Papillon. Анри Шарьер

I’d go to the village with him and look for another boat. It was a great risk to take; but not so great as putting to sea in a coffin. The stores were all right: there was a wicker-covered bottle of oil and some tins full of manioc flour. We could go a long way on that.

      That morning we saw a wonderfully strange sight: a troop of grey-faced monkeys had a battle with monkeys whose faces were black and woolly. During the struggle Maturette came in for a piece of wood on the head that gave him a lump the size of a walnut.

      Now we had been there five days and four nights. Last night rain fell in torrents. We sheltered ourselves under wild banana leaves. Their shiny sides poured with water, but we were not wetted at all, only our feet. This morning, as we drank our coffee, I thought about Jesus’s wickedness. Taking advantage of our lack of experience to palm off this rotting boat on us! Just to save five hundred or a thousand francs he was sending three men to certain death. I wondered whether I shouldn’t kill him once I had forced him to get us another boat.

      Suddenly we were startled by a noise like jays, a shrieking so harsh and unpleasant that I told Maturette to take the jungle-knife and go and see what was up. Five minutes later he came back, beckoning. I followed him and we reached a spot about a hundred and fifty yards from the boat: hanging there I saw a great pheasant or wild-fowl, twice the size of a cock. It was caught in a noose and it was hanging by its foot from a branch. With one blow of the jungle-knife I took off its head, to stop its ghastly shrieks. I felt its weight: it must have been at least ten pounds. It had spurs like a cock. We decided to eat it, but while we were thinking it over, it occurred to us that somebody must have set that snare and that there might be others. We went to have a look. When we were back there we found something very odd – a positive fence or wall about a foot high, made of woven leaves and creepers, some ten yards from the creek. This barrier ran parallel with the water. Every now and then there was a gap, and in this gap, hidden by twigs, the end of a noose of brass wire fixed to a bent-over whippy branch. I saw at once that the creature must come up against this hedge and then go along it, trying to get past. On finding the gap, it would pass through, but its feet would catch in the wire and spring the branch. Then there it would be, hanging in the air until the owner of the snares came to take it.

      This discovery worried us badly. The hedge seemed to be well kept, so it wasn’t old: and we were in danger of being found. We mustn’t light a fire in the daytime: but at night the hunter wouldn’t come. We decided to take it in turns to keep watch in the direction of the traps. We hid the boat under branches and all the stores in the bush.

      The next day at ten o’clock I was on guard. For supper we had eaten that pheasant or cock or whatever it was. The soup had done us an enormous amount of good, and although the meat was only boiled it was still delicious. We had each eaten two bowls full. So I was on guard: but I was so taken up with the goings-on of the huge black manioc ants, each carrying a piece of leaf to the enormous ant-hill, that I forgot to keep watch. These ants were close on an inch long and they stood high on their legs. Each one was carrying this enormous piece of leaf. I followed them to the plant they were stripping and I discovered the whole thing was thoroughly organized. First there were the cutters, who did nothing but get the pieces ready: they were working away on a gigantic leaf something like the ones on a banana palm, very skilfully and very quickly cutting off pieces all the same size, which they dropped to the ground. Down below there were ants of the same sort but slightly different. These ones had a grey stripe on the side of their jaws: and they stood in a half circle, supervising the carriers. The carriers came filing in from the right and they went off towards the left in the direction of the ant-hill. They snatched up their loads before getting into line, but sometimes, what with their hurry in trying to load and to get into position, there was a jam. Then the police-ants would step in and shove the workers into their proper places. I couldn’t understand the crime one worker had committed, but she was brought out of the ranks and one police-ant bit off her head while another divided her body in two in the middle. The police-ants stopped two workers; they put down their loads, scratched a hole, buried the three parts of the ant – head, chest, bottom piece-and covered them over with earth.

      Pigeon Island

      I was so taken up with watching these creatures and following the soldiers to see whether their policing went as far as the entrance to the ant-hill, that I was taken utterly by surprise when a voice said, ‘Don’t move or you’re a dead man. Turn round.’

      It was a man bare from the waist up, wearing khaki shorts and long red leather boots. He had a double-barrelled gun in his hands. Medium-sized and thickset: sunburnt. He was bald and his eyes and nose were covered with a bright blue tattooed mask. And in the middle of his forehead there was a tattooed black-beetle.

      ‘You armed?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Alone?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘How many of you are there?’

      ‘Three.’

      ‘Take me to your friends.’

      ‘I wouldn’t like to do that: one has a rifle, and I wouldn’t like to get you killed before I know what you mean to do.’

      ‘Ah? Don’t you move an inch, then; and just you talk quiet. You’re the three guys that escaped from the hospital?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Which is Papillon?’

      ‘That’s me.’

      ‘Well then, I can tell you you’ve stirred things up good and proper in the village, with your escape! Half the time-expired men are under arrest at the gendarmerie.’ He came towards me, and lowering his gun he stretched out his hand. ‘I’m the Masked Breton,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

      ‘No, but I can see you’re not a tracker.’

      ‘You’re right there. I set traps round about here to catch hoccos. A jaguar must have eaten one for me, unless it was you guys.’

      ‘It was us.’

      ‘You want some coffee?’ He had a thermos in a knapsack: he gave me a little and drank some himself. I said, ‘Come and see my friends.’ He came and sat down with us. He was amused at my having pulled the rifle trick with him. He said, ‘I fell for it, particularly as everyone knows you left carrying a gun, and there’s no tracker who’ll go after you.’

      He told us he had been in Guiana twenty years and that he’d been free these last five. He was forty-five. Because of the silly caper of having had that mask tattooed on his face, life in France didn’t mean anything to him. He worshipped the bush and lived off it entirely – snakes’ and jaguars’ skins, butterfly collections, and above all catching live hoccos, the bird we’d eaten. He could sell them for two hundred or two hundred and fifty francs. I suggested paying for it, but he refused indignantly. This is what he told us: ‘The bird is a sort of wild bush cock. Of course, it’s never so much as seen an ordinary hen or a cock or a human being. Well, I catch one, I take it to the village and I sell it to someone who has a hen-run – they’re always in demand. Right. You don’t have to clip his wings, you don’t have to do anything at all: at nightfall you put him into the henhouse and when you open the door in the morning there he is, standing by, looking like he was counting the cocks and hens as they come out. He comes out after them, and although he eats alongside of them, all the time he’s watching – he looks up, he looks sideways and he looks into the bushes all round. There’s no watchdog to touch him. In the evening he stands there at the door and although no one can tell how, he knows if there’s a hen or two missing, and he goes and finds them. And whether it’s a cock or whether it’s a hen, he drives them in, pecking them like mad to teach them to keep an eye on the clock. He kills rats, snakes, shrews, spiders and centipedes; and a bird of prey has hardly appeared in the sky before he sends everyone off to hide in the grass while he stands there defying it. He never quits the hen-run for a moment.’ And this was the wonderful bird we had eaten like any common barnyard cock.

      The Masked Breton told us that Jesus, Fatgut