"My mother once met a dead tiger. In Margali, India. Four years before I was born. She walked up to its still warm body with timid steps, wary of cutting its camouflaging stripes out of the shades and shadows-seeing it clearly on its own. Aware, that only its death will let you cut a tiger out of the jungle, she was overcome by sadness. In an attempt to find a way to carry with her some of the strength lost in the death of a tiger, she and my father cut out the heart and ate it. Bearing in mind the stories my grandfather told him about his times in India, my father knew that they were not the first to do such a thing. If there is strength in anything, it must be in a tiger’s heart."

 

“I don’t know if it is true, but it is said that a baboon dying slowly from a bullet to the chest, will stick a finger into the hole, thinking it can get what is hurting its inside. There is a completely black nail on the sensitive finger it uses to dig in with, in the hope of finding and demolishing this evil thing that is pulling and sucking inside its torso. In the logic of a baboon, the perpetrator must be the thing that is moving in there, the swelling and shrinking object that is pushing against the finger in a quick, unsteady rhythm, as if cornered and afraid. But on trying to get it out, the baboon finds that it is stuck, it won’t budge. The baboon will then try to get two fingers inside, to enable it to get a better grip, but the hole is too small and the skin won’t stretch any further. The one black nail scratches desperately at the tip of the heart, until it stops beating. For one happy moment though, while the warm body was still optimistically waiting for the next heartbeat, not knowing it would never come, the baboon thought that the danger had passed and everything would be all right. For that evil thing, had finally stopped moving in there. No different is it when we, in an attempt to strangle the pain or the loneliness, wedge a finger in to the cracks of our own inner core and dig. Our understanding of what we find in there is muddled, as it would always be impossible to see or grasp the truth in our own destinies."

“You say that you love nature, but you are a woman. The woman is the creator of life. How can you make yourself kill?”. I was grateful that someone chose to actually say something. For the last hour, I had felt a silent but clear consensus of who the sinner of the dinner-party was. I looked across the table, at the woman who had spoken and smiled, relieved. I was at the dinner-party of one of my old friends in London and it was his new girlfriend, Emily, who had asked me the question. She was about thirty, with beautiful hands and long legs. “Delicious calf’s liver,” I answered and took a bite. That could have been answer enough, though of course I wasn't trying to get away that cheaply.” Once, for an entire month, I lived of zebra meat and zebra innards, that I had shot in an area I was culling in, I swear my skin started smelling of zebra.”

 

"When they got the call from the pilot, to say that Daniel McFreigh had died, Beatrice was in the bath and hadn’t heard the conversation on the telephone. She was relieved that Thomas did not come into the bathroom, but told her from the passage. He stood outside the door and spoke to her in a low voice, as if it was an event from long ago. A past voice, one that history had already covered with muffling layers of time. A child with Daniel, she thought, would have been strong and beautiful. She looked at her own pale flesh under the surface of the water and wondered at how strange it was that she was waterproof and had probably just laid there, or laughed, or brushed her teeth, when he had died. They hadn’t planned to go back to Tanzania again. It wasn’t something they had discussed, but they had both known, Thomas had made it quite clear, when they left Kilimanjaro airport two years back, that it was the last time."