La Chasse

L’oustal could only survive and expand if the hostile forces outside its boundaries could be controlled and kept at bay. Nettles and brambles had to be tirelessly cut back. The rooks and starlings which wrought such havoc on the crops had to be destroyed, and where there were no real dangers, superstition created others in the form of sorcery and fantastic monsters like the Beast of Gévaudan, the scourge of the Robert Louis Stevenson country, which was said to have carried off and consumed countless young children at the end of the last century.