Seeking Whom He May Devour Read Online Free PDF Page B

accuracy.
    “She does,” Johnstone said.
    “Don’t be mean.”
    Johnstone caught Camille’s frowning stare and suddenly smiled.
    “All right,” he said, and took off his helmet.
    He followed her along the scorched grass track that wound down to the stone-built hovel. He had nothing against that other French habit of knocking yourself senseless with hooch from the stroke of noon. Canadians could compete in that event.
    “All the same,” he said to Camille with his hand on her shoulder. “She
does
stink.”

VII
    THAT EVENING THE national news featured the latest victims of the Mercantour wolves at some length.
    “Shit,” said Johnstone. “Why can’t they just leave us in peace.”
    Actually, the issue was no longer the wolves as a group, but
the
wolf of the Mercantour National Park. The lead item of the news was an overexcited report from the Alps, with rather more substance to it than in earlier stories. It prompted fear and loathing. It kneaded the related ingredients of fascination and horror into an unhealthy dough. The savagings were deplored with prurient gloating, the power of the beast was spelled out in detail: uncatchable, wild and, above all, huge. That was what really hooked the whole country and propelled its now passionate interest in the “Monster of the Mercantour”. Its uncommon size raised it above the ordinary and placed it on a par with the cohorts of Satan. People had suddenly encountered a wolf out of hell, and no way were they going to let go of it.
    “I’m astounded Suzanne let journalists inside,” Camille said.
    “Went in without asking.”
    “This time it’ll be a whole lynch-mob. No stopping them.”
    “They won’t catch it in the Mercantour.”
    “You reckon its lair is somewhere else?”
    “Sure, it moves around. Maybe a sibling.”
    Camille switched off the TV and looked at Johnstone.
    “Who are you talking about?”
    “Sibellius’s brother. There were five of them in the litter: two she-cubs, Livie and Octavie, and three males, Sibellius, Porcus the Lame, and the last-born, Crassus the Bald.”
    “Was
he
big?”
    “Looked set to grow to a good size. Never seen him grown-up. Mercier reminded me.”
    “Does he know where it is?”
    “Can’t pin it down. With mating season there’s been lots of boundary shifts all over the place. Males can cover thirty kilometres in one night. Hang on, Mercier gave me a photograph. But only when it was a cub.”
    Johnstone got up and looked for his rucksack. “Shit,” he grumbled. “I damn well left it with the old bag.”
    “With Suzanne,” Camille corrected.
    “With old bag Suzanne.”
    Camille hovered, on the brink of starting a row.
    “If you have to go down there,” she said in the end, “I’ll come with you. There’s a leak in the toilet.”
    “Filth,” said Johnstone. “Filth just doesn’t bother you.”
    Camille shrugged as she went to gather her toolkit. “It’s true, it doesn’t.”
    At Les Écarts Camille asked for a bucket and scrubbing sheet and left Johnstone in the care of Suzanne and Soliman, who offered herb tea or a glass of spirits.
    “Spirits,” he said.
    Camille noticed how he shifted around so as to sit as far away from Suzanne as possible.
    As she loosened the seized nuts on the sewer pipe Camille wondered if she could ever get Johnstone to utter a thank you, even a word of thanks. He wasn’t objectionable, really, just barely cordial. Mixing with grizzlies had left his social skills undeveloped. And that weighed on Camille, even with someone as rough-mannered as Suzanne. But she did not go in for preaching. Drop it, she told herself, as she prised a perished rubber seal off with the tip of a screwdriver. Say nothing. Don’t involve yourself, it’s not your job.
    She could hear the sounds of conversation coming up from the ground-floor living room, then doors slamming. Soliman ran along the corridor then up the stairs and stood to catch his breath at the door of the toilet. Camille was