Here there was a large, snow-coated field. In the autumn it had been ploughed, and now lumps of half-frozen earth created a surface underfoot that was hard to walk across. I was just starting to regret my decision to follow Consul when suddenly, once I’d toiled a short way uphill, I saw what had attracted him – a large black shape on the snow, and dried bloodstains. Consul was standing a little higher up, gazing at me calmly, without fear, as if he were saying: ‘You see? You see? I’ve brought you here, but now you must deal with it.’ And off he ran.
I went closer and saw that the shape was a Wild Boar, not quite an adult, lying in a pool of brown blood. The surrounding snow had been scraped away, exposing the ground, as if the Animal had thrashed about in convulsions. I could see other tracks around it too – of Foxes, Birds and Deer. Lots of Animals had been here. They’d come to see the murder for themselves and to mourn the poor young Boar. I preferred to examine their tracks rather than look at its body. How many times can one look at a dead body? Is there no end to it? I felt a stab of pain in my lungs and found it hard to breathe. I sat down on the snow, and once again my eyes began to stream with tears. I could feel the huge, unbearable burden of my own body. Why couldn’t I have gone in another direction, without following Consul? Why hadn’t I ignored his gloomy paths? Must I be a witness to every Crime? The day would have turned out quite differently, other days too perhaps. I could see where the bullets had struck – in the chest and belly. I could see where the Boar had been heading – towards the border, to the Czech Republic, away from the new pulpits, which stood on the other side of the forest. It must have been shot from there, so it must have run on, wounded, just a little further, in its effort to escape to the Czech Republic.
Sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal. One period of grief is followed by another, so I am in constant mourning. This is my natural state. I kneeled on the bloodstained snow and stroked the Boar’s coarse hair, cold and stiff.
‘You have more compassion for animals than for people.’
‘That’s not true. I feel just as sorry for both. But nobody shoots at defenceless people,’ I told the City Guard that same evening. ‘At least not these days,’ I added.
‘True. We’re a law-abiding country,’ confirmed the guard. He seemed good-natured and not very bright.
‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘Its attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.’
At the Police station I had only submitted a report. They had brushed me off. They had handed me a sheet of paper and I had written the relevant facts on it. It occurred to me that the City Guard was also a public body responsible for law and order, so I had come here. I promised myself that if this didn’t help, I’d go to the Prosecution Service. Next day. To Black Coat. And I’d report a Murder.
The handsome young man who looked a bit like Paul Newman had fetched a wad of papers out of a drawer and was now looking for a pen. A woman in uniform came in from the other room and placed a full mug in front of him.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked me.
I nodded gratefully. I was chilled to the bone. My legs were aching again.
‘Why didn’t they take away the body? What do you think?’ I asked, without expecting them to answer. They both seemed surprised by my visit and weren’t entirely sure how to behave. I accepted a mug of coffee from the nice young woman and answered my own question.
‘Because they didn’t even know they’d killed it. They shoot at everything illegally, so they shot it too, and then forgot about it. They thought it was sure to fall somewhere in the bushes, and nobody would ever know they’d killed a Boar beyond the legal deadline.’ I extracted a print-out from my bag and shoved it under the man’s nose. ‘I’ve checked the dates. It’s March now. Have a look, it’s not legal to shoot a Boar now,’ I concluded with satisfaction, feeling sure that my reasoning was beyond reproach, though from the logical point of view it would be hard to convince me that on 28 February you may kill someone, but the next day you may not.
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ replied Paul Newman, ‘but this isn’t really within our jurisdiction. Why don’t you go and report the matter to the vet? He’ll know what’s done in such cases. Maybe the boar was rabid?’
I put down my mug with a thump. ‘No, it’s the killer who was rabid,’ I cried, because I know that argument well; the Slaughter of Animals is often justified by the fact that they may have been rabid. ‘It had been shot through the lungs, it must have died in agony, they shot it, and they thought it had run away alive. Besides, the vet is one of them, he hunts too.’
The man cast a helpless glance at his female colleague. ‘What do you expect us to do?’
‘Set the wheels in motion. Punish the culprits. Change the law.’
‘That’s too much. You can’t want all those things,’ he said.
‘Oh yes I can! And I’m the one to define what I can want,’ I shouted furiously.
He was confused; the situation was slipping from his control. ‘All right, all right. We’ll report it formally.’
‘To whom?’
‘First we’ll ask the Hunters Association for an explanation. Let them have their say.’
‘And this isn’t the first instance, because I found a Hare’s skull with a bullet hole in it on the other side of the Plateau. Do you know where? Very near the border. Now I call that copse the Site of the Skull.’
‘They might have lost one of their hares.’
‘Lost!’ I shrieked. ‘They shoot at everything that moves.’ I paused briefly, for I felt as if a large fist had hit me in the chest with all its might. ‘Even at Dogs.’
‘Sometimes dogs from the village kill animals. You have dogs too, and I remember that last year there were complaints about you…’
I froze. The blow was very painful.
‘I don’t have my Dogs any more.’
The coffee wasn’t good, the instant kind. I felt it in my stomach like a cramp. I bent double.
‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ asked the woman.
‘It’s nothing,’ I replied. ‘At my age one has various Ailments. I shouldn’t drink instant coffee, and I advise you against it too. It’s bad for the stomach.’
I put down the mug. ‘Well, then? Are you going to write the report?’ I asked, in what I considered to be a business-like tone.
They exchanged glances again, and the man reluctantly drew the form towards him. ‘All right, then,’ he said, and I could almost hear what he was thinking: I’ll write it to shut her up but I won’t bother showing it to anyone, so I added: ‘And please give me a date-stamped copy with your signature.’
As he was writing, I tried to slow down my thoughts, but they must have broken the speed limit by now, and were racing in my head, somehow managing to pervade my body and my blood stream as well. Yet paradoxically, from the feet, from the ground up, a strange calm was slowly spreading through me. It was a state I recognized – that same state of clarity, divine Wrath, terrible and unstoppable. I could feel my legs itching, and fire pouring into my blood from somewhere, and my blood flowing quickly, carrying this fire to my brain, and now my brain was glowing brightly, my fingertips were filling with fire, and so was my face, and it felt as if my entire body were being flooded by a bright aura, gently raising me upwards, tearing me free of the ground.