Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (21 page)

A sudden flush of fear.
Terrible pain.
Blood coming out of his chest and mouth in gouts.
Then the darkening, the silence.
These were his last memories.

Dead
?
he
thought.
Am I dead
?

The thought must have shown in his eyes, for the other man said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m still not convinced,’ said the hunter. ‘But I’ll go along with it for now.’

His new acquaintance shrugged.

The hunter then stared around the lodge, at the other hunters. Indeed, they were a strange mixture of men and women, the majority of them with the appearance of being from the past.
The Hall of the Hunters?
How wonderful if it were.

He turned to the other man.

‘What happens then? To us…dead?’

‘What happens?’ the man smiled broadly. ‘Why, what happens is you
hunt
. The lakes and streams outside are stocked with every kind of fish: carp, salmon, trout, even minnow. The forest around the lodge has wild boar, deer, hares...you see that woman over there?’ He pointed to a slim huntress who was waxing the string of her bow. ‘She can hit a hare on the run, pinning it to the earth with a single arrow. Pheasants, quail, wildfowl of every description,
you name it
,
it’s here
.

‘Yes, the hunting here is good. The best. And everything we kill during the day goes into that pot you see, making the best stew you have ever tasted. Here of an evening, in the great lodge, we feast. We eat, we drink, we enjoy our stories, and the next day, why it happens all over again. Those creatures we killed the day before, they rise again out of the woodland mosses, out of the lake mud, out of the bark of trees. I have shot the same boar, seven times now, and still he runs the forest tracks.

‘Tomorrow of course is the greatest banquet of the whole year—the Christmas Day Feast.’

If this is death, thought the hunter, it is better than life.

‘Is this heaven?’ he asked his companion.

‘I should say so, though it can be hell too.’

Hell? That sounded ugly. But the hunter was not curious enough at that moment to ask about the dark side of death. He was content only to bask in the comradeship of fellow hunters and enjoy what had been his reward. The Hall of the Hunters! How he had dreamed of such a place.

‘If that is so,’ he asked of the man, ‘where are the really
great
hunters of the world? For instance, I see no pygmies here. Where
are
the Efe of Congo? Where are those small dark hunters who excite their hunting dogs with cries and songs, to flush the quarry? Where are those renowned little archers?’

The man shrugged, a
gesture which
seemed typical in him.

‘There are a few hunters from other parts of the world, here in this lodge, but mostly they prefer their own type of hunting grounds, the ones they were used to in life. Those two men over there are Australian Aboriginals, and in the far corner behind the great hearth you will see a group of Iban Indians. There are others. We join together, for feasts from time to time, and try each other’s hunting grounds.

‘There are great hunts in which we all become involved together, and afterwards we exchange stories, talk about our different skills. Here in Hunter’s Hall you will see mainly those who have been touched by the mysticism and legends of our own land, by the beliefs of our forefathers…those who hunted in the bush during life, or in the jungle, or across the snowy tundra, usually want the same landscapes after death. The Inuit do not want to hunt in our forest all the time, nor we on their icy wastes. But there is nothing to stop you doing so, if you wish. You can hunt in any landscape you like, or on the sea. It’s your choice.’

‘I think I understand.’

There was silence between them now. All that could be heard was a murmuring, around the room, as hunters told hunters their tales of the hunt. It was their one source of entertainment, for the long lazy evening hours, when the dying sun shone through the tall windows, into the dimness of the great room. The hunter breathed the scent of burning hickory chips and sighed in contentment.

The darkhaired man then engaged his attention once more.

‘Tell me,’ said the man, ‘the
best
hunt you ever had in your life.’

The best hunt?
A surge of excitement went through the hunter’s breast. Oh yes, the very best of hunts. But could he tell this man about that time, on so short an acquaintance? He decided he could not. Instead, he recounted the time he had tracked and killed the wolves.

‘…
they
were the last wolves left in Scandinavia, an old pair but still potentially dangerous.
And tricky.
They threw me off the trail several times, I can tell you. I tracked them over the snow and shot them outside a cave. The whole thing took many weeks. It was a great experience.’

A frown had appeared on the brow of the other man.

He said, ‘
Did
you not eat the flesh? Or did you need the pelts to keep from dying of the cold? Or perhaps the wolves attacked and killed a child...?’

The hunter, puzzled by his companion’s questions, shook his head vigorously.

‘No, none of those.
You don’t understand. I killed them for sport. For the
thrill
of the hunt.’

‘Then,’ said the man, ‘I cannot understand why you are here, in this lodge. Here we have only huntsmen who killed out of necessity, or to protect themselves or their families. This is the mark of the true hunter, the real hunter, who kills to feed or clothe himself, but not simply to see blood.’

For a moment the darkhaired man’s words stunned him, but then he shrugged and said, ‘I am here.’

Suddenly the hunter had a great desire to shock this man, to whom he was beginning to take a dislike. He decided to tell his self-righteous companion the story of the greatest of all hunts, the greatest of all prey, which he himself had once hunted. If the darkhaired man did not like it, there were others to talk to in the room.

‘I once stalked the most cunning creature on this planet,’ said the hunter. ‘I pursued him, tracked him down, and killed him where he stood. Never has anything equalled the moment when I squeezed the trigger and saw him jerk backwards to lie in the dust, a bullet from this very rifle in his heart.’

The man stroked his dog, not looking at the hunter now, and asked, ‘
What
quarry would that be?’

‘A man,’ said the hunter.

Now the brown eyes flicked to his face and he felt satisfaction, knowing he had disturbed the owner of those eyes.

‘Yes,’ he told the other, ‘a manhunt. One night we captured...it doesn’t matter who or what he was, except that he was a human being, a man. We let him go, into the wood,
then
we went in after him. It was my shot that killed him.’

There was a long silence between them, until finally the man stopped stroking his dog and looked up. His eyes were full of sorrow and pity.

‘You killed a fellow creature,’ he said, ‘one of your own kind—for
sport
. Now I understand why you are here. This will be your only night in the lodge, to give you the opportunity to witness and experience what you
might
have had, what you have thrown away. Tomorrow you go into the forest.’

The hunter felt a certain fear at the other man’s words, but he said quickly, ‘As you will, yourself.’

‘But I go as a hunter,’ said the man. ‘You will be the prey.’

The newest hunter felt a bolt of terror go through him, at these words, and he looked about him, his mind in
a turmoil
. He glanced at the other hunters, cleaning their weapons, at the soft rugs on which they would sleep that night, and finally his eyes rested on the cauldron, the great stew that would be eaten before retiring.

A feeling of faint triumph trickled through his mind, bringing with it hope. Something was wrong with the logic of his fireside companion. There were surely errors in the rules, the laws of this place. Perhaps the dead told lies and the truth was still to be revealed? Maybe the mistake was not yet his? Possibly these things were not set in stone, but could be changed by clever argument? He would not accept what had been said to him without further dispute.

‘Ah,’ he said to his disapproving companion, ‘but there’s something wrong here. You told me a moment ago that what the true hunter kills, must be eaten. That means if I am to be the prey, and you kill me, you must eat me. Are you then cannibals?

‘Even if I am changed into a beast, to be hunted and killed, over and over again, for all eternity, I am still in my soul, a
man
. I may not keep a man’s body, but I will always have his spirit, which can’t be altered because it is
me
.

‘Do you hunters, you
great
hunters, do you eat the flesh of your fellow men? Do you gnaw on the bones of your comrades? Do you drink the blood of your own kind? Are you then going to hunt and kill me, then
eat me
?’

The black-haired man looked deep into his eyes.

‘No, of course we won’t eat you,’ he said, ‘but we have to feed our dogs.’

Believe me, this is the future of soft furnishings and sex.

W
e should never have invited Starkey to the party.

Starkey is wutheringly wild and still youthfully coded, possibly because at three-hundred-something, He’s the youngest and
rawest
of our friends. You can’t expect someone who hasn’t reached
their
millennium to act in a rational and decipherable manner, especially at a weekend squall. But then, as Jakoe pointed out to my partner Mica the other week, Starkey had just lost his wife and his vents were blocked. We had to try to open him up a little, let some joy inside.

Don’t get me
wrong,
it was a storm of a party.

It’s just that, well, the soft furnishings are
new
and though I didn’t want to change our old flops, Mica likes to be up-to-the-hour fashionable, and she insisted. Hell, it was her money to do
with
as she liked, so who was I to stand on top of the Zugspitze, dispensing consumer wisdom? Now the strafing sofa’s ruined and we suspect, in fact we as good as know, that it’s all Starkey’s fault. Who else could it
have
been? He’s the one who slept on it.

Let’s go back to before any of this ever happened, when we first installed our new soft furnishings. Jakoe came round to discuss plans for the party and he was one of the first to try them out. Already sitting on one of the chairs when Jakoe came into the room, I was nestled down onto silk-covered flesh, having my neck massaged by a soft pair of hands. The arms of the chair were, I guess, originally the thighs, but once a person has been resculptured it’s difficult to tell which body parts are where, though obviously some of them are recognisable for what they are.

Jakoe winced as he watched me being stroked.

‘You’re not worried about getting strangled then?’ he said. ‘Like that old woman in the high-rise apartment?’

‘Nobody ever proved that case,’ I answered. ‘It was mostly supposition. Sit down.’

Jakoe did as he was told, but nervously, as if he didn’t trust my new armchair one bit. He was actually sitting in the
best
chair, the one
which
had been fed on butter-milk to make it more pneumatic, softer on the buttocks. Some people are never comfortable with live furniture though.