Utliff had a crude pouch full of stones at his side. He threw hard at the runners as they went, hitting one but not stopping it. Both men laughed. They were in no desperate need for food. There was always plenty; and besides, hunting runners was done more easily from the bottom of the hill, as they knew from experience.
They pulled up in a cloud of dust at the bottom, still laughing. At this time of day, high noon, there was nothing to fear. In fact there were only the crunchers to fear at any time, and crunchers stayed supine in the shade at this period of heat. The quackers over in the swamp hurt nobody unless they were molested. It was a good life.
True, there came silent moments of fear, moments—as when one looked at Utliff’s distorted face—when unease crawled like a little animal inside one’s skull. But then one could generally run off and hunt something, and do a little killing and feel good again.
Dyak disliked thinking. The things that came from the head were bad, those from the body mainly good. With a whoop, he ran through the long grass and hurled himself in a dive over the steep bank and into the river. The river swallowed him, sweetly singing. He came to the surface gasping and shaking the water from his eyes. The water was deep under him, in a channel scoured by the river as it curved along its course, and it flowed warm and pure. It spoke to his body. On the opposite bank, where the quacker herd now plunged in confusion at his appearance, it was staled and too hot.
Letting out a shriek of delight, Dyak fought the satin currents that wrapped his body and called to his friend. Utliff stood mutely on the miniature cliff, staring across at Dyak.
“Come on in! You’ll feel better!”
Before Utliff obediently jumped, Dyak took in the whole panorama. Afterwards, it remained stamped on his mind.
Behind his friend stood the hillside that none of them had ever climbed, though their dwelling caves tunneled into the lower slopes. He noted that three women from the settlement stood there, clutching each other in the way women always did and laughing. On the heavy air, their sounds were just audible. In the evening, they would come down to the river and bathe and splash each other, laughing because they had forgotten (or because they remembered?) that the dark was coming on. Dyak felt a mild pleasure at their laughter. It meant that their stomachs were full and their heads empty. They were content.
Behind Utliff to the other side, Dyak saw Semary appear and stand unobtrusively in a position where she could watch the two men from behind a tree. Semary was smiling, although she did not laugh as frequently as the other women. No doubt the noise had attracted her from her own settlement. Though Dyak and Utliff knew little about her, they knew this girl was for some reason something of an outcast from her own people, the three men and three women who lived toward the place where the cruncher had its current den.
Dyak stopped smiling when he saw her. It hurt him to look at Semary.
She was less corpulent and bowed than any other women he had seen. On her face was not even an incipient mustache, such as sometimes blossomed on the lips of other women; nor was there hair between her breasts. Though all this was strange, it was the strangeness that attracted. And yet—to be with her hurt. He knew this from the times when Utliff and he had stayed with her; and from that time, he knew too that she was passive, and did not fight and bite and laugh as the other women did when they had hold of you.
The being with her and the passivity hurt in his head.
As he looked at these things and thought these things hearing the heat calls of the cicadas and soaking in the heavy green of the world, Utliff jumped into the river.
It was far from being his usual flashing crashing dive. When his head appeared above the surface, he was crying for help.
“Dyak, Dy! Help me, I’m a goner!”
Alarmed, Dyak was with him in three strokes, although still half expecting this might be a ruse that would earn him a ducking as soon as he reached his friend. But Utliff’s body was limp and heavy. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and groaned.
Grasping him firmly under the arm with one hand, Dyak slid beneath him until they were both on their backs, and kicked out for the nearest tree, a gnarled old broken pine that overhung the water so conveniently that they often used it to climb out on. Struggling only feebly, Utliff groaned again, and choked as water slopped into his mouth. With his free hand, Dyak reached up and seized a projecting limb of the tree.
He hauled himself far enough out of the water so that he could wrap his left leg around the tree trunk for leverage. It was still a terrible job to hook Utliff out of the water. As he leaned over, head almost in the river, panting and tugging, another pair of hands reached out to help him. Semary had run along the tree trunk and was beside him. With a grunt of thanks, he was able to let her support Utliff in the water while he released his friend and took a better purchase on him. Holding the tree trunk tightly between his knees, he hauled Utliff up beside him.
He and Semary rested the body along the trunk for a moment and then dragged it to the bank between them.
Utliff was dead.
Just for a moment, he shuddered violently. His eyes came open and his knees jerked up. Then he slumped back.
Almost at once, he began the horrible process of disintegration.
The limbs writhed as their muscles curled up. The flesh fell away. The flesh took on a greenish tinge. There came a frightening foetid smell as the insides revealed themselves; from them came a popping bubbling sound such as was never heard in the bowels of the living. In fear, Dyak and Semary rose and crept away, hand in hand. Utliff was not their kind any more. He had ceased to be Utliff.
They moved away from the river bank, hiding themselves among low trees and eventually sitting side by side on a large smooth boulder. Dyak was still dripping water, but the warmth of the rock helped to dry him and stop his shivering. Semary began to pluck leaves from an overhanging tree and stick them on his damp chest. She smiled as she did so, so sweetly that he was forced to smile back though it hurt him.
He put his arm about her and rubbed his nose in her armpit. She chuckled, and they slid down until their backs were against the boulder. Dyak began to peel the damp leaves off his chest and stick them on to her body. In his head, he was conscious of an affection for Semary. More than an affection. He had felt this thing with women of his own group, and he had felt it for Semary before this. The disturbance was at once pleasant and immeasurably sad. He did not know how to drive it away.
Semary too seemed full of the same feeling. Suddenly she said to him, “People wear out.” It was as if she wanted to hide the subject in her head.
As always when they spoke, Dyak was aware of a great gulf that could not be bridged by words. Words were so much feebler than the things they were meant to represent. He answered, feeling the inadequacy of what he said, “All people are made to wear out.”
“How do you mean? How are people made?”
“They are made to wear out. They come down new from the hills. Being new does not last. . . Their faces get strange. Then they wear out, like Utliff.”
With an effort, the girl said, “Did you come from the hills long after Utliff?”
“Many, many days. And you, dear Semary?”
“Only a few days ago did I come from the hills. I came ... I came from by the smooth thing—that black barrier by the hill.”
He did not know what barrier she meant. Under his skin, he felt a sort of strangeness, fear and excitement and other things for which he had no name. Her eyes stared, as if both of them were near to something they had not dared to allow inside their heads.