Seeking Whom He May Devour (3 page)

Johnstone paced around the little room with its closed wooden shutters. Hands clasped behind his back he strode from one corner to the other, crushing a few loose floor-tiles beneath his weight, with the hair on his head brushing the main beam. These Alpine shacks had not been designed for full-sized Canadians. Camille’s left hand was running over the keyboard trying to find the right tempo.

“To know which one it is,” he said. “Which wolf.”

Camille turned from the keyboard to face him.

“Which
one
it is? So you agree with them? That there’s only one?”

“Often hunt solo. Need to see the wounds.”

“Where are the sheep?”

“In cold store. The butcher’s been keeping them.”

“Is he going to sell them?”

Johnstone smiled as he shook his head.

“No. ‘You don’t eat dead meat’, is what he said. It’s for the post-mortem.”

Camille pondered with a finger on her lips. She had not thought about identifying the animal. She did not believe the rumours about an outsize beast. It was wolves, that’s all it was. But for Johnstone, obviously, the assailants might have their own faces, muzzles, and names.

“So which one is it? Do you know?”

Johnstone shrugged his massive shoulders and made a questioning movement with his hands.

“The injuries,” he repeated.

“What will they tell you?”

“Size. Sex. With lots of luck.”

“Which one are you expecting it to be?”

Johnstone put his hands over his face.

“Big Sibellius,” he spluttered through clenched teeth, as if he was informing on a friend. “Lost his hunting ground. To Marcus, a young tearaway. Must be in a foul mood. Not seen the boy for weeks. Sibellius is a tough guy, real tough. Jesus. Could have established a new territory for himself.”

Camille got up and put her arms around him.

“And if it is Sibellius, what can you do about it?”

“Sedative dart, chuck him into the van, drive him back to the Abruzzi.”

“What about the Italians?”

“They’re different. Proud of their wildlife.”

Camille stretched up to brush Johnstone’s lips. He bent his knees, clasped Camille by the waist and lifted her. Why should he bother about a bloody wolf when he could stay his whole life long in this little room with Camille?

“I’m coming down,” he said.

At the café there was some pretty rough parlaying before they finally agreed to take Johnstone to the cold store. The “trapper”, as he was known around here – because they assumed that anyone who’d hung around Canadian forests could only be a trapper – was now seen as some
kind
of traitor. They did not say it outright. They did not dare. Because they were aware that they were going to need him, for his knowledge, and for his sheer strength. A hulk that size was not to be dismissed in so small a village. Especially a man who could stand up to grizzlies. Wolves would be child’s play for a man like that, right? As a result it wasn’t obvious on which side the trapper should be placed, whether you could talk to him or not. Not that it really made a great deal of difference, since the trapper himself never talked back.

Under the watchful eye of Sylvain the butcher and Gerrot the carpenter, Johnstone inspected the savaged carcasses, one missing a foot, another one minus a piece of shoulder.

“Not clear, these marks,” he muttered. “They moved.”

He gestured to the carpenter that he needed a tape measure. Gerrot handed it to him without a word. Johnstone measured, pondered, measured again. Then he stood up, and at a wave of his hand the butcher took the carcasses back into the cold store, slammed shut the heavy white door and turned the handle.

“What’s the answer?” Sylvain asked.

“Same culprit. I think.”

“A big animal?”

“A fine male. That much is for sure.”

In the evening there were still fifteen or so locals hanging around the square, in small knots around the central fountain. They were putting off going home to bed. In a way, and without admitting it, they had already started to stand guard. An armed vigil. Men like that.
Johnstone
went over to Gerrot, who was sitting on his own on a stone bench, staring at the toes of his heavy boots, as if lost in a dream. Unless he was just looking at his boots without dreaming. The carpenter was a sensible man, not much given to violence or to chatter, and Johnstone respected him.

“Tomorrow,” Gerrot began, “are you going back up into the Mercantour?”

Johnstone nodded.

“You going to identify the wolves?”

“Sure, with the team. The others must have started already.”

“Do you know which one it is? Any idea?”

Johnstone scowled. “Could be a new one.”

“Why? What’s bothering you?”

“The size.”

“Big?”

“Much too big. Very highly developed jaw.”

Gerrot leaned his elbows on his knees and squinted up at the Canadian. “Bugger that,” he muttered. “So it’s true, is it? What people are saying? That it’s not a normal beast?”

“Uncommon,” Johnstone replied in a similar mumble.

“Maybe you didn’t measure it right, trapper. Measurements can hop around like anything.”

“Sure. The teeth dragged across the carcass. Skidded. Could have extended the bite-mark.”

“There you are, then.”

The two men sat in silence for a long moment.

“It’s a big one, all the same,” Johnstone said.

“There could be some fun and games soon,” the
carpenter
said, as he scanned the square, watching the men with their fists in their pockets.

“Don’t tell them.”

“They tell themselves, anyway. What do you want to do?”

“To catch the animal before they do.”

“I understand.”

On Monday at dawn Johnstone strapped up his kitbag, lashed it onto his motorbike and made ready to go back up to the Mercantour. To watch Marcus and Proserpine enjoying young love, to find Sibellius, to check the movements of the whole pack, to make a list of who’s there and who’s not, to feed the old fellow, and then to hunt for Electre, a small female who had not been seen for a week. He would track Sibellius towards the south-east, as near as he could get to Pierrefort, the village where the last attack had taken place.

VI

HE TRACKED SIBELLIUS
for two days without sighting the beast, stopping to shelter from the sun by the side of a sheep pen only when the flaming orb was simply too hot to bear. In so doing he checked more than twenty-two square kilometres of hunting grounds for the chance remains of dismembered sheep. Johnstone would never have cheated on his one great love, the great bears of the north-west, but he was forced to admit that this straggly set of skinny European wolves had made pretty deep inroads over the last six months.

He was edging his way along a narrow path with a sheer drop to one side when he saw Electre lying injured at the bottom of a gully. Johnstone calculated his chances of getting to the bottom of the steep, scrubby slope down which the she-wolf had slipped, and he reckoned he could manage it without getting help. Anyway, as all the park rangers were out on patrol, he’d have had to wait far too long for back-up. It took Johnstone more than an hour to lower himself down the cliff, going from handhold to
handhold
under the mind-numbing Saharan sun. The she-wolf was so weak he did not even need to strap her fangs before making an examination. Badly damaged paw, had not eaten for days. Johnstone laid her on a canvas sheet which then he tied up like a sling, so that he could carry it over his shoulder. The she-wolf may have lost a lot of weight, but she still wasn’t an ounce under seventy pounds – a featherweight for a wolf, but a hell of a load for a man climbing back up a near-vertical slope. When he’d made it to the cliff-top path Johnstone allowed himself thirty minutes’ rest lying flat on his back in the shade, with one hand on the she-wolf’s coat so she should understand she wasn’t going to die all alone up there as if at the dawn of time.

At eight in the evening he brought the she-wolf into the treatment hut.

“Any trouble below?” the vet asked Johnstone as he laid Electre on the examination table.

“Trouble about what?”

“About the savaged sheep.”

Johnstone shook his head. “We’ll have to get our hands on him before the locals come up here. And wreck everything.”

“You off?” the vet asked, as he noticed Johnstone grabbing a loaf, a salami and a bottle.

“Things to do.”

Yes, like hunting on behalf of the old man. Might take some time. He did not always get it right the first time. Like the ageing wolf himself.

Johnstone left word for Jean Mercier. They wouldn’t
cross
paths that night, he would sleep at his sheepfold.

The alarm was raised next morning, by Camille, on the mobile phone, around ten, while he was making his way to the north. Her breathless speech told Johnstone straight away that things were getting worse.

“They’ve been at it again,” Camille said. “There’s been a bloodbath at Les Écarts, at Suzanne Rosselin’s place.”

“At Saint-Victor?” Johnstone exclaimed, almost shouting.

“At Suzanne Rosselin’s place,” Camille repeated. “In the village. The wolf killed five sheep and wounded three others.”

“Did he eat them there and then?”

“No, he just tore pieces out of them, the same as before. Doesn’t look as though he’s attacking for food. Have you seen Sibellius?”

“Not a sign.”

“You’ll have to come down. Two
gendarme
s have turned up, but Gerrot says they haven’t got a clue about how to examine the carcasses properly. And the vet’s miles away on a foaling case. People are screaming and howling, Johnstone. Shit, man, you have to get down here.”

“Two hours’ time, at Les Écarts.”

Suzanne Rosselin was the sole owner of the breeding station at Les Écarts, to the west of the village, and she ran it with an iron fist, people said. A tall and corpulent woman, rough-mannered to the point of manliness, she was respected and feared throughout the canton, but she wasn’t much sought after outside the lambing trade.
People
found her too abrasive and too crude. Furthermore she was ugly. It was said that thirty years back she had fallen for an Italian migrant and wanted to run off with him without her father’s blessing. She had gone all the way with the man, so the story went. But life did not give her a chance to be a bad girl – the lover bolted back to the toe of Italy, and then, less than a year later, Suzanne’s parents died. Betrayed, ashamed and without a partner, Suzanne grew hard of head and heart. So it was fate, they said, that had made her as masculine as she was. Other people said that was wrong, that she had always been butch. It was partly for these reasons that Camille rather liked Suzanne, who took verbal crudity to an incandescent intensity that could only inspire admiration – Camille’s mother had taught her to consider vulgarity as a way of coping with life. She was also impressed by Suzanne’s professional competence.

Camille went up to the sheep farm roughly once a week to collect the box of provisions that Suzanne made up for her. As soon as she entered the grounds of Les Écarts she left the snide remarks and insinuations of the village behind her. The five men and women who worked there would have gone to the stake for Suzanne Rosselin.

She strode along the pebble path switching back and forth along the terraces up to the high and narrow stone-built farmhouse, with its low door and small, asymmetric windows. Camille reckoned that the decrepit roof owed its continued existence only to the moral solidarity between tiles that had bonded together long ago. The place was
empty
, so Camille walked onto the elongated sheepfold five hundred metres further up the steep slope. She could hear Suzanne bawling in the distance. Camille screwed up her eyes against the sun and made out the blue shirts of two
gendarme
s as well as Sylvain, hopping around. Whenever meat was involved, the butcher had to be there.

Then she made out the priestly silhouette of Watchee, standing erect against the wall of the sheepfold. She had not yet had an opportunity of seeing Suzanne’s shepherd close up, since this very old man was forever out in the fields guarding Suzanne’s flock. People said that he slept in the old shack with his animals, but they did not seem to find that shocking. He was called “Watchee”, meaning “watchman” or “keeper”, as far as Camille had been able to make out, but she did not know his real name. He was a slim, straight-backed old man with a head of longish white hair, and his two hands were resting firmly on the crook of a staff standing solidly in the ground, and with his haughty glance he cut a truly majestic figure, so much so that Camille wasn’t sure whether she had the right to speak to him directly.

On Suzanne’s other side stood Soliman, standing just as straight as Watchee, as if to match the old man. Seeing these two stationary guards to right and left of Suzanne, you could imagine them awaiting a signal from her to start using their staves to beat back an imaginary horde of marauders. But they weren’t. Watchee was just standing the way he always did, and in these rather dramatic circumstances Soliman was only following suit. Suzanne was in discussion with the
gendarme
s and filling
in
the incident report form. The dead and wounded sheep had been taken into the cooler darkness of the pen.

Seeing Camille, Suzanne took her shoulder in her huge grasp and gave it a rough shake.

“So where’s your trapper, eh? I could do with him right now. To tell us what’s what. He’s must have more between the ears than these two nitwits who’d be pushed even to wipe their own backsides.”

Sylvain the butcher raised an arm as if he was about to say something.

“Belt up, Sylvain,” Suzanne anticipated him. “You’re as dim as the others. No offence, you’ve got an excuse, and it’s not your job.”

No-one took offence in any case. The two
gendarme
s seemed quite bored with it all and carried on filling in the forms, laboriously.

“I let him know,” Camille said. “He’s on his way down.”

“If you’ve got a minute, afterwards. There’s a leak in my lavatory, I need you to mend it.”