The Perfect Host (4 page)

She went back to the kitchen door and stood looking at it. She was eighteen now, strong, well-balanced as she shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other, well-balanced as she thought.

She was hungry and naked. It was growing cool. She gazed without expression at the expressionless windows. A small breeze stroked her body, leaving a brief puckering of gooseflesh. She stepped to the door and tried it again. It never occurred to her to knock. If her father were inside at all, the chances were that he would be in the study or upstairs, to be called only by thunderous hammering—something unthinkable in that house. There could be no possibility that her father had locked the doors by mistake, for he was not a man who made mistakes.

Well, then, she must wait. She went to the shed, which was warm and dry, if nothing else. But—it was locked. So was the barn.

Then she knew.

“You must find your own way … you will leave. You must. For a year …”
It had been that way when first she was left by herself in the house; when first lunch-time had come and she suddenly realized that he had made no effort to prepare it. Always there had been a warning beforehand, buried in a lesson, perhaps, or mentioned casually in conversation. And this was like him. She must leave, but she would not be sent away, with clothes and money and a starting-place somewhere.

She went into the garden and looked about her. The tomatoes were green, but edible. It would be a crime to take any of the baby ears of corn, but in this emergency … she shook her head stubbornly. Not the corn. Let it grow. It was not responsible for her plight. A rabbit, then.

She walked to the hutches. The rabbits tumbled towards her, wanting more food. She smiled at them. There had always been rabbits. Always … suddenly it became clear to her that these rabbits were part of the place, as the corn was, as were the tomatoes. And she no longer had any part of it.

She nodded, looked briefly, bleakly, up at the house and strode away through the orchard. She did not look back for an hour, when she was on the mountain’s shoulder. Then she paused.

The house was invisible now, and dark. So he had gone away. She wondered remotely if she hated him. She had never hated anything in her life. She missed him, however, as much as one can who has never attached any importance to the idea of loneliness.

Beyond the house, far beyond, the lights of the town drifted like crumbs in a cup of ink. She had had no compulsion to go to the town. She was not known there, but she knew that she resembled her father very strongly, and that she would be brought back to the house by well-meaning but uncomprehending strangers who would do what they could to upset her father’s plans for her. She did not question those plans for a moment. Her father held a position in her cosmos outside such mutable abstracts. His law governed her as completely as did gravity.

The wind touched her again, colder now, and, as before, its breath brought her back to her immediate problem. She cast about her for a fallen tree, found one, and broke off a thick four-foot piece. She worked her way carefully into the darkening forest. A glance up through the trees told her that tonight, at least, she need not fear rain.

She chose a spot where two large trees grew close together, with a bed of moss at their roots. She gathered up dry leaves and piled them up over and beside the moss. Setting her club close to her hand, she lay down, pulled a mountain of leaves over her, and almost instantly lost her hunger in a deep sleep.

She woke before the sun was up, rested and ravenous. She stood up, shaking the leaves from her firm body, and immediately set about the business of breakfast. Retracing her steps of the night before,
she reached a meadow. She gathered clover heads and tender shoots of upland grass, and found, to her joy, the “walking” vine known as a Judas traveller. She uprooted about twenty feet of its tough, meandering stem and carefully stripped it until she had ten or twelve feet of flexible withe. This she took back into the woods, made a noose-snare by tying down a sapling so that when triggered, it would snap up and draw the noose tight. She put down the clover and shoots as bait, blocking them from behind so that they must be approached through the noose, and then went back to the meadow. She selected some round, smooth stones, and then stepped to a tree at the edge of the forest, put her back against the trunk, and stood there motionless.

The sun was up now. Great lazy clouds floated overhead, brindling the hills. She saw a woodchuck out on the meadow, and let it be. Hungry as she was, she did not consider its rank flesh worth the trouble of cutting it off from its nearby burrow. She waited patiently.

A movement caught her eye—something like a clump of grass moving within the field of grass. Moving very carefully, she set down her handful of stones. She raised her club up and back in her right hand, and with her left tossed a pebble to the side of the moving thing she had seen. As it fell, the surprised head of a grouse popped upward. Quietly’s club, unerringly thrown to turn end over end in a horizontal plane, caught the bird solidly on its ruff. In a half-dozen great bounds she was on the stunned creature and had wrung its neck.

She carried it back into the woods toward the two trees where she had slept. On her way was the snare. The sapling was upright, and a fat cottontail hung kicking in the noose. It had caught him around the withers; he was very much alive and frightened. Quietly looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then dropped her grouse and bent the sapling down, catching the rabbit deftly at the nape of the neck. She slackened the noose, smoothed the animal’s rumpled fur, and let him go, smiling a little as his powder-puff quarters disappeared through the trees. She had the grouse, and no way to carry anything extra. In addition, she had perfect confidence in her ability to get more food when she wanted it.

From a basalt outcropping she got an edged stone. She stripped some dead reeds for the soft, dry pith inside, crumbled it, and pounded with the stone on the rock until she had a spark. Nursing it carefully with her breath, feeding it with more pith and then with leaves, she soon had a healthy little fire. She spitted the bird with a green stick, singed it, plucked it. Then, pinching out the soft underflesh, she cut it with her stone against the rock and cleaned the grouse. With two forked sticks she made a frame for the spit. She piled stones around her fire to shelter it and to concentrate the heat. Then she squatted beside it and, between turnings, occupied herself by patiently combing out her long heavy hair with her fingers, and braiding it tightly.

At last it was ready—or at least, ready enough for her clamoring appetite. She ate slowly, however, and she ate the whole bird. She took the neck-bones apart for the tiny succulent strips of muscle there, and she cracked the other bones and sucked out the marrow. Then she gathered up the remains, scooped out a hole, and buried them. She drew up a large chunk of root to the fire, to keep it fed for the next few hours, wiped her hands and mouth carefully on some grass, and with a green twig meticulously cleaned her teeth.

Then she stretched out in a bright patch of warm mid-morning sun and quietly, half somnolently, began to think.

She had nothing—no clothes, no shelter, no knife or axe or other tools. She did not question the fact that she must take care of herself completely for at least a year.

She was not worried, and she was certainly not frightened. Fear is a functional thing, and she was happy to yield to it when it had a function. Now it had none, so she was not afraid.

She rolled over and cupped her chin in her hands. Food? Well, hunting was good. She could snare or club what she needed, and if she had to go a day or two without, she could stand it. There would be nuts and berries throughout the fall, and eggs aplenty in the spring and early summer. There was plenty of ash to be fire-cured and shaped and trimmed with stone, so that she could make bows and arrows. She had killed deer before this way. Clothing? She wanted none, at least until the cold came. By then she should have enough pelts to keep her warm—fox and deer and skunk and possibly coon and
beaver. There were caves in these parts; she could certainly find one. She could make rope from grasses for her snares, and possibly dig a pitfall or two. It would be hard, sometimes, but she would survive.

She lay still for a long while, her mind flickering over this detail and that. Gradually she let it go blank.
What is complicated is by definition not important
. This above all was her father’s creed, and she had learned from babyhood that, after a time of preoccupation with details, it paid to leave them for a while to see what basic, if any, emerged from their framework.

It came, without effort on her part. It was a sudden realization that her father had not turned her out so that she could prove her woodcraft. That was past proving. Had he expected her to live off the land for a year, he could have judged her ability to do it years ago without this specific trial. No, he expected her to go farther.

She forced her thoughts to turn to the towns. The only one she had ever seen was the one near the house. She had never been there, but she had seen it from the mountainside. She remembered:

“Why are they all clustered together like sheep in the winter, Father?”

“Like botflies on carrion,” he had answered. “They are built that way because they are used by folk who cannot bear to be by themselves.”

“Why not?”

“Each of them seeks better company than he finds when he is alone. You’ll see for yourself, one day.”

Quietly sat up and looked at the trees around her, and listened for a moment to the whispering song of their high branches. She shut her eyes and remembered the pictures she had seen, of crowds pushing up narrow, dirty streets, of ill-kempt children and of fat, bald, sickly doctors whose duty it was to heal and to cure. She thought of the noble things: great curved dams and high buildings with their windows lit. So much that was wrong—so much that was not wrong but was simply inconsistent. And it would be noisy, noisy, noisy.

Why not live out her year here in the hills, with her fire-building and her hunting and her thoughts? It would not be so different; her father had said, “The same laws, the same forces, apply to men
everywhere as apply to beasts. Kill or be killed, fill your belly, reproduce your kind. The difference is only in the fact that men kill and eat and reproduce beyond necessity, without regard to their basic need.”

That was it, then—that difference which he wanted her to see. And why not let her accept the truth of it, without this?

She remembered again—years back. “Quietly, what would it feel like if I hit you, hard, with my open hand?”

She had considered, carefully. “It would thump and it would sting.”

He had nodded, and then lashed out brutally and struck her. It was one of the very few times when he had suddenly gathered her up and held her close. She was stiff and silent for a long moment. Then she trembled and hid her face in his shoulder, and cried without making a sound. He held her, rocking her a little, until she quieted, and then said, “Never forget this, child. You did not cry when you answered my question. You could not; you had no reason to. You did
not
know what it would feel like. Now you are crying. Imagination is a good thing, but it can only approximate experience. You can only learn by doing. If ever you want to know what a thing is like, do it, Quietly, do it.”

Quietly rose and stepped to her fire to push the root-chunk further into the coals. She had a year, and the decision of what to do with it was hers. Her father’s wish was obviously that she live out her year in the world—other people’s world. She could follow his wish, or not. If she did not, she would survive; by the same token, she had no doubt of surviving if she did what he obviously wanted. Survival was not the question, nor was it a matter of which she would enjoy the most; for enjoyment had always been a substance to be squeezed from events as they were lived, and she would enjoy what she did, or not, only as her capacity for enjoyment changed, and not as events dictated. The important consideration sprang from her training. If, in any matter, she did what was expected of her, she was rewarded by the food or the quiet or the freedom her action had earned. If she did not do as her father wished, she took the consequences—not in punishment from him, but in the exact deprivation
that her lack warranted. If it were made possible for her to eat, and through her own choice she did not eat, then she went hungry. If, in the afternoon, she refused the privilege of a certain one of her father’s books, that book was unavailable to her in the evening. To accede to her father’s wishes was invariably to do the functional thing, to make the most of opportunity when it offered itself; and so rigorously did he control his environment—and hers—that there never had been an accident which proved this principle false.

To stay in the hills, or to go to the towns … she was free to choose. Purely by the placement of events, she knew which her father wished her to do. The fact that she did not want the opportunity to live among other people was unimportant. The fact that she may never have another opportunity if she did not take this one was important, vitally so.

She stared into the fire, felt its radiant heat, watched its pale sunlit flames. The living flame was the symbol of her competence here in the hills. Its vitality was the product of her own hands. She was its master.

Abruptly she bent, scattered it, kicked earth over its coals, turned the heavy, glowing chunk face downward in the ground and palmed earth around it. Then she marched off, leaving behind her, already forgotten, the dwindling smoke of her indecision.

By evening she had crossed the range through a high pass, and was descending the westward slope. Twice she had seen people, and both times she had kept herself hidden. She was determined to live with people, but she wished to choose her own point of entrance. The first she saw was a young man in what she considered a bewildering amount of clothing—rough shoes, heavy socks, breeches and a flannel shirt, and over all a knapsack and a bandolier. She gained on him, keeping to the rocks in the pass, and was about to call when he stopped, aimed his rifle at some movement on the hillside, and fired. The roar of the gun caught Quietly completely by surprise, and she dropped behind a boulder, rocking back and forth, with her hands over her ears. She had heard guns before, but never this close. She peered out after a moment; he was staring fixedly across the cut, with
his gun resting on his left forearm. He raised it abruptly and fired twice more, waited, shrugged, and then trudged off. Quietly sat watching him in utter amazement and disgust. Far off on the hillside she could discern the jerky motions of a rock-squirrel kicking and kicking its life away. The man had hit it with his first bullet, and had fired again as it writhed there. It was wanton; it was useless. Quietly felt no particular pity for the animal; she was not a sentimentalist, and had a scale of values for the lower orders. What offended her was the waste of a life, of powder, even of skill—the skill of the man himself and that of the precision workers who had made his weapon. He had not wanted the creature for fur or flesh, but had as his only apparent desire an affirmation of the evident fact that he was bigger and stronger and more intelligent than a chipmunk. Enter civilization she would, but not in the company of this pervert.