The Crowded Grave

rushing past. “Put the poor devil out of its misery.” Looking back, he saw Pierre bend to grip the goose behind its head and twist. The bird fluttered wildly and then went limp. Even when the farm boy grew up like Pierre to work in an accountant’s office, he hadn’t lost the skill.
    When he came to the main grouping of birds, advancing in a jumbled column from the woods, Bruno saw that the road ahead was blocked by some stopped cars coming the other way. He briefly considered using Gigi to turn the birds back, but they would go off and cross the road elsewhere. There was no stopping this exodus, so he might as well try to speed it up and clear the road. He persuaded the leading cars in each queue to reverse a little to make a broader passage to let the birds pass freely across to the pond. Some drivers tried to argue, but he pointed out that the sooner he could stop the supply of ducks, the sooner the road would unblock. He left them grumbling and took Gigi into the trees, trotting past the trail of ducks and geese that was still pottering and waddling its way from theVillatte farm. Bruno smiled to himself, wondering if the birds felt a sense of escape or curiosity, of adventure triggered by the coming of springtime.
    Louis and his wife were already at the huge hole torn in the fence. No tree had fallen, no tractor had ridden through the sturdy barrier of wooden posts and chicken wire that ringed the farm. Instead, whole fence posts had been hauled from the earth and the wire cut. With boards and old doors and cardboard boxes stuffed beneath an ancient tractor, Louis was trying to plug the gaps in the fence. His wife and eldest son were flapping their arms, and their dog was barking to shoo away the ducks and geese following their fellows toward the freedom of the woods.
    Without being told, Gigi darted forward to help drive the birds back from the fence, and Bruno helped Alain to haul some branches from broken trees to seal the remaining gaps in the wire. Once the makeshift barrier was in place, Louis came forward to shake their hands. Gigi and Louis’s dog sniffed politely at each other’s tails and then sat beside each other, staring at any bird daring to approach.
    “We’ve been at this since daybreak,” Louis said. “You see how big this gap is? Some bastard ripped this fence down deliberately and did a good job of it.”
    “And we know who,” added Sandrine, his wife. “Look at this, stuck on the bits of the fence they didn’t tear down.” She handed Bruno a photocopied leaflet, sealed inside a transparent plastic envelope.
    “STOP cruelty to animals. Boycott foie gras,” he read. There was a smudged photocopied image of a duck held down in a narrow cage. A flexible tube hanging from above was thrust into its mouth by an unidentified man who was stretching the duck’s neck taut for the force-feeding. At the bottom, it read
“Contactez PETAFrance.com.”
    “Who’s this PETA?” asked Alain, peering over Bruno’s shoulder.
    “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” said Bruno. “It’s an American thing, maybe British, but it’s growing in France. They made a big fuss up in Paris about battery chickens and veal, those calves kept in pens. Looks like they’ve started running a campaign against foie gras.”
    “But that’s our livelihood,” said Sandrine. “And we don’t make foie gras, we just raise the birds.”
    “And look at this,” said Louis. “The wire’s been cut with proper cutters. This was organized.” He showed Bruno the snipped strands of wire. “Then they pulled it away somewhere, hiding the stretches of wire they cut. I sent the other boy out looking for it in the woods.”
    “City bastards,” grunted Alain. “Don’t know the first thing about the country and they come here like a bunch of terrorists and try to ruin people.” He turned aside and spat. “You find out who they are, Bruno, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
    Bruno ignored Alain’s outrage on behalf of his fellow farmer. “All the birds seem to be heading for that pond on the far side of the road,” he told Louis. “Have you got some way to round them up and bring them back?”
    “I’ll ring the food bell. That brings most of them running. And for the rest, I’ve got some netting. That’s how we usually round them up. I’ll put them in the trailer and bring them back once I’ve got this fence fixed.”
    “Sooner the better, because they’ve blocked the whole road into