‘You clearly don’t believe me … You don’t eat meat, do you?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it’s obvious.’

The story stirred something in Franck. He thought back to the cage deep in the gully, wondering if it might be linked to what the butcher was saying. The house he was living in had perhaps been home to the woman and the man, and the wild beasts. The butcher carried on telling him terrible things. He was clearly exaggerating his stories about the lions, claiming that, one night, a guy who was jealous of the lion tamer had set the wild beasts free. He opened the cages and the animals descended upon the village and ate everything – sheep, horses and men too. He pictured the peaceful house on the hill, where these horrors had occurred. He had grown to like the place. The butcher held out the dense parcel of meat, a package he had just made up with his big hands. The red of the paper was the same bright red as the stall, a pure, glorious red. Franck weighed the parcel in his palm. It had been years since he had picked up a piece of meat or held it in his hand, or even touched an animal that wasn’t alive. It was a powerful sensation, and yet it wasn’t repulsive.

‘But before he died, how did the tamer feed them?’

‘Ah, he had a special way of feeding his lions.’

‘What was it?’

‘I can’t say!’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re still poaching up there. But he had a way, believe me. He used to catch everything: wild boar, deer; he even got lynxes and wolves.’

Franck got out his wallet to pay.

‘No, no, I said it was a gift.’

There was a good three hundred grams in the package. Franck pictured Lise’s face on finding the red parcel from the butcher in his basket, and then imagined the great cage in the igue yesterday with Liem and Travis locked up inside it, guarded by lions … The butcher held out his business card.

‘Take it, you never know!’

‘You never know what?’

‘When you’ll have wild animals to feed!’

Franck took the card and looked at the guy as coldly as he could.

He went back to the car, feeling guilty and embarrassed – not from having the flesh of a dead animal in his hand, but from rediscovering the ancestral pride of the hunter, the prehistoric way of life that he felt himself being drawn into: he felt himself becoming a hunter again.