Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel [12]
He turned the pages. Julian becomes a relentless hunter, with his reader's faithful highlighter as witness:
... preferred to hunt on his own, with his horse and his falcon... would soon fly back, tearing apart some bird...
... took herons, kites, crows and vultures in this way.
... loved to sound his horn and ride behind his dogs... the stag... as the dogs tore at its flesh...
On misty days... go deep into a marsh... geese, otters and wild ducks.
... slew bears with a knife, bulls with a hatchet and wild boar with a spear...
... basset hounds... rabbits... rushed at them... broke their backs.
... a mountain peak... two wild goats... approached barefoot... plunged a dagger...
... lake... beaver... his arrow killed it...
Then came a longer section that his reader had marked out:
Then he entered an avenue of tall trees whose tops formed a kind of triumphal arch leading into the forest. A deer leapt out of a thicket, a buck appeared in a clearing, a badger emerged from a hole, a pheasant on the grass spread its tail, and when he had slain them all, more deer appeared, more bucks, more badgers, more pheasants, and blackbirds, jays, ferrets, foxes, hedgehogs, lynx, an infinite variety of animals, more numerous with each step he took. They circled around him, trembling, gazing at him with gentle, pleading eyes. But Julian had not tired of killing, and again and again he drew his crossbow, unsheathed his sword and thrust with his knife, thinking of nothing, remembering nothing. He lived only for the instant, a hunter in an unreal landscape where time had lost all meaning and where everything was happening with dreamlike ease. An extraordinary sight stopped him short: a small valley shaped like an amphitheatre and filled with deer. The animals were huddled together, warming one another with their breath, which hung like a cloud in the surrounding mist.
The prospect of such carnage left him breathless with joy for several minutes. He dismounted, rolled up his sleeves and started to shoot.
At the whistling of the first arrow, all the stags turned their heads in unison. Gaps appeared in their ranks, plaintive cries rose up, and a great agitation ran through the herd.
The lip of the valley was too high for them to cross. The hillsides enclosed them and they leapt about frantically, trying to escape. Julian kept aiming and firing, and the arrows fell like rain. The frantic stags collided, bucked and climbed upon each other; their antlers became entangled and they collapsed together in a writhing mass of flesh.
Finally they all died, stretched out in the sand, their nostrils foaming and their entrails spilling out as the heaving of their bellies gradually subsided. Then all was still.
Night was falling, and beyond the woods, in the space between the branches, the sky was as red as a pool of blood.
Julian leaned against a tree. Wide-eyed, he surveyed the enormity of the massacre, unable to understand how he had managed to do it.
On the other side of the valley, on the edge of the forest, he saw a stag with a doe and a fawn.
The stag was huge and black, with massive antlers and a white beard. The doe, pale as the dead leaves, was grazing the grass, and the spotted fawn trotted along beside her, sucking on a teat.
The crossbow hummed again. The fawn was killed instantly. Its mother, looking up at the sky, gave a deep, heart-rending, almost human cry. Beside himself, Julian shot an arrow straight to her breast and brought her to the ground.
The great stag had seen him and it leapt forward. Julian fired his last arrow at the beast. It pierced its forehead and remained stuck there.
His reader's quoting ended there, so to speak. The neon yellow was turned off and the story left to continue on its own. This was curious, because the very next line mentions that the stag was not killed by Julian's last arrow. The stag rather strides up to him, faces him down, and