第12章

Fayes,--doesn't monsieur know him? though he be a Parisian, he's a fine young man like you, and he loves curiosities,--so, as I was saying, hearing of my talent for catching otters, for I know 'em as you know your alphabet, he says to me like this: 'Pere Fourchon,' says he, "when you find an otter bring it to me, and I'll pay you well; and if it's spotted white on the back,' says he, 'I'll give you thirty francs.' That's just what he did say to me as true as I believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.And there's a learned man at Soulanges, Monsieur Gourdon, our doctor, who is making, so they tell me, a collection of natural history which hasn't its mate at Dijon even; indeed he is first among the learned men in these parts, and he'll pay me a fine price, too; he stuffs men and beasts.Now my boy there stands me out that that otter has got the white spots.'If that's so,' says I to him, 'then the good God wishes well to us this morning!' Ha! didn't you see the water bubble? yes, there it is! there it is! Though it lives in a kind of a burrow, it sometimes stays whole days under water.Ha, there! it heard you, my good gentleman; it's on its guard now; for there's not a more suspicious animal on earth; it's worse than a woman."

"So you call women suspicious, do you?" said Blondet.

"Faith, monsieur, if you come from Paris you ought to know about that better than I.But you'd have done better for me if you had stayed in your bed and slept all the morning; don't you see that wake there?

that's where she's gone under.Get up, Mouche! the otter heard monsieur talking, and now she's scary enough to keep us at her heels till midnight.Come, let's be off! and good-bye to our thirty francs!"

Mouche got up reluctantly; he looked at the spot where the water bubbled, pointed to it with his finger and seemed unable to give up all hope.The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead leaves.This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of tarred oakum in guise of braces.A shirt of the same burlap which made the old man's trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in front showed a sun-burnt little breast.In short, the attire of the being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere Fourchon.

"What a good-natured set of people they are here," thought Blondet;

"if a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of Paris, how their tongues would maul him!"

As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with this episode of his early walk."Come," said he, quite touched when the old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, "you say you are a famous otter catcher.If you are sure there is an otter down there--"

From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on its surface.

"It has come back!" said Pere Fourchon; "don't you see it breathe, the beggar? How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the water? Ah, the creature's so clever it laughs at science."

"Well," said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, "wait and catch the otter."

"And what are we to do about our day's work, Mouche and I?"

"What is your day worth?"

"For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?--Five francs," said the old man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an enormous overcharge.

The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, "There's ten, and I'll give you ten more for the otter."

"And it won't cost you dear if there's white on its back; for the sub-

prefect told me there wasn't one o' them museums that had the like;

but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,--no fool he! If I hunt the otter, he, M'sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has a fine white "dot" on her back.Come now, my good gentleman, if I may make so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that stone down there.If we head the otter off, it will come down stream;

for just see their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their burrow to feed, for, once full of fish, they know they can easily drift down, the sly things! Ha! if I'd been trained in their school I should be living now on an income; but I was a long time finding out that you must go up stream very early in the morning if you want to bag the game before others.Well, somebody threw a spell over me when I was born.However, we three together ought to be slyer than the otter."

"How so, my old necromancer?"

"Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to understand the beasts.Now, see, this is what we'll do.When the otter wants to get home Mouche and I'll frighten it here, and you'll frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost! It can't run; it has web feet for swimming.Ho, ho! it will make you laugh, such floundering! you don't know whether you are fishing or hunting!

The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days running, he was so bent on getting an otter."

Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.

"There, that will do, my good gentleman."