The Serpent of Stars Read Online Free Page B

little rest, standing, not letting them fold their legs or lie down, then “Hup!” The head shepherd whistled through his fingers and they all set off with their sleepiness and their suffering.
    After that, I was watching peacefully from my window which looks out over everything, and there I saw it: the whole county was smoking under the hooves of the sheep. From Pertuis, from Valensole, from Pierrevert, from Corbières, from Sainte-Tulle, the lead sheep nudged one another on along the roads in the full fire of the great sun. Already, in the background, the Durance was lying in a cloud of earth thicker than the clouds of the sky, and the sound of a spring that had released all its waters danced over the country like a huge serpent crushing all the foliage.
    It was the height of the move to summer pastures. All the animals left the red Crau, where the full sun was already crushing everything.
    So, in the hills at noon, I ate my bread at the Turpine spring and I stayed there for an hour to watch the water fleas jumping. That noise of animals on the move was constantly in the sky. It resounded across the clouds as if across stretched skin. The noise no longer rose from the earth. A gray haze which was the dust from the fields and roads poured across the sky in the slow curves of thick, beautiful muscles. The whole world took part in the emigration of the beasts. The order had come from beyond the sky in the dazzling mystery of the sun. The rising tide of beasts obeyed the world’s orders. I was filled with that great monotonous noise like a sponge in a basin. I was more that noise than myself.
The streams of sheep descended the length of my arms. I heard them gathering in the great woods of my hair. Their horned feet sounded heavily against the full of my chest. All of a sudden, I felt the dizzying rotation of the earth and I woke up.
    Already that lovely silence, already that edge of evening, and the cowbell of the poor shepherd rang over there from under the blue junipers.
    He let me get my breath beside him, and then he handed me his water jug. I saw that he, too, had his natural home there, not like the potter’s, who hollows out the earth and then kneads it, knowing the forms, but only goes that far, without knowing what spirit to breathe into it. No, this was the home of the master, the pine-lyre player, the initiated who listens to the words of the clouds and reads the great writing of the stars: a hut of loosely woven branches, ethereal, saturated with air.
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    THIS IS what he told me:
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    I was fifteen years old. In the middle of winter, the master felt my arms. He said, “Let me see your legs.” I lifted my pants. He passed his hands over my legs and felt my calves. “Good,” he said, “you’ll leave for the Alps this spring, but first, show me your teeth.” I rolled back my lips like a laughing dog, and he said, “Alright,” and this time, it was decided. First I went to say good-bye to my team of horses, and then I went to find the shepherds. They were camping in the hayloft, on the fine hay, humpbacked as the open sea. Like all young shepherds, I stayed there to test the waters, and in the evening, instead of sleeping under the
stairs as I usually did, I dug myself a burrow in the hay to sleep beside them.
    At Christmas, we went to the church to welcome Jesus, and I wasn’t among the plowboys, but with the team of shepherds. I’d been lent a sheepskin jacket, a pointed hat, and a fife. Coming out, old Bouscarle put his hand on my shoulder. “Jesus,” he said to me, “is up there.” And as I looked at the vast sky, he said to me, “No, not in the vastness, in that little corner, there, you see, that tiny star.”
    Bouscarle was my boss. He was the one who gave me some idea of all you had to know to be an assistant shepherd, and especially, to take care of the beasts. “Look after them,” he would say to me, “but the