Bear hunters at Prats de Mollo, Pyrénées-Orientales

The bear has seen her. It is only a few paces away and she is petrified, in both senses of the word. In any case she can’t run away – she is standing on the edge of a precipice. The bear scuttles towards her, rising to full height on its legs as it approaches. The girl screams wildly and puts her arms out in front of her. I have the fleeting – absurd – impression that they are going to dance. But the bear tackles her to the ground and they roll over, bumping down the slope at the edge of the precipice, arms and legs entangled. I hear a gunshot. For a second the bear and the girl stop moving. The bear looks around, nose balancing from side to side. Perhaps it has smelt something. Seeing me, it releases its grip and charges.

We are just outside the fortified town of Prats de Mollo. This is about as far south in France as you can get, near to the eastern end of the Pyrenees. There have been no bears here for decades but, in a mad parody of traditional bear hunting, once a year, in February, three bears are released to rampage as they see fit.

The bear just released from Fort Lagarde

Half an hour previously I watched from the top of the castle wall as three men were dressed in sheepskins and daubed with a mixture of cooking oil and soot. When the signal was given, a group of hunters chased the ‘bears’ one by one out of the gate and down the hill towards the town a kilometre away. It is an event reminiscent of the bull-running in Pamplona, emphasising the importance of bears in Pyrenean culture.

If you are attacked by a bear, the experts say, there is no point in running away: a bear can run faster. Don’t climb a tree: bears are much better at it. The only thing to do is to make yourself as small as possible and play dead.

Even though this bear is not the real thing, I run away. I keep running, not looking back, hearing the bear’s footsteps as it crashes down the path behind me. I keep running. Ten, fifteen, twenty metres. I don’t understand why it hasn’t caught up with me, why I can’t feel its claws digging into my shoulders. But still, I don’t look back until I have caught up with my friends. Then I see that the bear has lost interest in me and has gone for another of our party. I glance back at the girl. She is getting up, a remarkably large tuft of fur in her right hand, covered in dust and with an enormous black oily smudge on her face and clothes, yet apparently intact.

One of the other bears tries to escape but hunters wielding sticks force it in the right direction. The bears, the hunters and the crowd which follows them are funnelled through the highest gate in the town’s walls. Once inside, there are more attacks and shrieks. The bears have a penchant for attractive young women but many other people end up with black smudges on their faces and clothes. One ageing man finds himself with a wonderfully precise black hand print on his bald scalp.

Bear hug

The air reeks of gunpowder and spilt red wine. Bombards and drums add to the chaos. Sometimes the crowd jumps violently, crushing onlookers already pressed hard back against the walls of the houses in the narrow cobbled streets. Every year there are injuries, sometimes broken bones, but the event continues to attract hundreds of spectators. Even today, with frost on the ground, the bears’ trajectory is lined with agitated participants half wishing to experience the bear’s hug – the victims acquire a special status in the eyes of the crowd – half hoping to avoid the inevitable rough and tumble.

By the end of the day the bears, bruised and exhausted, trailing blood and soot and oil, are channelled towards the market place outside the town’s east gate. The hunters with their guns and sticks are replaced by barbers with heavy chains, an axe, a basin, and, incongruously, a black pudding. By now the bears are very black, in contrast to the barbers, dressed in long white nightshirts and white caps, with arms, legs and faces flour-whitened. The bears are captured by the barbers. And then shaved with the black pudding.

As the last of the sheepskin ‘fur’ falls to the ground from this year’s bear-in-chief, a handsome, muscular young man is revealed: a well-known player from nearby Perpignan’s reputed rugby team. This must partly explain the young women’s willingness to be hugged and rolled on the ground, although this was not always the case. Brigitte Plo, now over 90 years old, looks back at the bear hunt when she was young: ‘Symbolically, it was the story of white and black, good and evil. The bear represented evil. He wanted to take a young woman back to his lair to deflower her. She prayed to the Virgin who sent the hunters to rescue her. That’s why, when I was young, when the bear caught a girl, the hunters had to fire in the air, so that she didn’t ‘fall’. That was an important point. At that time they didn’t plaster the girls with the oil and soot like now. Girls didn’t wear trousers, so we didn’t want to be made to fall over. It just wasn’t acceptable. That arrived later.’

The barbers searching for the bear

‘Aren’t the girls afraid of getting hurt?’ I ask one of the villagers. ‘No,’ he says. ‘If you watch carefully, when the bear grabs them he always falls on his back so they are cushioned.’

It is then that I realise why the bear never caught me. Paradoxically, if I had run faster he would have caught up with me, but being relatively old, fragile, and wearing glasses saved me.

The Bear festival (Fête de l’Ours)  takes place from  Sunday 14 February to Tuesday 16 February 2010. The bear hunt starts at 3 pm at the Fort Lagarde above the town. The festival includes traditional carnivals, dances and a children’s version of the bear hunt.

The Fort Lagarde, the town defences and the underground tunnel which joins them were constructed by Vauban in the 17th century as part of Louis XIV’s defensive strategy. In the next valley to the north, two other Vauban forts, Villefranche de Conflent and Mont-Louis, have recently become World Heritage Sites.

Access: Perpignan airport (62 km, 1 hour) or Gerona airport, Spain (123km, 2 hours).

Website: http://www.pratsdemollolapreste.com/

There has been a sheep market in Tarascon since at least 1158

At the end of September every year, for the last 851 years at least, there has been a livestock fair in Tarascon in the Ariège département in the Pyrenees. This year the sheep seem to be exclusively tarasconnais – the breed being named after the town – with impressive corkscrew horns. A farmer climbs over a hurdle, picks up the back leg of one and inspects her belly. She is heavily pregnant, like nearly all her sisters. Only a couple of concave mothers are already suckling their weak-legged lambs. The farmer offers 75 Euros per sheep. The seller refuses. “77,” he insists. The farmer moves on. The sheep hide their heads from the sun under the flanks of their neighbours. The air smells feisty, of sweat, wool and sheep shit. Here, apparently, nothing has changed for centuries.

But this illusion quickly evaporates when I spot a nearby mini-van, one side entirely covered by an angry poster. Stark black writing on a yellow background announces a demonstration scheduled for Saturday. A stout man in black tee-shirt and black trousers thrusts a black-and-yellow leaflet into my hand. Without saying a word, he shouts: “danger”. He tells me that he wants to protect the tarasconnais sheep from bears : “I threw blood at the town hall in Arbas in the demo in 2006.”

Contented sheep

He was given a suspended sentence of a month and a half in prison. He and nine other protesters – out of the 300 present – were selected by the authorities to pay for the damage.

The mayor of Arbas, François Arcangeli, had agreed to bears, imported from Slovenia to boost the local population, being released in his commune. The demonstrators also burned a wooden statue of a bear, daubed walls with graffiti, and would have attacked the mayor’s house if it hadn’t been protected by the police.

The association ASPAP, which organised the 2006 demonstration and is represented here today, is fiercely against the bears. Although there are fewer than 20 in the whole of the Pyrenees, in areas where the bears habitually attack, shepherds and their employers are angry at the devastation of their flocks. For a shepherd who cares for his flock an attack which kills or maims one, two, ten, twenty sheep in one night is unbearable. In an exceptional case in 2005, 160 sheep frightened by the presence of a bear stampeded over a cliff. Even shepherds who live with their flocks and use patous (guard dogs) (as recommended by the authorities) are not spared.

The official figures for 2008 for the French Pyrenees (far too low according to the ASPAP) show 137 sheep attacked, 5 rams, 20 lambs, 1 cow and 40 beehives. Two-thirds of the attacks were here in the Ariège, although it only accounts for about a quarter of the French side of the mountains.

Blockade near Luchon, 1 May 2006

These figures need to be put into perspective. Half a million sheep live in the French Pyrenees. On the first day of their summer holidays this year there was a thunderstorm. The lightning killed 132 of them in the Ariège.  In July two stray dogs in the Couserans (also in the Ariège) killed 92 sheep, a calf, a foal and a goat. According to Alain Reynes (of the pro-bear ADET) 50,000 sheep die each year from attacks by wild dogs, falls, and lately the blue tongue epidemic.

There is also the question of compensation. For a sheep killed by a bear the owner will receive 126-180 Euros according to the type of sheep and its age. [In contrast, when a sheep is infected with blue tongue disease which is sweeping across the Pyrenees at present, the farmer only receives a paltry 46 Euros.] Of course, it is not always possible to prove that the sheep was killed by a bear…

Setting aside the statistics, there is another aspect to the rejection of the bears. The ASPAP sees the arrival of (foreign) bears as unwarranted (urban, Parisian) interference in local (rural) affairs. Some participants in demonstrations evoke the 19th-century “War of the Maidens” , when local pressure kept state interference at bay for over half a century. The full name of the ASPAP, which translates as the Association for Preservation of the Heritage of the Pyrenees in Ariège, shows that the dissent is as much about identity and decision-making as about bears.

Propaganda or reality?

In 2009, bear attacks in the Ariège have been half those of 2008 and pro-bear groups were claiming that the government’s 2006-2009 management plan was beginning to work. The bears were becoming less problematic. Even the shepherds were calming down. More bears could safely be imported.

And then, in an interview on France 3 television, Jean Lacube, who sits on the committee of the ASPAP, surprised members by announcing that two bears had been illegally killed in the Ariège. That was why the attacks had decreased. The members were not surprised by the killings, but by the indiscretion, which launched a police operation to find the culprits. Was he ratting on his friends? In the October bulletin of the ASPAP, he explains: “I wanted to throw a big stone into the millpond so that the minister would hear the splash. On the one hand so that she would realise that if there were fewer attacks, it was for other reasons [the bears had not become vegetarian!]. And on the other hand, so that she would realise that the bears had not been accepted locally.” The investigation was inconclusive. No bodies, no weapons, and no confessions.

Sheep contraceptive

Whatever the truth of the matter might be, the splashes in Lacube’s millpond show that the 2006-2009 management plan has failed on all counts. The Pyrenean bear is still heading towards extinction – the last native female, Cannelle, was killed by a hunter in self-defence in 2004. Franska and Palouma, two of the newcomers, have died in accidents. The shepherds are still angry. And the debate has polarised into pro-bear and anti-bear, degenerating into insults and threats.

The man at the stand tells me: “We have pulled out of the meetings with the authorities. They were loaded against us. Whatever we said was ignored, but our presence gave them a legitimacy. Afterwards it was said that all the diverse opinions had been considered. We’ve learned from the Alps. The same thing happened there with the reintroduction of wolves. The shepherds were invited, and were ignored but they had been consulted,” he says, ironically.

François Arcangeli, the mayor of Arbas, fears that the new minister responsible for the bears will back down from her predecessors’ pro-bear stance: “I hope that France won’t celebrate the International Year for Biodiversity in 2010 by trying to bury the plans for the bears.”

Alain Reynes was quoted in the Dépeche du Midi, Lot edition, 6 October 2009, p 8.