Most of the time I lay in the low cave room, I had no memories of any other place or time. I was there, only there. I was alone, except when the dog was with me, lying by my left leg. Sometimes it raised its head and stared into the dark air. It never looked into my face. When the man came stooping into the room, the dog stood up and went to him, putting its long nose into his hand, and then went out. Later it would come back with him or by itself, step over me, turn round once, and lie down by my leg. Its name was Guard.
The man’s name was Cuga or Cuha. Sometimes he said one, sometimes the other. He talked strangely, deep in his throat, as if something obstructed his voice, which came out as if through rocks. When he came, he would sit down by me, give me fresh water, and offer me food: usually thin strips of smoke-dried meat or fish, sometimes a few berries as they came ripe. He never gave me much at a time. “What were you doing then, starving?” he said. He talked a good deal when he was with me, and often I heard him in the other part of the cave talking to himself or to the dog, the same low gargling broken stream of words never waiting for an answer.
To me he said, “What did you want to go starving for anyhow? There’s food. Food where you find it. What brought you up here? I thought you was from Derram. I thought they was after me again. I followed you, you know. I followed you and watched. I can watch all day. I told Guard, Lay low. You got up and I thought you was going on, but then you come straight down here, straight to my door, what am I to do, man? I’m behind you, I got my stick in hand, and so I hit you on the head, whack!” and he pantomimed a tremendous blow and laughed, showing his brown, wide-spaced teeth. “You never knew I was there, did you? I killed him, I thought, I killed him. You went down like a dead branch, there you was, I killed him. So much for Derram! So then I take a look and it’s a kid. Sampa, Sampa, I gone and killed a kid! No, not dead. Didn’t even break his fool egg head. But he’s down like a dead branch. A kid. I picked you up with one hand like a fawn. I’m strong, you know. They all know that. They don’t come here. What did you come here for, boy? What brought you? What was you starving for? Lying there with ten thousand moneys in your purse! Bronzes, silvers, the faces of gods! Rich as King Cumbelo! What was you starving for? What sort of place is this to come with all those moneys? You going to buy deer from Lady Iene? Are you crazy, boy?”
He nodded. “You are, you are," Then he chuckled and said, “So am I, boy. Crazy Cuga.” He chuckled again and gave me a sliver of sweet fibrous meat, bitter with smoke and ash. I slowly chewed at it, my mouth full of the juices of hunger.
That was all there was for a while, my hunger, the vivid taste of the food he doled out to me, his broken voice talking, the black rock roof above my face, the reek of smoke and fur, the dog pressed against my leg. Then I could sit up. Then I could crawl to the entrance of the rock chamber, and discover that it was the innermost, lowest one of several such chambers in the cave which Cuga had made his house. Slowly I explored them. In some you could stand up, at least in the center, and the largest room was quite spacious, though its floor was a jumble of big stones. The black rock of the cave was porous and cracked, and light came through cracks and crevices from above, making a smoky dimness. When I first went out, the sunlight blinded me with great dazzling bursts of red and gold, and the air smelled sweet as honey.
From outside the cave, even at its very entrance, you could not see it, only a massive slant of rocks like a dry waterfall all overgrown with creepers and fern.
Cuga’s possessions were the deerskins and rabbit furs he had crudely cured; some bark cups; some spoons and other implements he had whittled of alderwood; a roll of fine sinew; and his treasures—a metal box half full of dirty salt crystals, a tinderbox for fire making, and two horn-handled hunter’s knives of good steel, which he kept sharp on a fine-grained river pebble. Of these treasures he was fiercely jealous, suspicious of me, hiding them from me. I never knew where he kept the salt. The first time he had to bring out one of the knives where I could see it, he flourished it at me snarling and said in his choked voice, “Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, or by the Destroyer I’ll cut out your heart with it.”
“I won’t touch it,” I said.
“It’ll turn and cut your throat of itself if you do.” “I never will.”
“You’re a liar,” he said. “Liars, men are liars.” Sometimes he would say a thing like that over and over, and would say nothing else all day: Men are liars, men are liars… Keep away, keep out! Keep away, keep out!… At other times his talk was sane enough.
I had little to say, and that seemed to suit him. He talked to me as he did to the dog, recounting his daily expeditions through the woods to his rabbit snares and fishing holes and berry patches, everything he had caught or seen or smelled or heard. I listened just as the dog did to these long tales, intently, not interrupting.
“You’re a runaway,” he said to me one evening as we sat out looking up through the leaves at the heavy, bright stars of August. “House slave, brought up soft. You run away. You think I’m a slave, don’t you? Oh no. Oh no. You want runaways? You go on north, go on to the forest, that’s where they are. I got nothing to do with them. Liars, thieves. I’m a free man. I was born free. I don’t want to mix with them. Nor the farmers. Nor the townsfolk, Sampa destroy them, liars, cheats, thieves. All of them liars, cheats, thieves.”
“How do you know I’m a slave?” I asked.
“What else could you be?” he said with his dark grin and quick, canny look.
I didn’t know.
“I come here to be free of them, all of them,” Cuga said. “They call me the wild man, the hermit, they’re afraid of me. They leave me be. Cuga the hermit! They keep away. They keep out.”
I said, “You’re the Master of Cugamand.”
He sat for a while in silence and then he broke out in his choked, chuckling laugh, and slapped his thigh with his big, heavy hand. He was a big man, and very strong, though he must have been fifty or more. “Say it again,” he said.
“You’re the Master of Cugamand.”
“That I am! That I am! This is my domain and I’m the master here! By the Destroyer, that’s the truth. I met a man that speaks truth! By the Destroyer! A man that speaks truth! He come here and how do I welcome him? Smash his head in with a stick! How’s that for a greeting? Welcome to Cugamand!” And he laughed for a long time. He would be silent and then laugh again, and then again. At last he looked over at me through the grey starlight and said, “You’re a free man here. Trust me.”
I said, “I trust you.”
Cuga lived in filth and never bathed, and his carelessly tanned hides and furs stank and rotted; but he was meticulous in preserving and storing food. He smoke-dried the meat of all the larger animals he caught—rabbits, hares, the occasional fawn—and hung it from the roof of the fireplace room of the cave. He set snares for the little creatures of the grasslands too, wood rats, even harvest mice, and those he broiled on the fire and ate fresh. His snares were wonderfully clever and his patience endless, but he had no luck with his hooks and lines and seldom caught a fish big enough to be worth smoking. I could help him there. The sinew that was all he had for lines softened in the water; I pulled out some of the linen warp threads from the end of my brown blanket, and using them with the fine bone hooks he carved, I caught some big perch and bass as well as the little brown trout that swarmed in the pools of the stream. He showed me how to dry and smoke the fish. Aside from that I was of little use to him. He did not want me with him on his expeditions. Often he ignored me entirely all day long, lost in his muttered repetitions, but when he ate he always shared his food with me and with Guard.