Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

5. Work Experience II

Hunting had always been part of the New Carinthian way of life, and it had carried on after Ruth Gray had declared the dissolution of the original twenty-eight packs and declared Corviston the capital city. 

In the new nation hunting had been promoted as a way of bonding, a kinship that went beyond the old, obsolete boundaries of pack and rank. Hundreds of fenced-in hunting ranges had been established over the fledgling state.

Then, starting in the 1960s, urbanisation, the rise of animal rights activists and changes in lifestyle had converged to force a precipitous drop in the popularity of hunting as a pastime. Werewolves caring about animal rights seemed like the definition of oxymoron, but the numbers of people heading out every full moon continued to drop over the following decades, despite a few false starts here and there. 

Several scandals regarding the owners' tendencies towards hiring rogues from across the border and mistreating the game animals were the final nail in the coffin. Then someone had had the brainwave of making the age-old institution more palatable to the ethically-minded. The often malnourished and mistreated deer and grouse were replaced with state of the art robots. 

At first, the idea of a vegan hunting lodge had been the butt of jokes, but after some strategic celebrity endorsements, people began to take the thing seriously. Soon there began a steady stream of thrillseekers of all breeds paying upwards of $200 an hour every full moon to run around a fenced-in bit of woodland in wolf form chasing animatronic robots wrapped firmly with their choice of tofu, tempeh, raw Impossible Burger patty or some other type of meat substitute. 

Despite the insufferable clientele and the robots, which the undocumented rogue wolves from the Independent Territories never seemed to be able to fix properly, the biggest problem by far proved to be the method of securing the ethical meat substitutes to the metal skeleton of the robot. 

At first they had used fishing line. This was sturdy and usually lasted for a whole night, and perfectly adequate for the vast majority of customers, who were only fast enough to nip at the extremities of the robots. However, for the fitter clients who could get their entire jaw around a faux-rump of preformed tofu, it could get a lot more risky. 

This was soon proved when an up-and-coming paralegal nearly choked to death after getting her jaws caught in the lines. The food safety people had cracked down and afterwards they switched to rubber bands and cotton twine, which were much gentler on wolf jaws but made for a rather more messy and less efficient eating experience. So inefficient in fact, that people started losing money from all the tofu going to waste. 

Then began a period of further experimenting with alternative tethering methods, with limited success. And so, after exhausting the possibilities within the laws of physics, the owners had inevitably called in some outside help to bend the aforementioned rules. 

And that was how Adrian came to be sitting on a patio with sweeping views of the range framed by chestnut trees sipping a coffee. The boys had already gone off with the staff. 

He finished his coffee and set the empty cup carefully in the middle of the saucer. The scenery really was quite exquisite. He had maybe two hours to unwind and savour it before they would come back. 

He glanced at a newspaper left on the table next to him. The Daily Howl, Corviston's answer to the British tabloids. Some Alpha across the border had rejected their mate after two weeks, apparently. He had actually gatecrashed one of the aforementioned Alpha's infamous parties once. Everybody had been too blazed or drunk to notice that he was not a pack wolf. He had come over the border to get away from this shit, and it turned out that the people were quite fond of the bastards here too.