Seeking Whom He May Devour Read Online Free PDF

one.”
    Soliman took Camille into the pen and pointed her towards the bloodied carcasses laid out on the floor. Camille looked at them from a distance.
    “What does Suzanne think?” she asked.
    “Suzanne’s against wolves. She says nothing good will come of them, and that this beast kills for sport.”
    “She’s in favour of hunting them down?”
    “She’s against hunting, too. She’s says we won’t nab it round here, it’s already moved on.”
    “And Watchee?”
    “Watchee’s not happy.”
    “In favour of the hunt?”
    “Don’t know. Since he came across the savaged sheep he hasn’t opened his mouth.”
    “And what do you think, Soliman?”
    At that moment Johnstone walked into the pen and rubbed his eyes to adjust them to the sudden gloom. The old shack stank to high heaven of lanolin and stale urine. The French really were revolting people, he thought. They might have cleaned the place up. Behind Johnstone came Suzanne, and she smelled bad too, he reckoned, and then the two
gendarme
s, at a respectful distance, together with the butcher whom Suzanne had failed to chase off. “I’m the man with the cold store,” he had replied, “and I’ll be taking the carcasses away for you.”
    “The hell you will!” Suzanne snapped back. “They’ll be buried right here at Les Écarts, and Watchee will do it with the proper ceremony for serving soldiers what die in action.”
    That shut Sylvain up, no mistake, but he tagged along behind her nevertheless. Watchee stayed outside, by the door. Watching.
    Johnstone nodded to Soliman and then knelt down next to the dismembered sheep. He turned them over, inspected the injuries, probed their dirty coats looking for the best-defined imprint of the teeth. He dragged over a very young ewe and looked hard at the bite mark on its neck.
    “Sol, grab the torch and shine it over there,” Suzanne said.
    Johnstone pored over the wound by the light of the yellow beam.
    “The carnassial hardly scratched her,” he mumbled, “but the canine dug right in.”
    He picked up a long straw and poked it inside the bloody hole.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Camille asked.
    “Probing,” Johnstone answered, calmly.
    The Canadian pulled the straw out and used his thumbnail to score off the limit of staining on the now crimson piece of straw. He handed it without a word to Camille, then took another straw to measure the distance between the wounds. He stood up and went out into the fresh air with his thumbnail still marking the straw. He needed to breathe.
    “The sheep are all yours,” he said, as he went past Watchee, who responded with a nod.
    “Sol,” he said, “fetch me a ruler.”
    Soliman bounded down to the house without breaking his stride, and came back in five minutes with the tape measure Suzanne used for sewing.
    “Measure it,” Johnstone said, as he held the two straws out straight. “Exactly.”
    Soliman stretched the tape along the blood-marked straw.
    “Thirty-five millimetres,” he announced.
    Johnstone screwed up his face. Then he measured the other straw himself and handed the tape measure back to Soliman.
    “And so?” one of the
gendarme
s asked.
    “The canine tooth was almost four centimetres long.”
    “And so?” the
gendarme
repeated. “Is that awkward?”
    Nobody said anything, pregnantly. They were beginning to see. They were beginning to understand.
    “A large animal,” Johnstone concluded, summarising what everyone had grasped.
    The group hesitated then began to break up. The
gendarme
s bade farewell with a salute. Sol went to the house again. Watchee went back into the pen. Johnstone went off to one side to wash his hands, then put on his motorcycle helmet and his gloves. Camille went up to him.
    “Suzanne’s invited us in to have a drink, to get this out of our minds. Come on.”
    Johnstone pursed his lips.
    “She stinks,” he said.
    Camille stiffened.
    “She does not,” she replied rather harshly, flouting all factual