Bodo and Vixen worked over the grotto, quartering it, noses to the ground, stopping occasionally with backward looks at me. I followed them and found the trail to lead east and then, climbing one of the larger hillocks to get a better view, saw the smoke of a fire about half a mile away. It gave me a very strange feeling to see the smoke of another’s cooking fire. I sat down and, with my dogs beside me, spent some time watching the blue smoke curl upward like a ribbon into the sky. Once a little breeze caught it, and it made a question mark. Nothing, I thought, could be more apt unless it were a period. I was overcome by a sense of finality, of foreboding. If I am not careful, my pleasant way of life may end, my habit of years be interrupted. With a certain irony I reflected on the repetition of the human pattern. As we once feared and resented the coming of atomic power, or, for that matter, universal suffrage, the liberation of the slaves or anything else that was different, I am now upset because I am no longer alone in the world. With these thoughts in my mind, I came home and cooked my supper. I had the saddle and kidneys of a yearling moose calf cooked in bear fat, a can of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and a can of green peas. I opened a bottle of port, one of the few wines which has not begun to go off after more than twenty years. I topped it off with three brandies. I have given the dogs a good meal and now sit here, pencil in hand, to record further impressions. I am now right up to date.
The brandy has done me good. I can feel my heart beating strangely.
Six months have passed since I have written a line. Although, as a novelist, I have always objected to the diary or near-diary form, I find on reading this over that it has a certain interest. Oddly enough, whether or not anyone is ever to read it appears to depend on me, because the young women are with me now. I would call them nice-looking—though it is quite hard for me to remember exactly what a pretty girl should look like.
I will describe them in greater detail later. At the moment my problem is one of biology and morals.
I am seventy-three years of age, and, though I am healthy and remarkably strong, I am without any desire for these young creatures of my own species. My lack of interest does not appear to be reciprocated, for in them is the warmth and burgeoning of youth. This is very embarrassing to a man of my solitary habits and advanced years. Who am I to repopulate the world with white men? And would not the world perhaps be a better place without us? On the other hand, my vanity comes in—my vanity as an author and the historian of these events: the final chapter of history as we knew it, and the opening chapter of a new kind of history. If there are to be people again, if there, are to be readers again—who might someday read this diary—it appears that I must father them. The problem perturbs me; it is an issue that I find it hard to clarify. The moral question is not whether I should live with two girls, but whether our species is worth perpetuating.
And for the life of me I cannot see what is the matter with the young Indian braves. Why can’t the girls marry them, and live happily ever after without bothering me? Of course, the Indians may not think them attractive, but this seems hardly likely. In my opinion, the girls’ interest in me is simply curiosity: I seem unique, and women love the rare and strange. It is also evident that I have prestige value among the Indians.
It is now spring again, and as I look back over the last few months I feel them worthy of some notice because of their personal interest to me. We are now in some open country in what I take to be Florida, since our war party went south and we are among palms. I have seen brown pelicans and frigate birds and so I cannot be very far wrong. I was riding Prince, my big bay, and beside me on her chestnut was Helen, the smaller of the two blondes. We galloped side by side, my long white hair and beard blowing in the wind, her yellow hair flowing like a palomino’s tail. Throwing my leg across a horse again after all these years has been a strange and wonderful sensation that has really reconciled me to this new way of life.
As I rode, my thoughts went back to the day the Indians broke into my home and captured me far north in New York City.
I had finished eating and was working on my manuscript when the dogs leaped up and went almost mad with fury. They barked and snuffled under the door. As I grabbed my rifle, the door burst open and a number of young braves, accompanied by the two girls, broke in. They were all yelling and carrying weapons. The leader killed Bodo, who jumped at him as he crossed the threshold. As I raised my rifle, one of the girls tripped me. She flung herself onto me, wrapping her arms about my legs. I fired two shots but missed with both. Looking back at the incident, I am inclined to think the three brandies may have had something to do with the poor showing I made. The brandy was wonderful ‘65, the so-called Napoleon, and I drank from one of those large-bellied glasses that are warmed with the hands. My missing, however, must be considered providential, for had I wounded one of the braves I might easily have been killed.
Vixen fastened her teeth onto the leg of one of the young men, but another got hold of my left arm before I could get to my feet. The Indians seemed to have decided not to hurt me and to have had a mistaken idea that I would not strike the girls if they attacked me, because the second girl now knelt on my chest. Her hair had fallen down and was hanging in my face. I was able to raise the barrel of my rifle and clip her on the jaw with it as I lay on my back, at the same time striking the other girl on the top of the head with a downward stroke from the butt. The young men now became more active, and disarmed me and tied me. I called Vixen off and gave up the battle. To tell the truth, I was curious about these Indians. I was even more curious about the two girls, who definitely were white and who spoke a kind of English—in the struggle they both swore like cavalry officers. I only hoped they did not know the meaning of the words they used. (It subsequently appeared that they did not, but had learned them from an old prospector who, having joined the Indians and finding these two orphan girls among them—their parents had died of the Red Death—had decided to pay his debt to society by teaching them his version of their own language.) The Indians were Comanches and Kiowas and had set out from Oklahoma four years ago on a kind of scouting exploration mission. They had brought the girls with them as interpreters, in case they should find any white men left alive. Their medicine men had foretold the finding of one and had said the white man would give them news.
I was at first tongue-tied in the presence of the girls, who seemed, once I had got used to the idea, incredibly beautiful and desirable. I have to some extent got over this phase, which I consider one of the few signs of senility I have shown. I had next to learn the language they called English. Apart from its Rabelaisian flavor, it had many Comanche words which the girls used to fill in the gaps, where they had forgotten what their prospector friend had taught them. As he died when they were about ten years old, they had developed a kind of special language, as children do. However, by degrees I got their story. They were the daughters of an Indian agent and his wife who had been killed on the reservation when the blast hit us. The girls had been infants then, and so knew very little about the blast. An Indian squaw had adopted them. Some time later, a prospector by the name of Adam K. Bell had joined forces with the tribe (he had been in the mountains for two years) and had instructed the girls in their mother tongue and in his version of history, geography and mathematics. They knew the multiplication tables and could add, subtract, divide and multiply—arts which made them invaluable to the Indians, who called them in when such obscure calculations were necessary. He had also taught them some excellent geology, though they could never figure out his interest in gold, which they said was quite common in some of the mountains they had explored; and they thought it had caused the old prospector’s death through frustration, though of course they did not use that word. They said he went mad when he saw it—and to express his madness they clapped their hands, jumped up and down, and pulled at their hair.