The hyena was hampered by the squealing baby seal that it was dragging, and Centaine managed to get ahead of it. The animal stopped and lowered its head in a threatening stance, and watched Centaine approaching. The young seal was bleeding copiously from where the hyena's fangs were locked into its glossy pelt, and it was crying like an human infant.
The hyena growled fiercely and Centaine stopped, facing the beast, and swung the club and shrieked at it.
Drop it! Get away, you brute! Leave it! She sensed that the hyena was perplexed by her aggressive attitude, and though it growled again, it backed up a few steps and crouched protectively over its wriggling prey.
Centaine tried to stare it down, holding the gaze of the formidable yellow eyes as she shouted and brandished the club. Abruptly the hyena dropped the badly injured seal cub and rushed directly at Centaine, baring long yellow fangs and making a roaring bellow in its throat. Instinctively Centaine knew that this was the crucial moment.
If she ran the hyena would follow her and savage her.
She rushed forward to meet the animal's charge, redoubling her yells and swinging the club with all her strength.
Evidently the hyena had not expected this reaction. Its courage failed. It turned and ran back to its floundering prey, and burying its fangs in the silky skin of its neck, began to drag it away again.
At Centaine's feet was a crevice in the rocks and it was filled with waterworn round stones. She grabbed one of these, the size of a ripe orange, and hurled it at the hyena.
She aimed for the head, but the heavy stone fell short and it hit the creature's paw, crushing it against the rocky ground. The hyena squealed, dropped the seal cub and limped swiftly away on three legs.
Centaine ran forward and opened the clasp knife. She was a country girl and bad bel ed Anna and her father slaughter and dress animals before. With a single, swift, merciful stroke, she cut the seal's throat and let it bleed.
The hyena circled back, growling and whining, limping heavily, undecided and confused by the attack.
Centaine snatched up stones from the crevice in both hands and threw them. One of them struck the hyena on the side of its bushy-maned head and it yelped and fled fifty paces before stopping and staring back at her over its shoulder with hatred.
She worked swiftly. As she had watched Anna do so often with a sheep's carcass, she slit open the belly cavity, angling the point of the blade so as not to nick the stomach sac or the entrails, sawing through the cartilage that closed the front of the ribcage.
With bloodied hands she hurled another stone at the circling hyena, and then carefully lifted out the infant seal's stomach. The need for moisture was a raging fever within her; already she sensed that lack of it was threatening the existence of the embryo in her own womb, and yet her gorge rose at the thought of what she must do.
When I was a girl, Anna had told her, the shepherds used to do it whenever a suckling lamb died. Centaine held the seal cub's little stomach bag in her cupped and bloodied hands. The stomach lining was yellowish and translucent so that she fancied that she could see the contents through the walls. The cub must obviously have been lying with its mother up to the moment of the hyena attack, and it must have been suckling greedily. The small stomach was drum-tight with milk.
Centaine gulped with revulsion and then told herself, If you don't drink, you'll be dead by morning, you and Michel's son, both. She made a tiny incision in the stomach wall, and immediately the thick white curds of milk oozed from it.
Centaine closed her eyes and placed her mouth over the slit. She forced herself to suck the hot curdled milk. Her empty stomach heaved and she choked with an involun tory retching reflex, but she fought and at last controlled it.
The curds had a slightly fishy taste but were not altogether repulsive.
After she had forced down the first mouthful, she thought it tasted a little of the goat's-milk cheese that Anna made, strong with rennet.
She rested after a while, and wiped the blood and mucus from her mouth with the back of her hand. She could almost feel the fluid soaking back to replace that lost by her body tissues, and new strength seemed to radiate through her exhausted body.
She hurled another rock at the hyena, and then drank the rest of the thick curdled milk. Carefully she slit open the tiny empty stomach sac, and licked up the last drops.
Then she threw the empty membrane to the hyena.
I will share it with you, she told the snarling beast.
She skinned the carcass, cutting off the head and the rudimentary limbs, and threw those to the hyena also.
The big doglike carnivore seemed to have resigned itself.
It sat on its haunches twenty paces from Centaine, with its pointed ears pricked up and a comically expectant expression, waiting for the scraps she threw it.
Centaine cut as many log narrow strips of the bright red seal meat as she could get off the skeleton, and wrapped them in the canvas of her headdress. Then she retreated and the hyena rushed forward to lick up the spilled blood from the rocks and to crush the small skeleton in its ugly, over-developed jaws.
At the top of the headland the wind and wave action had cut a shallow overhang from the compacted sandstone, and it had provided a shelter for others before Centaine. She found the scattered ashes of a long-dead cooking fire on the sandy floor of the cave, and when she scratched in the dirt, she turned up a small triangular flint scraper or cutting tool, similar to those for which she and Anna had hunted on the hillock behind the chAteau at Mort Homme. It gave her a peculiarly nostalgic pang to hold the scrap of flint in the grubby palm of her hand, and when she felt self-pity overcoming her, she placed the sliver of stone in the pocket of her blouse, and forced herself to face harsh reality rather than mope over bygone days in a far-off land.
Fire, she said, as she examined the dead sticks of charcoal, and she laid out the precious scraps of seal meat
