.”
“I'm going to Marseille today ⦠taking the boat to Corsica,” the Englishman went on, waving a hand through the hot air toward an imaginary sea.
“You have a good journey,” he had said, for want of anything better.
The Englishman's Land-Rover, an old model, about as comfortable as a church pew, made one hell of a din. By the time they reached the turning that led to the Thibert farmhouse he had fallen into a sort of torpor, before pointing to a lay-by on the long straight stretch of Route Nationale 568, between Arles and Martigues.
“You can drop me off there.”
The Englishman braked abruptly, without asking any questions. The man got out and waited for the Land-Rover to fade into the distance. Then he slipped off through a barrier of reeds, careful to avoid their long leaves, which were as sharp as razors.
