by Fred Vargas
Johnstone was on the side of the wolves. He reckoned that the bold beasts honoured the little land of France by crossing over the Alps like proud ghosts from the distant past. No way could you let them get shot by pint-sized, sun-baked humans. But like all nomadic hunters the Canadian was cautious by nature. Down in the village he never talked about the wolves. He kept quiet, obeying the lesson his father had taught him: “If you want to stay free, keep your mouth shut.”
Johnstone had not been down to Saint-Victor-du-Mont for five days. He had warned Camille that he would be away until Thursday, using his night-vision camera to keep watch on noble Augustus desperately seeking prey in the dark. But as the old wolf had still failed to catch anything by Thursday Johnstone gave in and extended his vigil by one more night so as to find something for the poor creature to eat. He had caught two rabbits in their burrow, slit their throats with his knife, and left the bodies on one of Augustus’s tracks. He hid himself under bracken, wrapped in an oilcloth that was supposed to stop his human scent from escaping, and waited anxiously for the starving animal.
Now he was whistling as he walked through Saint-Victor, mightily relieved. The old fellow had come, and had eaten.
* * *
Camille was a night bird, so when Johnstone opened the door there she still was, with furrowed brow and her mouth half-open, hunched over the keyboard, concentrating on what she could hear through her headphones, with her fingers darting among the notes, hovering over them every now and again. Camille was never so beautiful as when she was concentrating on her work or on love. Johnstone put down his rucksack, sat at the table, and watched her for a while. Camille was shut away from the world and unaware of any noise because of her headphones, and she was now scribbling on manuscript paper. Johnstone knew she was making the music track for a romantic soap in twelve episodes with a deadline in November. The production was a dreadful mess, she’d said. And it was a big job, too. Johnstone did not like talking shop into the small hours. You got on with your work and that was that. That’s what really mattered.
He crossed behind her, looked at the bare nape of her neck beneath her short-cut hair, gave it a quick kiss, mustn’t disturb Camille when she was working, even if he’d been away for five days, he knew that better than anyone. She carried on at the keyboard for another twenty minutes then took off her headphones and came to sit with him at the table. Johnstone played back the shots of Augustus devouring the rabbits and passed her the viewfinder.
“It’s the old fellow tucking in,” he explained.
“You can see he’s still going,” Camille said as she squinted into the monitor.
“I slipped him the meat,” Johnstone said, pursing his lips.
Camille stroked the Canadian’s fair hair, still looking into the camcorder.
“Johnstone,” she said, “things are astir. Be prepared to defend them.”
Johnstone queried Camille in his usual way, an interrogative thrust of his jaw.
“On Tuesday they found four sheep savaged at Ventebrune, and yesterday morning nine more torn to shreds at Pierrefort.”
“Holy Moses,” Johnstone whispered. “Jesus Christ.”
“They’ve never come so far down before.”
“There’s more of them.”
“Julien told me. It got onto the news, it’s becoming a national story. The hill farmers have said they’ll give the Italian wolves such trouble as to make them wish they were vegetarians.”
“Jesus Christ,” Johnstone said again. “Fuck that.”
He glanced at his watch, switched off the camcorder, and with a worried look switched on the portable TV which was on a tea chest in the corner.
“That’s not the worst of it,” Camille added.
Johnstone turned to her with chin raised.
“They’re saying that this time it’s not an ordinary animal.”
“Not ordinary?”
“A different kind of beast. Bigger. A force of nature, with a monster’s jaw. Abnormal, like. In a word, a ghoul.”
“Pull the other one.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
Johnstone was stunned. He shook his blond locks.
“Your bloody backward country,” he said after a pause, “is populated by nothing but bird-brained yokels.”
He zapped from channel to channel looking for a newsflash. Camille bit her lip, sat cross-legged on the floor in her boots and huddled up to Johnstone. The wolves were all going to get it in the neck. Old Augustus included.
V
JOHNSTONE SPENT THE weekend collecting the local newspapers, scouring the news, and going down to the café in the village.
“Don’t go,” Camille pleaded. “They’ll tackle you.”
“Why would they do that?” Johnstone asked, with the sulky expression he always put on when he was worried. “The wolves are theirs.”
“No, they’re not. Folk round here reckon the wolves are urban mascots put among their flocks by people up in Paris.”
“I’m not from Paris.”
“But you look after the wolves.”
“I look after grizzly bears. That’s what my job is. Grizzlies.”
“And what about Augustus?”
“Augustus is different. Respect the weak, honour thy elders. Nobody left to look out for him but me.”
Johnstone was not very good with words. He preferred to use gestures, grins and grimaces to express himself, like all hunters and divers skilled in making themselves understood without speaking. The hardest for him were the beginnings and ends of sentences. Most often he uttered only the middle bits, more or less audibly, blatantly hoping that someone else would provide the missing parts and complete his labours for him. Perhaps he had sought his Arctic solitude to get away from human chatter; perhaps his long sojourn in the icy wastes had robbed him of a taste for words – absence of function unmaking the faculty; but whichever way it had come about, he spoke as little as he could, with his eyes to the ground, shielded by blond hair falling forward in a fringe.
Camille, who scattered words with cheerful abandon, had found it hard to get used to such sparse communication. Hard, but also comforting. She’d spoken far too much these past three years, all to no avail, and she had grown to be quite sick of it. The silently smiling Canadian thus afforded her an unexpected resting place where she could cleanse herself of bad habits – notably of her indulgence in argument and persuasion, by far the most obnoxious habits she had ever had. Camille could not altogether abandon the profoundly entertaining world of words, but she could at least cast off the great mental machinery that she’d formerly applied to convincing other people. Like some worn-out and disused leviathan it now lay rusting in a corner of her mind, with the wheels of its logic and the mirrors of its metaphors peeling off one by one like so many bits of scrap. Nowadays, with a man who was nothing but gestures and silence, who went on his way without asking anybody’s advice and who wasn’t at all looking for an explanation of life’s mysteries, Camille could relax and clear out her head, as if she was sweeping piles of junk out of an attic.
She jotted a line of music on her manuscript book.
“If you don’t give a damn for them, for the wolves that is,” she asked, “why did you bother to come here?”
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 the
m.”
“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 gendarmes 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.
