When no more food remains, he moves, looking for another loaf, which will become the excuse for a fresh burrow, to be abandoned in its turn. Each fungus consumed represents a new house, which is a mere refectory, a traveller’s refreshment-room. Thus are the autumn and spring, the seasons of the hydnocystis, spent in the pleasures of the table, from one home to the next. To study the rabassier insect more closely, in my own house, I should need a little store of its favourite fare. It would be waste of time to seek for it myself, by digging at random: the little cryptogam is not so plentiful that I can hope to strike it with my trowel without a guide. The truffle-hunter needs his Dog; my informer shall be the Bolboceras himself. Behold me turned into a rabassier of a new kind. I reveal my secret, which can only raise a smile from my original instructor in underground botany, if he should ever hear of my singular form of competition. The subterranean fungi occur only at certain points, often in groups. Now the Beetle has been this way; with his delicate scent he has recognized the site as good, for the burrows are numerous hereabouts. We will therefore dig near the holes. The clue is accurate. In a few hours, thanks to the tracks left by the Bolboceras, I possess a handful of hydnocystes. It is the first time that I have gathered this particular fungus. Let us now catch the insect. That presents no difficulties: we have only to dig up the burrows. I make my experiments the same evening, filling a large earthen pan with fresh, sifted sand. With a stick as thick as my finger, I make six vertical tunnels in the sand, two decimetres [40] deep and placed at a suitable distance apart. A hydnocystis is lowered to the bottom of each; and I insert a fine straw, to show me the exact position later. Lastly, I fill up the six cavities with caked sand. When this surface has been carefully smoothed, so that the level is everywhere the same, except for the six straws, landmarks that mean nothing to the Bolboceras, I let loose my captives, covering them with a wire-gauze cage. There are eight of them. At first there is nothing to see save the inevitable uneasiness due to the incidents of their exhumation, transport and confinement in an unknown place. My exiles from home try to escape, climb up the wire, burrow right at the edge of the enclosure. Night falls and things grow calmer. Two hours later, I come to take a last look at them. Three are still buried under a thin layer of sand. The five others have each dug a perpendicular shaft at the very foot of the straws which tell me where the fungi lie. Next morning, the sixth straw has its well like the others. This is the moment to see what is happening underground. I remove the sand methodically in vertical slices. At the bottom of each burrow is a Bolboceras eating his truffle, the hydnocystis.