Before nightfall, Franck had walked over towards the water tank, and then a bit further. He tried calling the dog with all sorts of noises, ‘Oh-oh’, ‘Oh-là’, ‘Eh-ho’, before settling on ‘Ohé’. To summon a dog in this vast space you needed two syllables that would resonate, not soft ones. He hadn’t been afraid to raise his voice and yell as powerfully as he could, ‘Ohé, Ohé’, but the dog didn’t appear. Around midnight, Franck walked all around the house again in the pitch black, even going down to the foot of the hill to have a look in the valley, to see if the dog was hiding out on the edge of the woods, either sulking or watching them like he had done on the first evening. But he didn’t find it. He vowed he would ask the Dauclercqs whom the dog belonged to, and if they knew where it came from. He thought back to the huge gleaming thing that the satellite image had revealed, a flash amidst the ocean of green, an apparition where science fiction and fantasy converged. Perhaps this was the den the dog kept going back to, a sort of igue, one of those strange karst sinkholes you found near here. Maybe wild animals gathered there, or found themselves trapped in the limestone pit that might even be full of water, a deep lake that all the wildlife flocked towards. Perhaps the dog was the master of the animals that were so noisy at night but by day retreated to this secret world.

October 1914

October 1914

Feeding wild animals encourages barbarity. For his lions to survive he had to kill. Every day he had to be utterly cruel; he had no choice. But the barbarity came from them. It was their gaping jaws that forced him to his crimes. ‘Kill to live’ was the unvarying watchword of the animal kingdom and it now fell to Wolfgang to honour this, gradually making him more bestial and more savage than his lions.

The animal kingdom runs on cruelty. Even herbivores, which don’t themselves commit crimes, end up in the mouths of carnivores and so, as prey, play their part in the carnage. The lion tamer’s animals had been relieved of the existential anguish of hunting, even though it made them bitter not being able to hunt. But the fact remained that his lions and tigers had assigned him the daily task of killing, and he was becoming obsessed by it. Every morning he re-engaged with the instinct of the carnivore, automatically enlisted in the great cycle of life, high-priest of the murderous round. He saw nothing noble in the ritual, nothing beautiful; it was savage and that was all.