The entire Chapter 5 of Ignorance, the Freedom of the Weak, volume I:
Sayanne should have been dead. It should still be a matter of seconds. Yet the cat, contrary to its habit of devouring anything that ran slower than fifty kilometers per hour, continued to display its terrifying fangs and utter an intimidating shrieking sound.
The young woman’s mind was filling with questions. Her surprise and curiosity had overwhelmed her will to survive. She instinctively knew her chances of escape were long gone.
The animal kept rising, threatening and graceful. Sayanne felt that the moment was prolonging indefinitely and that she had been staring death in the face more than enough. A familiar feeling.
Instead, she was staring at a master of camouflage lying in the middle of a clearing, in broad daylight, hundreds of kilometers away from its home.
As the feline rose, a few blades of grass, which had been trapped underneath its body, escaped and sprung up into the light, crooked. Their swift motion grabbed Sayanne’s attention, resuming the natural flow of time. They looked filthy, smudged and dripping, contrasting with the vivid yellow hue of their neighbors.
The beast faltered.
Blood.
Spread all over the blades. Thick, dark, crimson blood.
In a heartbeat, Sayanne leaped down from the mossy rock and ran away as fast as she could. The distance between her and the peril increased rapidly. She left the feline behind, but her thoughts still lingered in the clearing. Too many questions.
There were no obstacles for her in this forest. She knew its paths too well to let herself stumble. This confidence allowed her mind to wander off while her agile body dashed through the trees.
She failed to understand how she could accept her fate so easily and just sit there mesmerized, admiring the merciless beast that was about to devour her. Maybe death wasn’t so frightening anymore, or maybe she naively thought her singing had tamed the beast.
No matter the reason, Sayanne blamed herself for falling into hopelessness without the slightest attempt to fight for her life. Hopelessness she couldn’t even sense once she became hypnotized by the mystery.
She let herself be led by appearances, trusting some deceiving intangible perceptions without questioning them once, solely concentrating on the disproportion of forces. Sayanne defeated herself before the beast even snarled.
Sayanne kept accusing that young woman sitting on the rock like it was someone else. In a way, she could not recognize herself and refused to forgive her moment of weakness. She knew she had to have more hope, she just didn’t know how to make it grow.
Her thoughts were unexpectedly disturbed by silence. It crept up on her and, subtly easing its way into her reflections, made her realize where she was. Sayanne was out of the forest, back at the farm. Usually, it was the scorching sunlight that brought her back to the present, forcing her eyes to adjust to reality.
Silence was unusual out there in the open fields. It was irritating and unsettling, it didn’t belong there, just like that cat didn’t belong in her forest. More uncertainty.
Sayanne remembered that, when she left in the morning, the machines were threshing wheat less than a hundred meters away. She could tell where they were and what they were doing simply by listening to them.
Obscured by the house, the machines remained hidden, unnerving Sayanne with their stillness. She rushed in anxiously through the back door to the living room windows only to witness a disconcerting sight.
The only things in this life Sayanne believed to be immortal had abandoned her.
The mammoths were dead.
