The narrator reveals that the footsteps she heard in the woods were her own—she had stepped on a food wrapper and startled herself, even peeing on her sandal. She acknowledges her quick reflexes can tip into overreaction.

Later, she drives to Boulière, the largest town in the Guyenne, to stock up on groceries and beer at its ring-road supermarkets, then heads west toward the Dubois family estate. She takes a detour through Vantôme to scout the area near Pascal Balmy's radical farming commune, Le Moulin.

Vantôme is depressed and depopulated: cinder-block houses, abandoned buildings, hillsides scarred by logging. She drives past Le Moulin's struggling crops on rocky, hard-to-irrigate land, judging that only Parisian activists would attempt subsistence farming here. She summarizes the region's economic decline—youth fleeing to cities, locals subsisting on satellite TV and drink, a state-driven push to convert the area into a corn monocrop economy supported by controversial "megabasins" that divert water to corporate growers.

She passes a megabasin construction site where equipment had been sabotaged, now guarded by gendarmes and screened by slogans. She notes that megabasin protests elsewhere in France have escalated to violent clashes. After excavators were torched in Tayssac, Pascal Balmy fell under suspicion, but locals refused to cooperate with investigators—they side with the Le Moulin anarchists and view corporate farmers, contractors, police, and state ministries as their true enemies.