The Hunter and the Wild Girl
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 6, 2017 7:04 PM | Last Updated: March 9, 2017
Pauline Holdstock
A feral girl roams the dense forests of nineteenth-century France, stealing food from remote farmyards and avoiding human contact. Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend.
On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything.
When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement from conventional society. He provides her with her material needs, while she brings light to places Peyre had thought dark forever. The two achieve an easy coexistence. But the careful patterns of the life Peyre has made for himself begin to unravel, and when the wider world learns of the girl's presence at the estate, Peyre is forced to confront not only his choices and their consequences, but society itself. (From Goose Lane Editions)
From the book
With a shriek of splintering boards, the girl breaks into daylight and stands blinded, panting, sucking air as if it were a great hot soup, her chest heaving. Three breaths, harsh as the scrape of wood on stone — and then she is running, naked limbs a hieroglyph in motion across the scrubby field beside the house she had not known was there, through the alarmed and protesting sheep, running, leaping, until she reaches the cloudy cover of an olive grove where she draws a breath and, breakneck, reckless, races on. Desperate, unfledged harpy. No destination, no thought, only 'away.' Away from the darkness of the hovel and its reek, away from the old man and his snarling dog. She can hear it yammering back at the house. Up is where she needs to be. As high as she can go. Climbing is what she knows.
From The Hunter and the Wild Girl by Pauline Holdstock ©2015. Published by Goose Lane Editions.