Sacred Sierra Read Online Free PDF Page B

that?’ Salud asked incredulously, indignation and fear in her voice.
    ‘They’re after food,’ Arcadio said. ‘Almonds are easy for them: rip the branches off and then eat all they want. Got whole families of them living up there.’ He pointed towards the upper section of the gulley that cleaved the side of our mountain, a dense dark-green area thick with trees and bushes.
    There was a pause as we took this in. I had two mental images of wild boar: one as frightened, harmless creatures that always ended up as banquet material in
Asterix
comic books; the other as fierce, territorial beasts that could charge and kill a man. I had the feeling the comic-book version was not entirely accurate.
    ‘Shooting them’s the best thing,’ Arcadio said. ‘Hunters’ll come up once the season’s started. Nothing but trouble, those boar.’
    Wild man-eating beasts, and now the prospect of armed men wandering around our land taking potshots at them: rather than a farm in Spain, it was beginning to feel more like some kind of safari park.
    We carried on stripping the trees of their fruit as the shadows shortened and the sun rose higher in the sky, Salud and I carefully picking each almond and placing it in the sack, Arcadio ripping them off in handfuls along with clumps of leaves and bits of twig and tossing them carelessly into his basket. By the time we had had finished one tree, he was already on his fourth.
    ‘Perhaps there
is
some trick,’ I said.
    I heard a sharp intake of breath from Salud and a soft, muffled ‘
¡ay!
’. From the tone I knew something was wrong: she was never one to scream or make a fuss. I looked round and saw her holding one hand tightly while blood was oozing out from between her fingers.
    ‘Bloody thorns,’ she said.
    The cut had stretched along her finger and looked deep, lips of skin parting and exposing the bloody mass underneath.
    ‘I need to sit down,’ she said quietly.
    ‘I’ll go to the house and get some iodine.’
    ‘Wait,’ said Arcadio. He had walked over and was kneeling down to take a look at Salud’s hand.
    ‘Almond thorn?’ he asked. She nodded. The blood was still flowing thickly, dripping over her clothes and drying in ugly brown stains. Arcadio walked towards a nearby terrace wall and bent down as though looking for something. Then he knelt, pulled up part of a plant he’d found, and stuffed the leaves into his mouth to chew. For a few seconds of confusion we watched him masticating like a cow. It had seemed he was about to do something to help the cut on Salud’s finger, now I started to wonder if he’d changed his mind and was simply having a hillman’s snack.
    Finally he spat a dark green gob into the palm of his hand, looked at it for a moment as though to gauge its usefulness, then walked over towards Salud again. Taking her hand he started spreading the gunge on to her bleeding finger.
    ‘Should slow it down,’ he said. ‘Might take some of the pain away as well.’
    I watched his spittle mix freely with her blood.
    ‘It’s stopping,’ Salud said. ‘It feels sharp, as though it’s drying up.’
    Arcadio stood up.
    ‘Should be fine by tomorrow,’ he said. ‘
Bruguerola
. Makes it heal quicker.’
    Later that night we sat at the kitchen table next to the remains of dinner and an empty bottle of wine, a large sack of almonds on the floor beside us. We’d bandaged Salud’s hand up, but barely a drop of blood had appeared since Arcadio’s intervention.
    ‘Something in the leaves must make the bleeding stop,’ Salud said. I wondered what it might be, and how Arcadio had got to know about it. What other medicinal treasures were we walking over every time we stepped out of the front door? The grasses and weeds choking up the mountainside started to appear in a different light.
    We’d carried on all morning, stopping only for a short break at midday before picking almonds late into the afternoon. It wasn’t a strenuous job in itself, but had become so