The giant hyena is the only animal on the Dalvik flats that will eat a boot, and it does so without malice, the way a man finishes a heel of bread. Everything else about it, the size of a pony, the jaw that splits a cow's thighbone, follows from that appetite.
Rolf Aksnes keeps the lime kilns at Lunnhavn and starts his day at the cull pit behind the sheds, where he shovels out the previous night's slaked waste and the rinds of whatever the kiln crew left in their lunch pails. He is up before the crew. He checks the pit rim first. Some mornings the rim is licked clean to the dirt, the bones gone, a few coarse gray hairs snagged on the fence wire, and he writes nothing down. Some mornings there is a single bone left in the middle, cracked end to end and sucked hollow, and he buries that one with his heel before anyone sees it. The kiln crew believes a bone left whole means a bad firing week. A bone left cracked means nothing, and Rolf prefers nothing.
By midmorning he is hauling lime sacks and arguing with the cart driver about weight. The hyena does not appear in this. It sleeps in the dry wash east of Dalvik, in a den dug under a slab of shale, and it will not move until the heat drops. Its hide is the dull tan of old rope, with a darker saddle of blotches across the shoulders, and the forelegs are longer than the hind, so even lying down it looks as if it is about to stand up in the wrong order. One ear is torn in a clean V. It stays torn.
At noon Rolf eats on an upturned sack and shares nothing. It is the local rule: never toss food over the fence, only into the pit, and only after dark. A scrap thrown by hand teaches the animal that hands are generous, and a hyena that believes this will wait at the gate. Rolf's brother-in-law once threw a sausage end. The hyena stood at the kiln door for nine days, and the crew walked in pairs. The afternoon is shovels and soot. At dusk the hyena rises, stretches its front legs forward like a dog bowing, and trots to the pit. Its routine does not change. It circles the fence twice, sniffs the same post, and urinates on it before it eats. Rolf watches from the window with his supper going cold. The animal looks up at the lit glass every night, ears forward, for a moment too long to be chance. What it expects to see there, nobody at Lunnhavn has been able to say.
- Classification
- Oversized scavenging hyena
- Habitat
- Dry scrubland and shale washes
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Dalvik flats
- Binomial
- Crocuta maxima
- Diet
- Carrion, bone, leather, and kiln scraps
- Temperament
- Patient, greedy, wary of lit windows