FLATTENING herself even more among the round boulders where she lay concealed, Ivy took several pictures of the almost naked man who came to extract the arrow and sling the black pig over his shoulder after the other pigs had fled.
The man could have been thirty or a little over. He was tall and broad, with a square face, firm chin, fleshy mouth, and a straight nose between high cheekbones. His eyes were neither dark nor very pale. Ivy had a good close-up view of him through her 200 mm telephoto lens. He had a wide forehead beneath an unkempt shock of tow hair, strands of which fell over his ears. He was athletic, well built and deeply tanned. His bow was slightly taller than him. It was made of aluminum and strung with nylon. Also on his back the hunter had a worn beige canvas quiver containing seven or eight long arrows whose feathered fletching could be seen, while down his right thigh against his threadbare shorts hung a very large blade in a canvas scabbard—like a machete but apparently more curved.
Between his left nipple and his collarbone, a round scar was visible, absolutely white and roughly the size of a half dollar. When the hunter swung around with the black pig over his shoulders, Ivy could see his back, with on its left side a growth of gray and white scar tissue as big as a small tomato. Clearly the man had been run through by something, most likely a bullet of formidable caliber, 9 mm or 11.43 mm or something of that order. He moved away northwestwards, following the little stream and ascending the slope of Pico Turquino with the pig’s carcass over his shoulders, and Ivy immediately set off in his wake.
Since the hunter stuck to the stream rather than cutting through the woods, Ivy was scarcely in danger of losing sight of him. By the same token, however, he could have seen her had he turned around. She let him extend his lead. Suddenly he disappeared from view. Ivy froze and cocked an ear. There was no wind. She heard movement in the underbrush at some distance and headed in its direction. The hunter was proceeding heedlessly, without fear or precaution. Ivy, had she been a fine tracker like those in the Hollywood westerns she loved, would have been able to follow the traces left by the man, in the shape of broken branches along his path, and by the pig, whose blood streaked the man’s torso and spattered rocks here and there on the ascent. But sounds sufficed to guide the young woman, and before long she caught a glimpse of the hunter among the trees and thereafter kept at a reasonable distance from this stranger, who still did not turn around.
After making his way up the increasingly steep incline, the archer emerged into a tiny clearing. He set the dead pig down on the ground. Ivy stood still behind the trunk of a pine tree. Out from a low shelter, constructed from branches, earth, grasses and stones, which melded almost perfectly with the undulating terrain, came a very young and very dirty girl who joined the man, crouched next to the pig, stuck her pointer into the animal’s wound and sucked the bloody finger with curiosity.
She might have been twelve or thirteen. She wore Ivy’s purloined (or swapped) nightdress. Her curly black hair was very matted and obviously unwashed; it covered her forehead and fell down her back to her shoulder blades. On top of a deep tan the dirt was visible on her face even from fifty meters away, as also on her hands, forearms, legs, and bare mud-encrusted feet. The front of the nightdress was already stained, no doubt with food. By contrast the girl had girdled the garment with a braided belt, knotted like a pajama cord and probably made from plant fiber, and donned a necklace of little pieces of wood strung on a possibly nylon thread.
The hunter skinned the pig. He spread the hide out on some rocks, then quartered and boned the beast. His very large blade was in fact a parang. Ivy had seen parangs in 1950 in Malaya after she ran away from the Général Dufour College and went to photograph the insurgents and counterinsurgents. With his parang, the hunter was able to cut his meat up very easily. For a moment or two the young girl watched him, and twice she drank a little blood, leaning down to lap and suck it up. It trickled down her chin and onto the nightdress when she stood up straight. For the time being Ivy observed events through the 200 mm lens of the Hasselblad and noted that beneath the dirt the girl’s face was delicate and perhaps intelligent. Just then the wild child tore a muscle from the pig’s carcass and ate it raw. Ivy raised her eyebrows.
“Disgusting, Negra! You’re filthy!” declared the man in English.
“It’s time to eat,” retorted the wild child, also in English, and Ivy looked at her watch and realized that the young girl was right: it was 12:55 p.m.
“Oh well, to hell with it!” grumbled Ivy, and, leaving her hiding place and checking that her Colt was at her belt, she covered thirty or forty meters and emerged into the clearing and came face-to-face with the archer and the girl named Negra, both of whom looked at her with no particular astonishment as she said: “Hello there. Am I invited to lunch?”