Moles

Moles enter the narrative through the work and routines of Pierre Piscot, a laborer in the narrator’s garden. Catching them is his distinctive skill: he watches their underground routes, waits for them to surface, and may be joined by Dingo, who sometimes catches one first. The animals thus connect practical rural labor with a relationship that stands apart from Dingo’s dealings with the other people of Ponteilles.

Place in the Garden

Piscot works in the garden as often as he is wanted, tying up lettuces, hoeing seedlings, weeding beds, and raking paths. In winter, he trims trees, breaks wood, gathers leaves, fertilizes the soil, and turns it over. Mole-catching is another part of this varied work, but the narrator singles it out as a specialty that particularly delights Dingo. The garden is not merely a cultivated setting: it is also a place where Piscot’s knowledge of the ground and Dingo’s attention to prey meet.

Piscot rejects the use of traps. In his view, moles are clever enough to avoid or circumvent them, so he relies instead on patience and close observation. He watches the molehills at the times he considers their regular periods of movement and feeding: five in the morning, ten in the morning, and five in the evening. When a mole comes close to the loosened surface, he strikes the ground with a digging spade and sends it into the air. The account presents this as a practiced routine, dependent on knowing when to wait as much as on acting quickly.

Capture, Food, and Small Earnings

Piscot’s catch has both a market value and a use at home. He sells each skin for one sou to a ragpicker from Cortoise, while keeping the meat to eat. The narrator reports that Piscot prepares it with small onions and considers it a treat. This detail makes mole-catching more than a garden chore: even a small animal can become a little cash and a meal, with the two uses divided between sale and consumption.

The passage sets this practice against Piscot’s broader poverty. He often does not have enough to eat, and the narrator notes that his food includes animals that bourgeois households would not ordinarily eat. Piscot speaks favorably of rats, hedgehogs, snakes, and weasels as well as moles, assigning each a familiar culinary comparison. The account does not present these foods as an abstract curiosity; they belong to the precarious material circumstances of a worker who makes use of what is available. At the same time, Piscot’s confident assessments of taste give him a distinctive voice and a practical authority that differs from the habits of the better-off narrator and his class.

Dingo and Piscot

Moles help explain why Dingo takes such an interest in Piscot. Among the inhabitants of Ponteilles, Piscot is the only person with whom Dingo forms a friendship. The narrator guesses that the shared interest in catching moles may be part of the reason, while also allowing that Dingo may respond to Piscot’s persistent poverty. The explanation remains tentative, but the companionship itself is clear: when Piscot works in the garden, Dingo stays near him and eagerly attends to him.

Dingo appears, in the narrator’s account, to urge Piscot to take up his spade and go after the moles. The dog sometimes catches one with a bite before Piscot can strike it with the spade. Their activity therefore combines rather than simply duplicates their skills: Piscot watches the ground and uses his tool, while Dingo’s own hunting ability can intervene at the moment the animal surfaces. The moles are not given speech or an individual story, but their movements organize this small collaboration between human worker and dog.

Dingo’s attachment is not confined to the mole hunt. He also helps Piscot with other tasks, including pushing his wheelbarrow, in a manner the narrator compares with Dingo’s earlier help to an old itinerant man pulling a loaded cart. The comparison places the garden work within a recurring pattern of assistance. Moles are one occasion for Dingo and Piscot to spend time together; their connection extends beyond the catch to the ordinary labor around it.

Narrative Significance

The account makes the moles matter through their place in a local economy of attention and use. Piscot studies when they travel, waits for them to surface, catches them, sells their skins, and eats their meat. Dingo joins the pursuit for reasons the narrator can only partly infer. In a few concrete details—the stated hours, the spade, the one-sou skin, and the meal—the narrative links animal behavior to work, subsistence, and companionship without turning the moles into symbols with a separate, asserted meaning.

Their role also reveals a difference between Piscot and the other villagers as the narrator sees them. Piscot is unusually open and sociable with the narrator and Dingo, and his expertise is treated as both useful and amusing. The mole hunt gives that expertise a scene: its success depends on attention to the animal’s habits, not on equipment or social standing. For Dingo, the same scene offers a shared pursuit and a reason to remain close to the one human in the village with whom he sustains a friendship.