Five o'clock on a chilly Sunday. No use turning a deaf ear to the alarm clock or Iron John. He thumped his chest at last night's dinner party and you kept time. "You're lucky," says Christian Hoffmann without irony as he greets you at this ungodly hour. "We don't often take guests."
By six you are at the rendezvous in the village of Reynes. A dozen vehicles are there, including a showily chrome-buttressed, four-wheel drive. Shadowy figures with rifles bearing names from classic westerns move in and out of the headlights. Is this the set of a Costa-Gavras movie, or some grim Catalan blood-rite - "Hunt the Gringo" - with you as prey?
No, the target is wild boar (sanglier), not tame foreigner. Unless you end up in a casualty war. Forty-five hunters were mistaken for boar and killed last year, some 220 were injured. But with 1,400,000 Frenchmen licensed to hunt, the figures look less alarming. Still, best kill or . . . suppress the thought.
The 40-plus members of the Reynes club are organised with near military precision. They carry horns to signal each other: one for a sighting; two for a boar wounded; several short blasts for an accident. The dog handlers have marked out the terrain and everyone, including one woman, a cross between Calamity Jane and Ma Barker, signs the roll.
Twenty minutes later, you begin the silent slog into the forest. Sneaking refugees over the Spanish border must have been a bit like this. Every few hundred metres, someone finds his position, but Christian likes the high country. After two hours he locates our spot. Disappointingly, there are no mountain views, just a regiment of leafless birches giving the area its Catalan name, Les Bearns.
Above us, Pierre takes up position. An estate agent in the real world, he is new to hunting. Bob Hope waving six-shooters would inspire more confidence. Pierre is too close for comfort. Christian strokes his Zapata moustache and shifts our post to place a rock between us and Son of Paleface.
Hours crawl by.
Occasionally something hints, like the ghost of Godot, that it might be going to happen. Distant shots reverberate around hidden peaks. A little closer, hounds bark. Christian grips his carabine. Hemingway lives! Then it's silence and inaction again. Wilde may have been right about fox-hunting, but at least the unspeakable do something colourful in their pursuit of the uneatable.
Ah, but when Christian lets you handle the gun . . . There is "a terrible beauty" in its craftsmanship. You begin to grasp why so many people do this every year.
On average, weapons cost between 4,000 and 6,000 French francs. Christian's German-made Heckler-Koch carabine set him back 12,000 francs. The hardware should be a one-off, but hunters also have to find up to 2,000 francs annually for licence, subs and ammunition. Each boar-hunter is also required to spend three weeks cleaning up the countryside he shoots in.
Contrary to what you might think, it is not only the well-heeled who hunt. Maurice Trougnou, for example, retired farmhand living in a council flat, has two guns, one a Remington, and hunts regularly.
There are the hounds again. Christian retrieves his semi-automatic. The baying is closer now. More urgent.
Rustling and scrabbling behind you. Something big and black streaks past. Your host has it in his sights, shoots before you can get to your feet.
Down the poor devil goes, bumping, bouncing down the slope like a boulder of blood and bone, crashing to a halt against the bole of an oak. Christian gives three blasts of his horn for a kill.
There is a disappointing absence of tusks on this boar. It could never have charged Francis Macomber to the end of his short, happy life. It is just a pig, after all, a wild pig.
Now comes the hardest part. You find yourself helping to lug the corpse over a switchback of tracks scarcely suitable for walkers, let alone those bearing boars. We must be hauling 100 kilos of dead animal. But (oh, not Iron John again!) it's hard to resist bonding as the miles pass. Take care, or you'll start hankering after a life with Jack Merridew's hunters!
Especially when the best is yet to come: the feast.
Draw a veil over the dextrous butchery of the slaughtered animals. Edit out the image of the toddler at the farm parading with a severed boar's head on his own like a bloody crown. Nobody likes that. There are murmured regrets too, when it is revealed that one of the laies (sows) killed was carrying a litter.
"That's bad," says Maurice, who has been hooked for 25 years since killing a boar on his first hunt. "We try to avoid it."
When all present have been handed their share of fresh meat, it's back to Can Dagoust, the village restaurant, for a meal of boars' livers.
Christian does the cooking for the hunters and some of their wives. The meat is flambeed and cooked in red wine with masses of onions. The result is delicious. Too rustic to excite Lloyd Grossman's outlandish vowels, but it is nice to know that you are eating something that hasn't been dosed with chemicals . . . or genetically modified.