I couldn’t get the taste of that pig out of my memory.
My people do eat meat, though they make sure the animals live a happy life first, and are killed quickly and without fear. The People follow an animal to its exhaustion – hardly a death without fear, but I do eat the meat they bring in. Still, I cannot bring myself to hunt a healthy animal.
If one is attacking me, or injured so badly that I know it will die soon, I feel justified in using my abilities to give it a swift, painless death and then eat it. But hunting? My skills as a hunter are not up to giving a clean death, and I cannot help but feel it would be a misuse of my mental talents to kill a healthy animal that means me no harm.
That leaves scavenging, usually a sick, old, or very young animal, as these are what most wild predators target.
Perhaps a very young pig?
I teleported to one of the areas where I knew the wild pigs were common, on the northern continent. The acorns and pistachios are ripe and abundant, and the pigs are eating them greedily. I opened my mind to pig, alert also for any feeling of pain or fear. There – for an instant I was paralyzed, feeling the leopard’s fangs at my neck. The years must have hardened me, for I came out of the paralysis almost at once, to end the young pig’s life and teleport it to me. It would not have lived long, I saw, the leopard’s fangs had almost pierced its spinal cord.
I teleported the carcass to Rainbow, together with dates, nuts, and honey. We will eat well tonight, and for days to come if I freeze most of the meat.
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