La Chasse a commencé and an attack of insomnia for the cats

The last weekend of September is marked by two loud and noisy traditions in our part of rural Brittany.

La Chasse (the hunting season) starts and the weekends from now to the New Year are marked by a volley of gunfire, men in combat clothing creeping along our bottom fence, wary looking lean hunting dogs prowling the fields and the sight of the ubiquitous white vans beloved by farmers and artisans around here furtively parked in the corner of fields at dawn. I don't know what sort of firepower they use but last Sunday I counted five successive shots immediately after each other on one occasion - I did understand that if a pheasant escaped both cartridges discharged from a twin bore shotgun it was allowed to fly free but a gun capable of firing five shots seems to tip the odds a bit too far towards the hunter. However the advantage of all this activity is that we have no damage in the garden from rabbits, there are no grey squirrels to raid our walnut trees and the only fox we ever see is so petrified of humans it runs away at 500m (in Fleet they used to come and peer in at the windows of the house to see what was on the table .....). Red squirrels seem to be immune or protected from hunting and so we get the occasional visit from our local resident one.

It's often possible to hear a sharp retort from the direction of the Grange (our open stone built outbuilding) which sounds like a very close rifle shot. Actually it's our ancient walnut tree dropping its crop of ripe walnuts onto the metal roof of the Grange store, gusts of wind can produce a sound like a machine gun - fortunately we haven't had a gale yet as anyone venturing out in that would surely need ear protectors. Something terrible has happened to the walnut tree in the distant past as it has a huge 2m gash in its trunk and leans drunkenly to one side. The gash is so big it has acquired a pocket of soil in the bottom and now has its own mini plantation of oaks growing within the circumference of the walnut. As if anticipating its future demise the walnut has responded by producing huge crops of walnuts to try to maintain a juvenile walnut presence on our land. The cats' cages were moved out to the Grange when the work on the barn began and so they get the full effect of a rifle shot above their heads every ninety seconds or so through the night. They emerge bleary eyed in the morning and sidle off to get their heads down for the rest of the morning somewhere quieter. Cats seem to have have little sense of time (unless it's time to be fed) and Jess appears to have no memory following an unfortunate accident in a tree when she was younger so it's not easy for them to understand that they will shortly get back to an undisturbed night's sleep.

In the meantime we have a lot of walnuts to harvest from the ground - 50kg last year and more this. Fortunately we love them and they are popular with friends and family as well.