It finally occurred to me that if the boy has lived (as he says) a good part of his life in the wild Country, he may be—despite the corrupting influence of his father and his own consequent belief that he is himself partly Annese—an excellent source of information. I have the interview on tape, but as I have tried to make it a practice to do with the more interesting material, I transcribe it here.
Self: “You’ve told me that you and your mother have often lived, you say in spring and summer particularly, “in back of beyond”—sometimes for months at a stretch. I have been informed that fifty or more years ago Annese children often came to play with human children on the remote stock farms. Did anything of that sort ever happen to you? Did you ever see anyone out here besides your mother and yourself? After all, we’ve seen no one in four days.”
V. R. T.: “We saw a great many people almost every day, many animals and birds, trees that were alive, just as you and I have traveling, as you say for these four days—though this is still not the back of beyond where one sees gods come floating down the river on logs, and trees gone traveling, the gods with large and small heads, and blossoms of the water hydrangea in their hair; or the elk-men whose heads and hair and beards and arms and bodies were like those of men, whose legs were the bodies of red elk so that they needed to mate with the cow-women once as beasts and once as men do, and fought shouting all spring on the hillsides, then when the black mereskimmers flew back from the south were at once friends again and went away with their arms around each other and stole eggs from the pine-thrashers or kicked stones at me; and The Shadow Children of course came to steal by evening, riding up in the bubbles and the foam from the springs—then my mother would not let me go out from beneath her hair—this was when I was very small—after the sun set, but when I was larger I would go out and shout and make them run!—they believe—they always believe—that they’ll get all around, and then they’ll all run in at once, biting; but if you turn quickly and shout, they never do, and there are never as many of them as they think, because some are only in the minds of the others so that at the time to fight they fade back into each other and become one lonely.”
Self: “Why haven’t you and I seen any of these strange things?”
V. R. T.: “I have.”
Self: “What have you seen—I mean, while you’ve been with me.”
V. R. T.: “Birds and animals and trees living, and The Shadow Children.”
Self: “You mean the stars. If you see anything extraordinary you’ll tell me, won’t you?”
V. R. T.: (Nods)
Self: “You’re an unusual boy. Do you ever go to school when you’re with your father in Frenchman’s Landing?”
V. R. T.: “Sometimes.”
Self: “You’re almost a man now. Have you given any thought to what you’re going to do in a few years?”
V. R. T.: (Weeps)
There was no reply to that last question; the boy broke into tears, embarrassing me so acutely that after putting my arm around his shoulders for a moment, I had to walk away from the fire, leaving him there sobbing for half an hour or more while I blundered around in the brush where huge worms, luminous but of the livid color of a dead man’s lips, writhe underfoot at night. I confess it was a miserably stupid question; what is he going to do, a beggar’s son, no better than half-educated? He does read well—he’s borrowed some of my anthropology texts, and I’ve asked him questions and gotten better answers than I would have expected from the average university student; but his hand-writing is miserable, as I’ve seen from an old school notebook (one of his very few pieces of personal baggage).
April 11. An eventful day. Let me see if I can cure my habit of skipping back and forth and give everything of interest in the order in which it occurred. When I came back into camp last night (I see that at the close of yesterday’s entry I left myself blundering about in bushes), the boy was asleep in his bag. I put more wood on the fire and played back the.tape and wrote the stuff on the last page, then turned in. About an hour before dawn we were both roused by a commotion among the mules and went running out to see what the trouble was, myself with a flashlight and the heavy rifle, the boy with two burning sticks from the fire. Didn’t see anything, but smelled a stink like rotten meat and heard some big animal, which I really don’t believe could have been one of the mules, making off. The mules, when we found them, were covered with sweat, and one had broken its hobble—fortunately it didn’t go far, and as soon as it got light the boy was able to catch it, though it took him the best part of an hour—and the two that were still with us seemed very glad to claim the protection due domestic animals.
By the time we had thrashed around long enough to decide there was nothing to find, further sleep was out of the question. We struck the tent, loaded the mules, and then at my insistence spent the first hour in backtracking our path of the day before to see if we could turn up the spoor of any large predatory animal. We saw the cat (which growing bolder now that I’ve stopped shooting at it) and some tracks of what the boy calls a fire-fox and which, by comparing his description with my Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne, I have decided is most probably Hutchesson’s fennec, a fox or coyote-like creature with immense ears and a liking for poultry and carrion.
After this little interlude of backtracking we made good progress, and about an hour before noon I made the best shot of the trip to date, dropping a huge brute—not described in the Field Guide—similar to the carabao of Asian Earth; this with a single brain shot from the heavy rifle. I paced the distance when the animal was down and found it to be a full three hundred yards!
Naturally I was proud as hell and carefully examined the result of my shot, which had struck the big fellow just in back of the right ear. Even there the skull was so massive that the bullet had failed to penetrate completely; so that the animal had probably been alive for a good part of the time while I was pacing off the distance to it; there seemed to have been a heavy flow of lachrymal fluid that left broad wet streaks in the dust beneath each eye. I lifted one of the eyelids with my fingers after I had looked at the wound and noticed that the eyes were double-pupiled, like those of certain Terrestrial fish; the lower segments of one eye moved slightly when I touched it with my finger, indicating that the animal may have been hanging on a bit even then. The double pupils don’t seem characteristic of most life here; so I suppose they must be an adaptation induced by the creature’s largely aquatic habits.
I longed to have the head mounted, but that was out of the question; as it was the boy was almost in tears (his own eyes, which are large, are a startling green), imagining that I would want to load the entire carcass, which must have weighed a good fifteen pounds, on to the mules, and assuring me that they could not be expected to carry so much. Eventually I was able to convince him that I intended to leave behind the entrails, the head (though how I regretted those horns!) and the hide and hoofs, as well as the ribs and, in fact, all but the choicest meat. The mules, even so, appreciated neither the added weight nor the smell of blood, and we had more difficulty with them than I had anticipated.