Meanwhile I think only of the Child. The rest is mere filling of empty time. The summer passes with flowers. The grain is brought in, threshed, stored. It is autumn again. We go out to take him.
I have no wish to tell how it came about. Coward that I am, I did not take part in the chase and would have preferred not to witness it. Crouched against one of the birches with my hands over my ears, I let the others do it for me, the big horses surging about the wood, chopping at the leaf mold with their iron hooves, the men whooping and yelling, weaving in circles, so that the Child, driven this way and that in the thick undergrowth, must have been confounded utterly by strange cries coming at him from all directions, shadowy figures darting out from all parts of the sky. When he suddenly stumbled into the clearing and stopped before me, he was in a state of utter panic, exhausted, half-crazed, his shoulders torn and bleeding where twigs had caught them, his body filthy with mud. His mouth, as he stood there surrounded at last, poured out a terrible howling that was like nothing I have ever heard from a human throat. But as the first of the young men swung down behind him, he suddenly discovered a new force of energy, lashing out with his fists, heels, teeth, till the young man covered his mouth and nostrils with a fierce hand, squeezing the breath out of him, and the others were able to hold and then tie him with thongs. Only the eyes continued to move wildly, and I thought from the spasms that shook his body that he might be in a fit. I put my hand on him, and a savage hissing came from the nostrils, the spasms increased. At last we left him to himself, trussed like a pig, under an oak tree, while the shaman began his ritual. The high singing of the shamanґs other, polar, voice seemed to quiet him. It was as if the shaman were singing the wildness form him, leading it north in his trances towards the polar circle of eternal whiteness, taking it down through a hole made with a fish bone, under the ice. When the shaman woke and came out of his circle the Child was asleep, and he slept like that all through the journey back, slung forward over the headmanґs saddle, and for another whole day after we had returned. What a strange procession we must have made, coming up the long slope from the marshes in the late afternoon, with the autumn light over the river flats and the long black line of the cliffs, beyond which, shining flat and gray, lay the sea. Children left off splashing about in the pools and ran shouting behind us, wide-eyed, staring. Women gathering their clothes off thorn bushes came and stood with their arms full of washing to watch us, only their eyes visible under the black shawls. Rumor of the boyґs capture had preceded us. The lean body, about the size of a deer, slung across the headmanґs horse, might have been lifeless, drained of blood and spirit like the joints we were bringing home on the other horses.
But the news is already abroad that the creature, whatever he is - wolf boy, godling, satyr - is alive. The village has accepted him within its walls. It is all to begin.
What have I done?
The Child is lying, still trussed, in a corner of the room opposite me. Since the first occasion the women have refused to touch him. When he fouls himself I must wash him down. They prepare his food, a gruel made of meal and sweetened with honey, but will not cross the threshold of the room. I untie his hands and leave the bowl, listening at the door for him to drag himself over the rushes and sup it up, snuffling like an animal in his hunger. He whimpers but does not cry. His eyes remain dry and nothing like a human sobbing ever comes from him, none of that giving of oneself over to tears that might release the child in him. The whimpering comes from somewhere high in his head and has been learned from one of the animals. He keeps it up for hours on end. To comfort himself, quite shamelessly, as some children suck their thumb, he excites himself with his hand to a series of little shudders, as I have seen monkeys do, then again, and again, till the spasms have exhausted him and he is quiet, squatting in the corner with his knees drawn up sharp and his mouth clenched; or curled up in a ball in the rushes, his knees under his chin, his elbows tight between them. We spend hours simply staring at one another. And I have no idea what feelings might be at work in him. He shows no sign of interest in anything I do. I write a little. I eat. I mend a tear in my cloak. He stares but does not see. At first when I touched him in the cleaning he tried to bite me with his sharp incisors. Now he accepts all that I do with a passivity that has begun to disturb me. I am afraid we may already have killed something in him. I have a terrible fear that he may die - that what we have brought back here is some animal part of him that can be housed and fed for a while, and kept with us by force, but only till it realizes that the spirit is already gone, having slipped away out of the arms of the first young man who caught and held him, or worse still, having been dreamed out of his body in that first protracted sleep.
I watch him sleep. His limbs twitch like a dog’s, with little involuntary spasms along the inside of the thighs. Does he dream? If only I could be certain he was dreaming I would know that what I have to contact at last, what I have slowly to lead up through the ladders of being in him, is still there. I must know that he can dream. I must assure myself that he can smile, that he can weep.
But I have not even described him.
He is about eleven years old, tall, strongly but scraggily made, with the elbow and knee joints enlarged and roughly calloused. There are sores on his arms and legs, and old scars that appear as discolorations of the flesh, brownish under the yellow tan. The limbs are lightly haired, the chest hairless; but all along the spine there is a hairline, reddish in color like a fox, and it is this that terrifies the women and has made them unwilling to touch him, though the phenomenon is common enough. You may observe it in small children everywhere, as they play naked on doorsteps or splash about in summer under water showers. It usually goes unremarked. Only in this boy has it become, for the women, some sort of sign. That and the feet, which are splayed and hardened from being unshod in all weathers, the toenails worn away, the underside of the foot thickened to a crust as deep perhaps as an earthenware dish, but in no way resembling anything other than a normal foot. The rumor that he is covered with hair and has hooves, which the boy Lullo brings back from the village, is absurd. I dragged the boy in this evening and made him look at the Child and tell me what he saw. But he was too terrified to look properly, and though he has seen what there is to see, I know he is not convinced. What he imagines is so much more powerful than the facts.
I know what he thinks. He thinks I have somehow bewitched the Child’s hooves into stunted feet to deceive him, or that I have bewitched him.
I had imagined that the boy, being something like the same age as the Child, might have some special interest in him, some special sympathy. But he has none. He regards the Child with loathing, as if he were somehow about to be displaced here by a changeling; as if - is it that? - the Child might, while he was sleeping, steal his spirit. These people believe profoundly in sleepwalkers and stealers of souls. Do they suspects, as I have begun to do, that the Child has lost his spirit, and may, while we see him curled asleep in his corner, be capable, like the shaman, of walking out of his body, through the walls into the next room, and into the boy Lullo’s body while he is absent on one of those dream journeys small boys are accustomed to make, into the hunting woods or out over the river? The old woman and the boy’s mother, I know, are encouraging him in this, because of his influence with the old man. But Ryzak, for what reason I do not know, remains my supporter in the business. Against the women. And against the shaman, who has come only once to examine the Child, and on that occasion refused to sing -another fact that the women mutter over and hold against me. The shaman and the women, of course, are in league.