"So, two, there is no assistance we can render. Three, when the dog is found, if it's found, nothing can be proved, even to our own certainty, that would indicate origin from BDI. Given all this, I can't see anything but serious, unnecessary, and undeserved damage to us if we were to claim it as ours. Therefore, I think this should stay strictly between us."
"What if someone else is attacked?"
"No one will be, unless they box the dog in. The same thing would be true of any of those million "pets' of yours too. Hope that it doesn't happen.
But if it does, nothing changes."
"I guess," Hazlett said. "You know what I feel worst about? The dog himself. He didn't ask for any of this."
"Maybe he has the best of it," Mandelberg said. "If he can get free.
Men are the only real problem dogs ever had."
Orph stayed to the shadows, scraped low under brush, skirted clearings and open plateaus. The pack followed him with the same silent caution.
He stood patiently at the edge of cover to survey new terrain for half an hour, an hour if he felt uneasy, before he would commit them to it.
Prey could freeze and become so much a part of the landscape that a predator could pass by in total ignorance if the wind was wrong. Some human predators could imitate prey in that respect. Orph had learned this the first day the humans had come into the woods, heavy, beneath the odors of metal and oil and pungency they brought." with the scent of killing purpose.
He'd winded one, stiffening instantly, that was close enough to see or hear, yet he could do neither and it disturbed him deeply. He remained absolutely still-as time passed, as his muscles began to cramp-and listened, scented, and looked, with all the concentration he was capable of, which was formidable, until at last he found the man. The man was far up the side of the ridge, seated at the hole of a big tree, dressed in clothes that melted into the background. He'd shifted to relieve the strain of his careful wait, the smallest adjustment of posture, but it was enough. Satisfied, Orph drew back into the brush and led them away in a wide circle. In the following days he located and circled two more humans in the same fashion. There were not many who behaved like this.
The rest, the ones who came tramping with clumsy feet, who shouted to one another, whose acrid tobacco reek was borne far ahead of them on breezes, who coughed and spat, gathered together and lit fires at night, even fired their guns out of boredom and frustration, were easy to keep clear of.
Orph brought his pack far out of its range, to the mountains to the north, where the human predators were sparse and infrequent. In a little time the humans quit the woods, Orph probed back, found the territory untroubled once more, and the pack returned. Now and then some men would invade, but the pack had no difficulty moving around them, and their stay was brief.
It was a hot day. They sweated. The slickness of their skin lent an exoticism to their caresses. Afterward, Kathy went into the bathroom.
When she returned she brought a face towel she'd soaked in cold water and squeezed out. She swabbed his body with it. It jarred at first, then refreshed. He reciprocated. Then they napped atop the sheet with a breeze from the window blowing over them, not long, and awakened feeling good.
He kissed her breasts. He took a large part of one into his mouth. It seemed if he could suck hard enough, he could pull her whole breast into his mouth, down, deeper, and contain all of her in time, become full with her. She pushed her fingers into his hair and rubbed his scalp.
"Oh that feels good," she said, free of the urgency of desire, with lazy pleasure.
He released her and ministered to her other breast.
She closed her eyes and sighed.
He pillowed his head on her breasts and looked up at her.
"Your body is very important to you, isn't it?" he said.
"Isn't everyone's?"
"Not in the same way."
"How sad for them."
"You fuck with every piece."
"Sure. If I'm not lucky enough to die young, it'll be all dried up and falling apart some day. It would be terrible not to have memories at least."
"I like the way you use it, but I'm not so sure about the motivation."
"That's a killer word. Reasons are pasts and futures. That makes "Now' impossible, and anything that does that is evil."
"Evil is the impossibility of now?" he asked incredulously.
"What else? You, you fuck like you were going to be shot tomorrow.
That focuses you, which is good, as far as it goes, but it must be an awful drag."
"No."
"There's never any reason to be desperate, you know."
"You don't know much about me," he said, with a touch of sarcasm.
She stretched, contented. "Of course not. No one can ever know themselves, so how can they know anyone else? We're butterflies. I mean that's what we can be. But almost no one understands that, so they just stay caterpillars all their lives."
"What do butterflies do?"
"They fly around in the sun in the summer. But it's not so much what they do as what they are. They're very beautiful creatures-who are content just to be beautiful. They don't try to understand anything, they're too busy being. Every moment is pleasure, and every moment is all that ever was and all that ever will be."
"But there are lepidopterists at large. They pin butterflies to boards."
"There are always people who want to kill beauty. When you see them, you fly away from them, and if you can't…" She shrugged.
"Tomorrow the earth could fall into the sun, and anyway we'll all get caught by something sooner or later, even the catchers and that's a joke on them. So there's no point in doing anything at all that doesn't feel good and make you happy."
"This doesn't sound like the same person who was pursuing Melville with such determination last term."
"That was then, love, and I was playing student. The butterfly always plays whatever it wants to. Now it's summer and I'm playing at the Treehouse."
"Kathy, your soul is a glass snowflake."
"That's pretty."
"But easily shattered."
She shrugged. "You have bars of lead in yours, and you just can't fly very far that way."
"Tell Icarus it's a bad idea."
"That's a very puritanical myth. It says too much rapture will kill you. People are afraid of pleasure."
"What are you afraid of?"
"Nothing. What happens, happens. I have a good time until it does."
"Mundane as they might be, there are necessities. The brow must sweat sometimes."
"Work is only a surface process, and knowledge is just a tool to get it done faster and more efficiently with. That's the trouble with people, they don't understand the purpose of knowledge. They think it's an end all in itself and they spend their lives accumulating it and think it's wisdom.
But if there is such a thing as wisdom, then it's nothing more than simply being, like I said. You don't have to have a single scrap of knowledge or an intelligent thought in your head to be wise. The butterfly doesn't, but it's wise-because it's happy and that's what being wise is."
"Owls will be distressed to learn that."
"Owls are not wise, they think too much. Thinking is deadly. It's abstractions, and abstractions are unnatural. Can you imagine animals killing other animals over a religion or a flag? Only humans do that.
You know, we slaughtered a goat yesterday. Some people tell you that meat is bad, that the killing hurts your spirit and the meat messes up your body systems and gives you diseases. But it's really not the meat that hurts, it's what the meat becomes when you don't kill the animal right. We took the goat out of its pen and we all sat in a circle, and we touched it and gave it our love, and then Billy had a long talk with it. He explained how all living creatures have to eat, and how in the end everything feeds everything else, and the rabbit isn't evil for eating a carrot even though the carrot doesn't exist as a carrot anymore, or an antelope when a lion eats it, but the essence of the carrot joins with the rabbit and the essence of the antelope with the lion, and he told the goat it was going to join with us, and explained how we'd fed it and cared for it, and that now it was going to do the same thing for us, and it was all natural and good, and in time we'd die too, at least our bodies would, but our essences would go back to the soil and that would be the food for growing things, and the growing things would be the food for things like goats and other animals and so it was all the same-goats, butterflies, and people-and it was good. We helped the goat to understand. That's all that ever has to be done.