The Devil's Larder

31

NO NEED TO STARVE. When we were big enough, our parents let us wander in the hills behind the village. We knew the taste of everything — the salty gypsum in the rocks, the peachy flavours in the leaves of morning star, the sulphur of a pigeon’s egg boiled in the furnace of the sand. We knew where water was.

Sometimes we begged my uncle for some matches and some cigarettes — to catch scrub fowls. ‘Smoke is better than a catapult,’ we said. We told him how we’d sit underneath the bushes in the river bed and wait for a donkey or a sheep to come down for the leaves. A goat would do. We’d have to blow smoke from his cigarettes into its ears, and wait for ticks to show themselves in the folds of skin. The grey or blackish ticks weren’t any good. We needed one which was red-brown, bloated with sheep or donkey or goat blood. We couldn’t grip the tick and twist its jaws free of the skin without its body popping between our fingertips. But, with luck, with one more cigarette, smoke might make it drop free of the ear. We’d have to catch the tick before it hit the ground, or it would burst.

Then it was simple. All we had to do was pull a length of cotton from the bottom of our shirts, lasso the tick and put it on a stone out in the sun, then tie the free end of the cotton to a branch. We’d find a cool place underneath the bush. We wouldn’t have to count to ten even before a scrub fowl came. It loved the blood bean of a tick. The captive tick, the cotton line, went down its throat in one. We’d snared our meal.

‘We have to be patient,’ we told our uncle. ‘It can take an hour just to catch our tick. But then it only takes five minutes to trap the bird, and five minutes in the fire to roast it.’

‘That must be hard,’ he said, ‘to catch a donkey or a sheep and then persuade it to stay still while hot smoke tunnels in its ear.’

We shrugged. We laughed. We begged my uncle for his matches and his cigarettes.

It’s true, we did sit down below the bushes in the river bed. But we did not care for dining out on scrub fowl. We did not hunt for ticks, or look for sheep and donkeys. We smoked my uncle’s cigarettes, one at a time, passing them between us so that the smoke was never idle. ‘Smoke is better than a catapult,’ we said. We filled our mouths and stomachs up with smoke.

We fed on cigarettes. We loved the peach and salt and sulphur in the nicotine, the ashy meat and wood. We waited while our appetites fell free, and hit the stony ground, and burst.