The Holy Grail

 

Scotland spread this consolation through every fold of its moors: fairies survive everywhere, even under the cataracts of sadness.

Daniel Du Lac joined me in the port of Thurso, facing the Orkney Islands. The archipelago shimmered on the horizon, less than thirty miles away.

We were heading towards the Old Man of Hoy, king of the stacks, in the south of the archipelago. Du Lac had arrived from Paris with a bag of ropes. For twenty years, my friend, a high-mountain guide, a wanderer of the peaks, always showed up whenever there was a summit to climb.

I had Benoît for the sea, Du Lac for the cliffs, Humann for the steppes: I was ready to travel the world. I compensated for my shortcomings with the art of knowing how to surround myself with the right people.

At the helm, Benoît grazed the base of the stack. The sandstone column rose a few dozen meters from the coastal cliff.

"It's a Celtic-Shaivite lingam," I said to Du Lac.

"There is a route to be opened on the south face," said Du Lac.

The sea stack rose, its 160 meters of sandstone covered in green moss. Its summit was crowned with thundering petrels and moderate gulls. Behind it, the coastline crumbled. It held firm. " I will maintain ," say the kings of Holland. "I am here," said the sea stack. We sailed in silence past the dead castles. The cathedrals had drowned. Only a spire remained.At the port of Stromness, while I was reading a translation of Ivanhoe , Du Lac's favorite phrase—the one that had been propelling me to the world's peaks for twenty years—ringed out in the cabin: "Tesson! We're leaving." As usual, I closed my book, buckled my bag, and obeyed. I never said no to Du Lac. Chardonne had experienced this kind of hypnotism: "You think you're acting, but you're being swept along." {5} . »

We took the ferry, disembarked at Hoy, and walked for two hours under a grey sky along the road that connected the port to Rackwick Bay. Du Lac carried the ropes, and I wore a kilt out of respect for the wind.

At Rackwick, a sign warned visitors: "Climbers are hereby strongly advised that no one will come to their rescue." Typical British manner: when you leave everyone to die in their own corner, there's no harm in being polite. In Chamonix, the soldiers of the high-mountain gendarmerie platoon preferred to save everyone, without any niceties. Their motto: "Your suffering gives rise to our duties." It was a different breed altogether from the obsequiousness of the British.

We camped in the moor, near a fern-covered spring. Twilight lingered, and so did the stack. Its summit protruded above the crest of the cliff. The wind howled. Du Lac protected the tent behind a rampart of sandstone slabs, which he erected with heavy panting. He was resuming the old megalithic labor.

At dawn, we climbed the Old Man. First, we had to descend the cliff to the sea via ledges of salty grass, then cross a basalt plateau to the foot of the majestic column. The cracks were damp. Du Lac was exultant, climbing quickly, securing himself to the few English pitons. With us was Benoît, who had never climbed any major rock routes. Since he made us do night watches, we got our revenge by dangling him over the sixth-grade overhangs. He didn't feel dizzy at all and found it amusing, though quite pointless, to play the monkey on a rock stained with guano. An Englishman we had met the day before on the ferry was returning from climbing the Old Man. We asked him his impressions: " Pretty horrible. "The seals' cries didn't help matters. Their bagpipe-like death throes echoed off the ruins. The birds were cursing us. The sea foamed. The sky rolled. The wind wailed and lifted my kilt. We felt out of place in this sepulcher. Suddenly, we were at the summit. Again, that feeling of complete gratitude, a fleeting moment. For a brief instant, the universe grants you at the summit what you didn't know you needed before reaching it.

The next day, I was belaying Du Lac on the south face. We forced a new four-pitch line of climbing, graded sixth and seventh, on unstable rock. Du Lac, moving from layer to layer, secured himself with tiny metal nuts wedged into the sandy cracks.

Then he reassured me, and I joined him. Everything was flaking away. Below, everything sparkled. The sun in the foam. The foam on the rock. The air vibrated. The seals bellowed. The birds were wild. The lake was blowing. If it had fallen, our metal armor would have torn away. We were once again on the summit of the Old Man of Hoy, bathed in complex splendor and primal joy.

What were we looking for when we were looking for the Grail? A cup of the most precious craftsmanship? A modest bowl filled with the blood of Christ? A vessel full of whatever we wanted to find there? Therein lay the genius of Chrétien de Troyes: to have revealed nothing, compelling the knight to never cease his quest, compelling the novel to never end, offering the reader to imagine whatever he wanted, encouraging him to always reread the tale.

"Grail": the Tao of the West, nothingness filled with its own mystery, a representation born of absence and poured into the void. The name of the Grail was legion. But unlike the satanic legion, this legion shimmered with meanings associated with the noblest virtues. Through the interpretations of the Grail, the motifs of the Western soul were gathered. It was the stained-glass window of the grandeur of being. Purity, prowess, valor, adventure, love, or faith—everything made sense, everything was Grail. O blessed century (the twelfth) when chivalry anchored a society to these virtues of strength and beauty. Then, high and low, pure and filthy, light and darkness, good and evil, white and black were not equal.

The knight on his journey sought the meaning of his existence and the means to elevate it to its highest definition. Under no circumstances would the Grail be reduced to a mere object—even one resembling Christ's cup. It was something else entirely. It could signify the culmination of the highest ambitions.

Another possibility: the Grail would correspond to the quest itself. Only the movement leading from darkness to light, that is, from question to answer, would then matter. The quest for the Grail would thus be defined by its own impetus. Born of its desire, living by its own mechanism, nourished by its own existence, the Grail was the quest. "The selfhood of the Grail," the pedants would say. One could imagine a lay:

— What are you looking for, knight?

— I'm trying to search.

— Will you find it?

— I don't want to find it.

— Where are you going?

— Where the quest continues.

— Will it ever end?

— Its purpose is not to have one.

Had I reached the Holy Grail atop this stack? On the platform, suspended between sky and sea, I stood at the point of contact between reality and the ideal. Reality was the sandstone. The ideal, the feeling that swelled in my heart of being where I was meant to be. Nothing made me want to descend. Neither the wind blew strong enough, nor had the rain yet fallen. My sense of plenitude beneath the immensity of the sky found a homeland of ten square meters bordered by one hundred and sixty-five meters of void.

For over two months, I had called this convergence of sensations, emotions, and observations, this crossroads of paths , the "emergence of the fairy ." Something could appear if one were willing to make the effort. The arrival of the fairy contradicted Yeats; life was certainly not " a perpetual preparation for something that never happens . "

Here, with bruised hands, standing at the crossroads of space, time and effort, I had reached the "fine point" invented by Vladimir Jankélévitch, the total instant where everything was accomplished, where man finally experienced the awareness of having achieved what he had desired without even knowing that he dreamed of it.

Du Lac put an end to these digressions. It's easy to drift in muddy meditations when fulmars howl over the churning seas. "Tesson, we must go down."

It was foolish to think oneself at home on the tip of a needle. Everything pointed to leaving.

A summit is never a sharp point or an end point.

Du Lac was right: we only knew how to unleash stages.

The race continued. They had to get out. Keep searching for somewhere else. And for now, get off the train. The quest resumed, the movement was reborn.

Moreover, Du Lac had already swung the fifty meters of rope into the void, its strands whipping against the rock in the wind. The Holy Grail was to set off again.

As long as we had to go and get it, it meant we had found it.

Sylvian Tesson

With the Fairies 

Love in the Forest

 Love in the Forest

I , too, had loved someone. Love had fulfilled its function: all else had disappeared. She was a pale, warm girl who lives in the forests of Landes. We would take walks along the pathways in the evening. The pine trees planted 150 years earlier had colonized the marshland, flourished in the hinterland behind the dunes, and exuded a warm, acrid smell: the sweat of the earth. We walked effortlessly along the rubbery ribbons of the pathways. “People should live at the pace of the Sioux,” she would say. We surprised animals, a bird, a roe deer. A snake slithered away. The man of antiquity—muscles of chiseled marble and vacant eyes—saw such animal appearances as the apparition of a god.

“It’s injured and can’t run away, she’s spotted it, it’s going to die.” For months I heard phrases like this. That evening, it was a spider—“a wolf spider,” she informed me—had come upon a longhorn beetle behind a frond of fern. “She’s going to inject it with a lethal dose, she’s going to devour it.” Like Munier, she knew such things. Who had instilled these insights into her? It was the wisdom of the ancients. A knowledge of nature flourishes in certain creatures who have never studied it. They are seers, they perceive the intricate structure of things while scientists are focused on a single part of the edifice.

She would read the hedgerows. She understood birds and insects. When the beachgrass blossomed, she would say, “It is the orison of the flower to its god the sun.” She would save ants that got swept away by a stream, snails caught in brambles, birds with broken wings. Faced with a scarab beetle, she would say: “It is a heraldic element, it deserves our respect, it is at one with nature.” One day, in Paris, a sparrow landed on her head and I wondered whether I was worthy of this woman whom birds chose as a perch. She was a priestess; I followed her.

We lived in the forests at night. She had a stud farm in Landes that spanned a dozen hectares on the western slopes of a dirt track whose deep rut seemed to her the guarantee of a covert life. On the outskirts of the forest, she had built a pine cabin. A large pond was the principal axis of the property. There, mallard ducks rested, and horses came to drink. All around, dense grasses drilled through the sand trampled by the animals. All of the comforts of the cabin: a stove, some books, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, all the necessities for making coffee, and an awning under which to drink it, and a tack room that smelled of pine resin. This kingdom was guarded by a sharp-eared Beauceron sheepdog, twitchy as the trigger on a Beretta 92, but friendly to those who were polite. He would have ripped the throat out of an intruder. I managed to escape with my life.

Sometimes, we would sit on the dunes. The ocean raged and pounded, while the waves crashed, indefatigable. “There must be some ancient quarrel between the sea and the land.” I used to say such things, she did not listen.

Nose buried in her hair, which smelled of boxwood, I allowed her to spin out her theories. Man had appeared on earth some millions of years ago. He had arrived uninvited, after the table had been set, the forests unfurled, the beasts frolicking. The Neolithic revolution, like all revolutions, fomented the Terror. Man declared himself head of the politburo of all living things, hoisted himself to the top rung of the ladder and made up screeds of dogma to legitimize his dominion. All in defense of the same cause: himself. “Man is God’s hangover!” I would say. She did not like these pronouncements. She accused me of launching damp squibs.

•   •   •It was she who first introduced me to the idea I explained to Léo amid the sand dunes of Tibet. Animals, plants, single-cell life forms and the neocortex are all fractals of the same poem. She talked to me about the primordial soup: four and a half billion years ago, a principal matter had existed, churning in the waters. The whole antedated the parts. From this prebiotic broth, something emerged. A separation occurred, leading to a branching of organic forms of increasing complexity. She worshipped all living things as a shard of the mirror. She would pick up a fox’s tooth, a heron’s feather, a cuttlefish bone, and whisper as she contemplated each shard: “We proceed from the Same.”

Kneeling in the dunes, she would say: “She is going back to find the column, she was drawn to the sap of the stonecrop, the others missed it.”

This time it was an ant rejoining its column after a detour via a patch of stonecrop. Where did she get her infinite tenderness for the minutiae of animal life? “From their willingness to do things properly,” she would say, “their preciseness. Humans aren’t conscientious.”

In summer, the sky was clear. The wind churned the sea, a cloud appeared from the eddies. The air was warm, the sea wild, the sand soft. On the beach, human bodies lay supine. French people had grown fat. Too much screen time? Since the sixties, societies had spent their lives sitting. Since the cybernetic mutation, images flickered in front of motionless bodies.

An airplane would fly past trailing a banner advertising an online dating site. “Imagine the pilot flying over the beach and seeing his wife lying next to some guy she met on that site,” I would say.

She was staring at the gulls surfing the wind, riding the crest, framed by the sunlight.

We would walk back to the cabin along smooth paths. Her hair now smelled of candle wax. To her, the rustle of the trees was filled with meaning. The leaves were an alphabet. “Birds don’t sing out of vanity,” she would say. “They sing patriotic anthems or serenades: this is my home; I love you.” We would arrive back at the cabin and she would uncork a wine from the Loire, of sands and mists. I drank greedily, the red venom swelling my veins. I could feel night welling inside me. A barn owl screeched. “I know that owl, it lives around here, the spirit of night, the commander-in-chief of dead trees.” This was one of her obsessions: re-creating a classification of living creatures, not according to Linnaean taxonomy, but according to a transversal taxonomy bringing together plants and animals according to their disposition. Thus, there was the spirit of voracity (shared by sharks and the carnivorous plants), the spirit of cooperation (a quality shared by jumping spiders and kangaroos), the spirit of longevity (the hallmark of the tortoise or the sequoia), of concealment (exemplified by the chameleon and the stick insect). It did not matter that these creatures did not belong to the same biological phylum so long as they shared the same skills. Hence, she concluded, a cuckoo and a flukeworm, through their opportunism and their intimate knowledge of their victims, were more closely related to each other than to certain members of the same family. To her, the living world was a panoply of stratagems, for war, for love and for locomotion.

She would go out to stable the horses. Unhurried, clear and precise, she was a Pre-Raphaelite vision as she walked beneath the moon, followed by her cat, by a goose, by horses with no halters, by her dog. All that was missing beneath the starry vault was a leopard. They glided through the darkness, heads held high, without a rustle or a sound, without touching, perfectly aligned and perfectly distanced, knowing where they were headed. An orderly troop. The animals stirred like springs at the slightest movement by their mistress. She was a sister of Saint Francis of Assisi. If she believed in God, she would have joined an order of poverty and death, a mystical nocturnal sisterhood that communicated with God without clerical intercession. In fact, her communion with the animals was a prayer.

I lost her. She rejected me because I refused to give myself over body and soul to the love of nature. We would have lived in a demesne, in the deep forest, a cabin or a ruin, devoted to the contemplation of animals. The dream dissolved and I watched her walk away as softly as she had come, flanked by her animals, into the forest of the night. I went on my way, I traveled far and wide, leaping from plane to train, going from conference to conference, bleating (in a self-important tone) that humankind would do well to stop rushing around the globe. I rushed around the globe and each time I encountered an animal, it was her vanished face I saw. I followed her everywhere. When Munier first talked to me about the snow leopard on the banks of the Moselle, he could not know that he was suggesting that I go and find her.

If I were to encounter the animal, my only love would appear, embodied in the snow leopard. I offered up all my apparitions to her ravaged memory.

From: The Art of Patience

By Sylvian Tesson

Seeing big cats hidden behind ordinary screens

 

Munier showed the children a print of a photograph he had taken a year earlier.

In the foreground, a falcon the color of leather perched on a lichen-speckled boulder. Behind, slightly to the left, hidden by the curve of the rockface and invisible to the unsuspecting glance, the eyes of a snow leopard staring straight at the photographer. The animal’s head merged so completely with the rock that it took a moment for the eye to make it out. Munier had his lens focused on the falcon’s plumage, utterly unaware that the leopard was watching him. It was only when studying his prints two months later that he noticed its presence. The infallible naturalist had let himself be duped. When he first showed me the photo, I had seen only the bird and my friend had to point to the leopard before I noticed what my eye would never have detected unprompted, since it sought only to detect an immediate presence. Once seen, I was struck by the presence of the animal every time I saw the photograph. The indistinguishable had become the obvious. The image concealed a valuable lesson. In nature, we are constantly being watched. Our eyes, on the other hand, are drawn to what is simple, they confirm what we already know. A child, being less conditioned than an adult, catches the mysteries of backgrounds and of hidden presences.

Our little Tibetan friends were not taken in. The fingers instantly pointed to the leopard. “Sa’u!” they shrieked. Not because their life in the mountains had honed their vision, but because their child’s eyes were not drawn to certainty. They explored the peripheries of the real.

Definition of the artist’s gaze: seeing big cats hidden behind ordinary screens.

From: Tesson, Sylvain

Title: The art of patience: seeking the snow leopard in Tibet

The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard ...

 Preface

I had met him one Easter day, at a screening of his film about the Abyssinian wolf. He had spoken to me about the elusiveness of animals and of the supreme virtue: patience. He had told me about his life as a wildlife photographer, and explained the technique of lying in wait. It was a delicate and rarefied art that involved hiding in the wild and waiting for an animal that could not be guaranteed to appear. There was a strong chance of coming away empty-handed. This acceptance of uncertainty seemed to me to be very noble—and by the same token anti-modern.

Could I, who loved to run like the wind over lowlands and highlands, manage to spend hours, silent and utterly still?

Lying among the nettles, I obeyed Munier’s precepts: not a movement, not a sound. I could breathe; this was the only vulgar reflex permitted. In cities, I had grown accustomed to prattling about anything and everything. The most difficult thing was saying nothing. Cigars were prohibited. “We’ll smoke later, down by the river,” Munier had said, “it will be night and fog!” The prospect of lighting a Havana on the banks of the Moselle made it easier to endure the position of prostrate watcher.

Life was exploding. The birds in the trees streaked the night sky, they did not shatter the magic of the place, did not disturb the order of things, they belonged to this world. This was beauty. A hundred meters away, the river flowed. Swarms of dragonflies hovered over the surface, predatory. On the western bank, a hobby falcon was diving. Its flight was hieratic, precise, deadly—a Stuka.

This was not the time to allow myself to be distracted: two adult badgers were emerging from the sett.

Until it grew dark, all was a mixture of grace, of drollery, of authority. Would the badgers give a signal? Four heads appeared, and the shadows darted from the tunnels. The twilight games had begun. We were posted ten meters away, and the animals were oblivious to our presence. The badger cubs tussled, scrabbled up the embankment, rolled into the ditch, nipped at each other’s necks and got a clout from an adult, determined to restore a semblance of order to the night circus. The black pelts daubed with three stripes of ivory would disappear into the undergrowth only to reappear further on. The animals were preparing to forage in the fields and on the riverbanks. They were warming up for the night ahead.

From time to time, one of the badgers would wander close to our hide, snuffling the ground with its long snout, then turning to face us. The dark bands set with coal-black eyes sketched out melancholy smears. They were still on the move; we could make out the powerful plantigrade paws turned inward. In the French clay, their claws left small bear-like tracks that a certain lumbering race of humans, in its wisdom, identified as the tracks of “vermin.”

It was the first time I had ever been so still, hoping for an encounter. I scarcely recognized myself. Until now, from the Yakutia to Seine-et-Oise, I had run, adhering to three principles:

The unexpected does not pay house calls, it must be sought out everywhere. 

Movement enhances inspiration. 

Boredom runs less swiftly than a man in a hurry. 

In short, I convinced myself that there was a link between distance and the importance of an event. I thought of stillness as a dress rehearsal for death. In deference to my mother, resting in the family tomb on the banks of the Seine, I roved about frenetically—the mountains on Saturday, the seaside on Sunday—without paying attention to what was going on around me. How do journeys spanning thousands of kilometers lead one day to lying in the tall grass with your chin propped on the edge of a ditch?

Next to me, Vincent Munier was taking photographs of the badgers. The mass of muscle beneath his camouflage clothes blended into the vegetation, but his profile was still visible in the half-light. His face, all sharp edges and long ridges, seemed to be sculpted for issuing orders; he had a nose that Asians mocked, a carved chin and soft eyes. A gentle giant.

He had talked to me about his childhood, his father taking him to a hide beneath a spruce tree to witness the flight of the king—the capercaillie; the father teaching the son the promise of silence; the son discovering the rewards of nights spent lying on the frozen ground; the father explaining that the appearance of an animal is the greatest gift life can give to those who love it; the son setting up his own hides, discovering the secrets of the world unaided, learning to frame a nighthawk taking wing; the father discovering the son’s artistic photographs. Munier, lying next to me, had been born in the mists of the Vosges. He had become the greatest wildlife photographer of his time. His peerless photographs of wolves, bears and cranes were sold in New York galleries.

“Tesson, I’m taking you to the forest to see badgers,” he had said to me, and I had accepted, because no one refuses an invitation from an artist in his studio. He did not know that Tesson meant “badger” in Old French. The word is still common in the vernacular of western France and Picardy. It originated as a deformation of the Greek taxis, from which we get the words “taxonomy,” the science of classifying animals, and “taxidermy,” the art of stuffing animals (since man likes to skin the things he has just named). On the topographical maps of France, there are tessonières, the name given to the bucolic sites of mass culls. For, in the countryside, the badger was despised and ruthlessly destroyed. It was accused of digging up the soil, of damaging hedges. It was smoked out, it was killed. Did the badger deserve the relentless fury of men? It was a secretive animal, creature of night and solitude. It favored an inconspicuous life, ruled over the shadows, did not suffer visitors. It knew tranquility was something to be defended. It left its sett at night and returned at dawn. How could man tolerate the existence of a totem to discretion, making a virtue of distance and an honor of silence? Zoologists described the badger as “monogamous and sedentary.” If etymology connected me to the animal, I did not conform to its nature.

•   •   •Night fell, the animals disappeared into the undergrowth, there was a general rustling. Munier must have noticed my joy. I considered these few hours as one of the best nights of my life. I had just encountered a clan of living creatures that was utterly sovereign. They did not struggle to escape their condition. We headed back to the road via the riverbank. In my pocket, the cigars were crushed.

“There’s an animal in Tibet that I’ve been tracking for six years,” said Munier. “It lives up in the high plateaus. You can spend a long time in a hide just to catch a glimpse of one. I’m going back this winter; come with me.”

“What is it?”

“The snow leopard,” he said.

“I thought it had disappeared,” I said.

“That’s what it wants you to think.”

*

In the distance beyond the pass, wolves howled at the setting sun.

“They’re singing,” Munier insisted. “There are at least eight of them.”

How could he possibly know? I could hear only a lone lament. Munier gave a howl. Ten minutes later, a wolf answered. So began what I think of as the most beautiful conversations between living creatures certain never to meet. “Why did we drift apart?” Munier was howling. “What do you want from me?” replied the wolf.

Munier would sing. A wolf would respond. Munier would fall silent, the wolf would start again. Then, suddenly, one of the wolves appeared on the highest pass. Munier sang a last lament and the wolf dashed down the slope heading in our direction. Having been weaned on medieval literature—the fables of the Beast of Gévaudan, the Arthurian cycle—I was not exactly thrilled to see a wolf hurtling toward us. I reassured myself by glancing at Munier, who looked about as worried as an Air France flight attendant in a pocket of turbulence.

“He’ll stop dead before he gets to us,” he whispered a moment before the wolf froze some fifty meters away.

It turned aside and padded in a wide circle, its muzzle turned toward us, unsettling the yaks. The herd moved further up the slopes, alarmed by the presence of the wolf. The tragedy of life in the herd: never a moment’s peace. The wolf disappeared; we scanned the valley, the yaks had now reached the crest, night was drawing in; we did not see the wolf again, it had melted away.

*

Munier told me about the first photograph he ever took, at the age of twelve: a roe deer in the Vosges. “Oh! nobility! Oh! true and simple beauty!” was the prayer offered by the young Ernest Renan as he surveyed the ruins of Athens. For Munier, that first encounter was his night spent on the Acropolis.

“That day, I shaped my destiny: to see animals. To wait for them.”

Since that night, he had spent more time crouching behind bushes than sitting at school desks. His father did not force him. He never passed his baccalauréat, and earned a living working on building sites until his work as a photographer was recognized.

Scientists were scornful. Munier approached nature as an artist. His work was of little interest to statisticians, the servants of the number. I had met my fair share of number crunchers. They ringed hummingbirds and disemboweled seagulls to take samples of bile. The numbers added up. Where was the poetry? Nowhere. Did their work contribute to the sum of knowledge? Not necessarily. Science masked its limitations behind petabytes of digital data. The process of tallying the world claimed to advance science. It was pretentious.

Munier, for his part, paid tribute only to beauty. He celebrated the grace of the wolf, the elegance of the crane, the perfection of the bear. His photographs belong to art, not to mathematics.

“Your detractors would rather model the digestive system of a tiger than own a Delacroix,” I told him. In the late nineteenth century, Eugène Labiche foresaw the absurdity of the age of science: “Statistics, Madame, is a modern positive science. It shines a light on the most impenetrable facts. Recently, for example, thanks to laborious research, we have managed to calculate the exact number of widows who crossed the Pont-Neuf in the year 1860.”

“A yak is a lord,” replied Munier. “What do I care whether he’s ruminated twelve times this morning!”

Munier constantly seemed to be nurturing a melancholy. He never raised his voice for fear of startling the snowfinches.

*

Mediocrity

Another morning spent on the dusty slopes. The sixth. This sand had once been a mountain that was molded by rivers. These stones held secrets that stretched back. The air throttled all movement. The sky was steel blue as an anvil. Frost lay like lace over the sand. A Tibetan gazelle stood, eating snow, with delicate movements.

Suddenly, a wild donkey—a kiang—appeared. The animal stopped, warily. Munier pressed an eye to the telescopic sight. It looked almost as though he were hunting. Neither Munier nor I have the heart of a killer. Why destroy an animal more powerful and better adapted than oneself? The hunter kills twice. He kills a living creature, and, in himself, he kills the spite he feels at being less powerful than the wolf, less agile than the antelope. Bang! the shot rings out. “At last,” says the hunter’s wife.

Pity the poor hunter; it is unfair to be pot-bellied when you are surrounded by creatures as taut as a drawn bow.

The wild donkey did not leave. Had we not seen it arrive, we could have mistaken it for a statue carved from sand.

We were looking down on the bed of the frozen river, some five kilometers from our camp, and I was talking about a letter I had received some years earlier from Monsieur de B—feathered hat and velvet tailcoat—the president of the French Federation of Huntsmen, in response to an article I had written lambasting hunters. In it, he accused me of being a moccasin-wearing urbanite with no sense of tragedy, someone who strolled through gardens, maudlin about field mice and terrified by the clack of a breechblock. A pansy, I guess. As I read the letter, having just arrived back from a trek in the mountains of Afghanistan, my first thought was that it was a pity that the word “hunter” lumped together men who eviscerated woolly mammoths with spears and a gentleman with a double chin who fired grapeshot at obese pheasants between the cognac and the camembert. Using the same word to define contradictory concepts does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the world.

From The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard 

by Sylvian Tesson