by James Lasdun
At lunchtime they picnicked under a stone watchtower on a hill. The trees up there were oaks and birches, and there were no cocoons in them. But when they moved on, turning onto the trail that led back to the hotel, they passed again through pinewoods, and there were white cocoons lodged in the green branches wherever they looked. Around each one, large volumes of needles had desiccated and turned brown. Inside, among the moving shapes of caterpillars, were strangled clusters of brown needles showing milkily through. Dead branches hung crookedly from the trunks. On some of the trees there were ten or twelve cocoons in different places.
Caitlin turned to Luke. “They look sort of like invalids, don’t they, the trees? Covered in bandages?”
The boy gave her the unnerving sidelong look that had so far greeted most of her attempts to befriend him.
Back at the hotel the owner told them the cocoons were made by processionary caterpillars, “chenilles processionnaires.” They were called that, he explained, because they traveled in long lines joined head to toe. Most years the winter killed enough of them that they weren’t a problem, but the past few winters had been warm, so now there was an infestation. He smiled as he said this, as if it were something to be proud of.
Craig asked if they were everywhere in this area. The man nodded enthusiastically. “Ici, oui, partout.”
Wagging a finger, he added: “Faut pas les toucher …” You shouldn’t touch them, or you could get a painful rash.
They had been planning to do another walk from the village the next day, to a cave with an underground lake. But after this conversation Craig said it would be too depressing to spend another day surrounded by half-dead trees and that they should leave early in the morning instead.
“Let’s head on up to the mountains.”
“What about the cave?” Luke asked.
“There’ll be other things to see.”
So the next morning they drove to the mountains. Their ears popped as they climbed. The air grew cooler. Vineyards gave way to stony lavender fields and sheep pastures bounded by low stone walls. Above these a vast pine forest began.
The three fell silent, staring out through the windows. The trees looked healthy enough, tall and straight, their branches spreading a pelt of deep, dark green over the bony ridges and slopes of the mountains. On the steepest slopes the trees grew more sparsely, and you could see the gray mountainside rubble between them, but even in these places they seemed to be flourishing, their massive, upward-curving branches bearing thick swaths of unblemished black-green needles.
Only as the forest became interspersed with pasture again did Caitlin see a cocoon, just the one, glistening like a tuft of cotton candy high in the branches of a tree above the road. She didn’t say anything; the others seemed not to have noticed.
The road turned to gravel, following a shallow river until it arrived at the stone buildings of the farm where they were staying. After they had checked in and eaten lunch, Craig spread out the hiking map. There was a pair of bergeries in the area that he wanted to see; old drystone sheepcotes that had been designated historic sites. According to the guidebook, you could get to them only on foot, which was a part of their attraction as far as Craig was concerned. They were set below a high ridge, and the woman who ran the farm restaurant pointed out a ringwalk they could do that would bring them past each bergerie before circling back to the farm in time for dinner.
The first part of the trail led over a saddle of grassland with sheep grazing on it. There were no pylons or cell phone towers to upset Craig, and for this Caitlin was grateful. Not that she liked these things any more than he did, but his diatribes had an unsettling effect on her. Since being with Craig, she had found that it was necessary to guard, rather carefully, what remained of her affection for her own species.
Over the saddle the trail fell through a valley to a stream where it entered a dark wood of deciduous trees. The stream was deep in places, with pools of green water under ledges of moss-covered rock. Along its banks were patches of buttery yellow that turned out to be primroses. There were also purple flowers that Craig said were hepatica.
“It’s nice here,” Caitlin ventured.
“Not bad,” Craig agreed.
As they came out of the wood and began climbing again, they saw something on the path ahead of them that appeared to be a long dark snake, moving very slowly forward over the red dust.
Luke ran toward it.
“It’s the caterpillars!”
They walked up and stood over the creatures. They were an inch and a half long, gray, with an orange stripe along the top, and covered with pale spikes of fur. Each shiny black head was attached to the tail of the caterpillar in front. Their progress along the path was slow, but the quilted, rubbery pouches of their bodies moved in vigorous undulations.
Craig squatted down. After inspecting them closely for some time, he called to his son. “Come here, Luke.”
The boy squatted beside him.
“We don’t kill animals, do we?”
“No. Mom does. She kills mice.”
“Okay, but I don’t and you don’t and Caitlin doesn’t. But these animals, I’m thinking—they aren’t part of nature, exactly. They’re here because the winters haven’t been cold enough to kill them, and you know why that is, right?”
The boy thought for a moment.
“Oh,” he said in a dull voice, “global warming.”
“Right. Which makes them partly a human phenomenon. Now, look at those pine trees.” Craig pointed to the wooded ridge ahead of them. “These guys can probably smell them from here. I imagine it’s a good smell to them. They’re going to go up there and start making their cocoons, which means pretty soon that whole forest is going to be infested like the one we saw yesterday.”
The boy blinked, then gave a grin.
“Are we going to kill them, Dad?”
“Yes, we are. But I want to make sure you understand why. Do you?”
“Yes, yes. How are we going to do it?”
“Like this.”
Craig stood up and stamped on the first caterpillar in the column, bursting it under the thick sole of his hiking boot. The line started breaking apart immediately, each individual uncoupling itself and striking out in its puff of fur with an appearance of panicky disorientation. The boy jumped on a group of them, crushing them to a dark pulp in the dust. Then he and Craig proceeded to obliterate the entire column.
“That takes care of that,” Craig said.
But a little farther along the trail they came upon another procession, crawling slowly up toward the ridge. This time father and son set about destroying them without any discussion, Luke yelling gleefully as he jumped about, Craig preserving a neutral air, as if he regarded himself as the instrument of some purely impersonal force of necessity.
They didn’t see any more caterpillars after that. The path climbed through an area of the sweet-smelling scrub of juniper and wild rosemary they had learned to call garigue. Luke and Craig were chatting, at ease with each other for the first time in days. Caitlin walked behind them, conscious of the need to give them their space.
As their trail turned for the final, steepest part of the ascent, they saw something shiny rising toward them over the brow of the ridge, a couple of hundred yards ahead. It was a car, a silver SUV—the small kind they had here in France—and it was driving down the footpath. A moment later another one, identical, appeared behind it, then another, and then another. Very slowly the four vehicles came down the near vertical-looking top section of the trail, before turning onto the horizontal path that branched off along the ridge toward the bergeries. There, in tight convoy, dust puffing up from their tires, they rolled slowly onward, disappearing into the trees.
“What the fuck was that?” Craig said.
He unfolded his map.
“They’re on a footpath,” he said. “There’s no road there, and there’s no road on the other side where they came from either.” He folded the map back up, qu
ickening his pace toward the ridge as if he thought he might be able to catch up with the cars. They were out of sight, of course, by the time the three of them reached the intersection. But the smell of their exhaust hung in the air, and you could still hear the sound of their engines over the tinkle of sheep bells down in the valley.
“They’re driving on a goddamn footpath!” Craig said.
They took the same turning as the cars had taken. Once they entered the woods they saw that there were in fact cocoons all over the pine trees. Caitlin glanced at Craig, but he didn’t seem interested in pursuing the implications of this. His jaw was set tight, his gray eyes glaring ahead along the trail. His bearing, as always, was calm, but she could tell he was furious. He would have liked to crush the cars, she sensed, just as he had crushed the caterpillars. Suddenly he stepped off the path into the woods. He stooped down for something, then came out backward, dragging the bleached trunk of a fallen tree.
“Luke, give me a hand!”
The boy helped his father drag the tree across the footpath.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re giving those people something to think about when they come back from their expedition. A little roadblock.”
“Oh. Cool.”
“In fact maybe a series of roadblocks,” Craig said, scanning the woods again. “Make sure they get the point. It’ll be like those stations of the cross they had outside that first village. Some little opportunities for reflection. There’s another tree …”
He and Luke dragged out several other trees as they walked along, setting them across the path every fifty yards or so. Caitlin looked on, unsure this was a good idea, but not wanting to get into an argument. With Craig you had to be utterly convinced of your position if you wanted to disagree with him, and she suspected her misgivings might be nothing more than cowardice. Besides, she didn’t want to interfere when he and Luke were getting along like this.
At one point they found some large rocks.
“We’ll use these too,” Craig said.
He and Luke braced themselves against the rocks, maneuvering them into the middle of the path.
A little farther along they saw a tractor tire lying by a gate at the entrance to a field. They heaved it up on its edge. It was enormous, almost as wide in diameter as Luke was tall. Together they rolled it into the path, where they tipped it over, water splatting from a gash in its side as it fell.
“Okay,” Craig said. “That should do the trick.”
They walked on along the flat, stony path. After a while Luke began lagging behind.
“Wait for me!” he shouted.
“Keep up,” Craig called back. “We have a ways to go.”
It was another half hour before they arrived at the first bergerie . The four cars were parked in a line at the top of the steeply sloping meadow, in the middle of which stood the small domed and arched sheepcote and shepherd’s hut. A group of people stood outside, gathered around a large woman in an outfit of mauve tweed.
“I’ll wait here for Luke, shall I?” Caitlin said at the entrance to the meadow. The boy had fallen back again. Craig shrugged, then walked on down.
She watched him approach the buildings. Several faces from the group turned toward him with smiles of greeting, and she watched his tall, straight figure stride past them into one of the buildings without so much as a glance in their direction. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew the severe expression it would be wearing. A familiar half-fearful, half-admiring feeling came into her as she pictured it. She found it so difficult herself to judge other people’s behavior, even when she could see it was wrong. But Craig regarded it as an obligation. He had told her once that if he’d been born in a time when it was possible to believe in a god, he would have felt compelled to become a preacher. He had gone into furniture making instead, but even this he had turned into his own kind of crusade, with his recycled materials, his all-natural stains and varnishes, his rejection of all elements of ornamentation and superfluous comfort from his designs. “It’s what Jesus would have done if he’d stuck to carpentry,” he liked to joke. Or not joke exactly, just say with a glint in his eye that you felt you were permitted to take as humorous. She’d never been with a man quite like him before. She didn’t love him exactly, not in the usual way of wanting to be always kissing and fooling around together. She didn’t even like him, she sometimes thought, observing his cold manner with people he disapproved of, which was most of the human race. But he had engulfed her somehow, taken up residence in her imagination like some large, dense, intractable problem that had been given to her to solve.
By the time Luke caught up, the group had begun walking back up toward their cars. The woman in the mauve outfit was talking to them in English, with a French accent:
“What you will see at the next bergerie will be a completely different technique of construction. Instead of the vaulted ceilings we have here, you will see that it will be built in the tunnel style …”
The people were mostly middle-aged, some of the men wearing ties and sport coats under green waterproof jackets, the women in wool and tweed outfits like their guide, though in more subdued colors. They looked like professors, Caitlin thought. They smiled at her, and she smiled uncomfortably back, wishing that she weren’t having to encounter them like this, in person.
The guide gave her a polite nod as she passed. Her eye lingered a moment on Luke. Caitlin looked back and saw that the boy had lifted his T-shirt over his large belly, which he was scratching vigorously. It was a bit embarrassing, but she didn’t feel it was her place to tell him to stop. Up beyond him the people were climbing back into their cars.
Craig emerged from the dark interior of the sheep shelter. He stood in the entrance, watching the cars as they set off in a line along the footpath, heading for the second bergerie.
“I was thinking,” he said, “if they were in wheelchairs or something, that might be an excuse, but really I don’t even believe that. It’s not like if I was old or disabled, I’d feel entitled to be driven places off the road that I couldn’t walk to. Anyway, those people are perfectly capable of walking. They’re just lazy and selfish.”
They wandered through the buildings. Craig explained how the arches and domed roofs were built without any tools or cement, just with the careful piling and balancing of all the flattest stones the shepherds could find in the area. There was a rare note of approval in his voice, and Caitlin brightened, as she always did at such moments. He loved this kind of patient, anonymous craftsmanship, and his enthusiasm when he spoke about it made her want to cheer him on even though she didn’t find it that exciting herself.
After they had finished looking, they went back to the path and started walking to the second bergerie. The boy was scratching himself again.
“What are you doing?” Craig asked.
“It itches.”
“Leave it alone. What is it, a mosquito bite?”
He peered at his son’s stomach. “I don’t see anything. Except too much of this.” He grabbed the roll of fat on Luke’s belly. “Come on, let’s burn some off.”
He set off at a brisk march. The boy soon started lagging behind again.
“Wait!”
Craig turned. “Keep up, kiddo. And stop the scratching.”
The boy was panting when he caught up. His face was mottled pink.
“I can’t walk this fast,” he said. He was scratching his forearms now, clawing them with his plump, nail-bitten fingers.
“What is going on?” Craig said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, stop scratching. And try to keep up.” He tousled the boy’s hair. “You want a nature quiz?”
“No.”
They walked in silence along the path. The sun had dropped below the other side of the ridge, and they were in shadow now. Here and there pale cocoons hung in the pines above them, stretched and bulging in a way that made Caitlin think of something hawked up from a lung. She tried not to look
. Before long the boy had fallen behind again.
“Wait for me!” he wailed.
This time when he caught up, his face was an angry red and there were yellowish welts standing out on his arms.
“My God,” Caitlin said, “are you okay?”
He ignored her, as usual. Craig examined his arms.
“It looks like hives. He gets allergies sometimes. You didn’t touch one of those caterpillars, did you? With your skin?”
“No.”
“Well, listen, we’re not halfway yet. We have another couple hours’ walking. Think you can make it okay?”
“I don’t feel good.”
“I know. We’ll get you some antihistamine when we get back. But you’re okay to go on, right?”
“I’m tired.”
“I could take him back the way we came,” Caitlin heard herself say, “I mean, if you want to go on …”
“No!” the boy said, clinging to his father.
Craig opened the map. He didn’t say anything for a while.
“How much shorter would it be?” Caitlin asked.
“To go back?”
“Mm.”
He looked at her; a faint sardonic light in his eye, as if in acknowledgment of some small but unexpected challenge.
“A bit. Yeah, I guess it would be quite a bit shorter.”
He looked again at Luke. The boy seemed dazed. The soft flesh around his eyes had begun to swell up, and the eyes themselves were bloodshot.
“All right,” Craig said, folding the map away. “We’ll go back. We’ll go back the way we came.”
And so they turned around and started walking back along the trail the way they had come. This time they moved at Luke’s pace; it took them a good twenty minutes to reach the bergerie again, twice as long as it had coming.
