Read The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store for Free Online Page B

were several coils of dirty rope, and two thicker blades each affixed to lengths of pole, making a kind of pike. Urso reached for one of these and went down on his knee before Lucio. ‘Now, Gufo, courage! Your weapon, sir.’ He shoved the spear into Lucio’s hand, searched his face, and then laughed heartily. ‘Don’t look so worried, boy,’ he whispered. ‘Valeriana does most of the work. She’ll sniff out a dozy spinosa or badger for us, and you can finish it off with your pike. Alright? Forza!’
    Urso reached for the other spear and handed it to Lucio’s father as he emerged from the chapel. ‘Set?’
    He nodded. ‘In the mouth of the wolf!’
    Urso grinned and finished off the saying for good luck: ‘And may the wolf drop dead!’ The starlings in the trees screeched at his growl. He clicked to his dog and set off at a pace Lucio hadn’t thought him capable of.
    They worked their way deeper into the wood with its rises and dells, its briars and fallen trees to be negotiated. Even his father seemed to struggle to keep up with the butcher’s large and practised strides, as good as noiseless as he tracked Valeriana’s tail forging ahead of them through the undergrowth. Her whining had stopped: an expectant silence had descended on both the dog and her master. Lucio listened to the faint workings of the forest.
    Without warning, Valeriana sprang into the ferns and vanished. For several minutes none of them moved. The only sound was the groaning of the trees, the distant chime of birdsong. Uncertain, Lucio kept Urso in his sights. With a jut of his chin, the butcher signalled the dog’s whereabouts and cocked his head. As if at some secret signal, he started to run, coming to an abrupt stop at a tangled thicket of holly and young hornbeams. Valeriana had begun a fierce baying, and alongside it they could pick out the angry grunts and squeals of some cornered beast. Urso lifted his stick to thrash through the scrub, but the two animals burst forth, a young boar bolting towards them with Valeriana clamped to its ear. Lucio caught the flash of her bared teeth and the newly ruptured tusks of the boar. Within seconds she had it down, her massive hind legs firing the barrel of her body, so that he understood for the first time what she had been bred for.
    â€˜Get here!’ his father shouted from Urso’s side.
    The butcher was bent over Valeriana, her tail in his fist, struggling to hold her back. ‘Now or never, Gufo. I can’t keep her from its throat for long,’ Urso called. ‘Forza! Su!’
    It was the dream of running with legs of lead. Or the slowing of time so that all the details of a second pass as minutes. He was no more able to move than one of the giant chestnuts rooted all around him. He could hear the blood coursing in his ears, felt the pulse of it in his tongue. The faces of Urso and his father, flushed with adrenalin, glanced up at him and back at the boar, and he saw the disappointment gathering at their mouths.
    When he finally reached them, the animal was panting and pumping blood from its belly where his father had driven his pike, pinning it to the ground. He circled Lucio now with slow, deliberate steps and raised his hand. Lucio flinched, but the blow didn’t come. Instead his father reached for the spear and tugged it from the boar. Its scream caught Lucio like a fist to the stomach. He saw his father’s clamped teeth, heard his animal grunt as, in one fluid stroke, he pulled the head of the beast against his thigh and drew a deep slit across its throat with Urso’s skinning knife. The boar’s blood let over the leaf litter of the forest floor and slapped across Lucio’s boots.
    Valeriana’s whines were all that was left of the confusion. Urso kneeled over her where she had fallen, trying to stem a gash in her side. He kept up a constant murmur as his hands worked over the dog.