Well, it was "just" a cave lion who while larger than today's lions didn't have sabre-teeth.... but yeah, I probably would have appreciated that more in sixth grade, and maybe not even have hoped that it would eat the horse already. OTOH in sixth grade I would have been bored to tears worse than now by the sex and probably grossed out. I really wasn't the most precocious kid. It took me until reading lesbian mysteries as a teenager to appreciate sex scenes.

But I get that embarrassing moment. I once put a comic by a favorite artist on my wish list, and it was really kind of explicit, which I hadn't realized when reading about it, and well, with comics it's kind of more obvious than with books...