I said we seemed to be pretty much in the same boat.
«Oh no!» she said, with a very youthful and downright practicality. «I'm a valuable property, you're just a Criminal–a liquidation-piece. I don't know just what the Master Forester does with the Criminals they give him, but I do know it's something slow and messy. How much have you seen here?»
I told her.
She nodded. «I haven't seen those cat-women, but I've heard about them. And heard them. They'll be doctored pieces, I expect.» The casualness of her tone shocked me more than the thing she suggested. The surgical excision from a perfect human body of the element that lights it with a human soul was not a nightmare fancy to her but a commonplace practice.
«I've been here six months,» she told me. «I'm a Jagdstuck–a game-girl, kept specially for these hunts. They pick out the good runners for that: there's a whole collection of us–Aryans as well as Under-Race. In between hunts it's not so bad. The forester boys aren't bad fellows in their way, until there's a shooting party. Then it's the dogs that terrify you; you know you ought not to run, but you can't control your fear when you hear the dogs behind you. And you know they'd let them get you if you didn't run, because you'd be no use for sport and they'd make an example of you to frighten the others. And even the best of the foresters go mad when they're hunting you. I've been hunted different ways. Sometimes they have guests who want more exercise than this Gauleiter's party. They take them shooting wild deer in the outer forest, and then for fun they have a mock deer hunt here. They turn you loose a day beforehand and then track you with hounds. You try to hide in the thickest places you can find, but when the hounds find you they send in those savage dogs and of course you break out and run for it. They shoot at you then with a sort of little dart that sticks fast in your flesh and has a long coloured thread attached to it, so that they know which man has shot you. They dress you like a deer for that in this tough skin sort of stuff and just leave you bare where the darts will stick without doing any permanent damage. The things sting like the devil, though, and you can't get them out without stopping; but then, as soon as they see you're hit they loose the retrievers–those ape-boys–to catch you and truss you up. But you have more chance at that game: they have to shoot you in the right place because the darts won't go through the deerskin stuff, and if it's not a fair hit they won't loose the apes. I've been hunted three times like that and got away twice.»
«But they track you down afterwards?» I said, and I told her about the party I had seen out with bloodhounds and baboon-boys.
«Oh, yes,» she said coolly. «They were after me most of yesterday, but I gave them the slip in the marshes. They'll get me in the end, of course, by watching the feeding places, but I shall have had a good long run.»
«But aren't you afraid of what they'll do when they do catch you?»
«They won't do anything. True, they let the apes play with you a bit and that's loathsome. But they don't punish you for running–after all, that's what they want you to do. It's no sport for them if you give up.»
«But if you do refuse to run?»
«Then the dogs eat you,» she said with calm finality. «But once you've had one of those darts in you you'll do your best to dodge them the next time. They put something on them to make them smart more.»
We crouched there in the long grass through most of that warm, sunny forenoon, and it was the strangest of wonders to me to listen to that pleasant young voice, speaking my own language, talking with such an odd mixture of naivete and experience, with such frank acceptance of fantastic circumstances. After a while I realised that she had fully made up her mind that I had been a member of an English resistance organisation: there was a kind of deference, almost respect, in her tone when she hinted at my 'work'–as though I had been a master in underground activities while she was just a beginner. She called me 'Friend' so often and with such an air of conscientiousness that I perceived that the word must be the consecrated form of address among members of the resistance movement, and I fell into using it to her and saw how that pleased her.
«But what are we to do about you?» she repeated.
«I'm going to escape,» I said, with confidence.
«How?»
«Across the wire.»
She shook her head very solemnly. «It can't be done. It's charged with Bohlen Rays, you know. One touch of that and you're done for. We've talked about that-some of the other Aryan malignants and I. There was a girl who'd been hunted once and was so afraid of being caught again that she said the next time they chased her she'd make straight for the fence and throw herself on it and kill herself. Well, she was turned out again as a deer one of the times that I was. She hid near the fence. They found her and she was hit as she dashed out. I saw it. She ran straight at the fence. But she wasn't killed– not outright, that is. I saw her fall and I heard her screaming from the burns. But what they do, you know, is to switch the rays off if something big goes into them. They can do that from the watch-towers. They picked this girl up and brought her in again. I expect she died from the burns. We never saw her again.»
I told her my own experience of the rays. «But I don't intend to rush the fence,» I explained. «My idea is a tunnel.»
She looked blank, and so I discoursed on the art of moling as understood by prisoners of war. She listened attentively and saw the obvious flaws in my plan at once.
«It'll take too long,» she pointed out. «Even with two of us working at it. They'll not leave you alone long enough.»
«But there must be other criminals in the forest besides me,» I argued. I told her about the Frenchman. He seemed to have been free a long time. He seemed to know where to hide.
She bent her head until her face was quite hidden by the grass. «I don't know,» she said in a low, hesitating voice, «I don't know what happened to him. I heard the horn...»
«Well,» I said, «I'm going to have a shot at it. The thing is to get some tools. You know the ropes here better than I do. Where do they keep the spades?»
Then, when I showed so bold a purpose, she took up the idea with enthusiasm, and began excitedly planning how to get hold of some implement. She knew the place, she declared: the Kranichfels pavilion. The men who looked after the valley where the butts were kept tools there. She knew her way about there, for the game-girls were kept there when a drive was being prepared. I proposed to go there that night and see what I could lift.
«No, no!» she exclaimed. «I will do that! You'll be spotted at once in those things. I can slip in at dusk without them noticing. There are slave-girls there and I can pass for one of them. Help me only to get rid of this headpiece.»
The different parts of a game-girl's costume were so sewn on that the wearer could not remove them herself–at least without scissors or a knife. I hunted about until I found two flints and cracked one to make a sharp edge, then sawed through the stitching that fastened the mask to her gorget. The fine, solid workmanship of her trappings amazed me now when I could examine them closely. «Ah! German thoroughness!» she exclaimed scornfully and pitched the beaked mask into the thicket. «It's beyond belief what pains they'll take to get every detail just right. These forester officers are monomaniacs, and the most inhuman thing about them is the way they fail completely to see that you are a human being: they'll fuss and fiddle about with you for hours to get you exactly dressed for your part in one of their shows, and yet you feel that they understand nothing at all about girls, or human beings of any sort.»