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"How to accept my sharp and biting point," Katsuk whispered.
"What?"
"You need to know how to live that you may die correctly. First, you need to
live. Most of you hoquat do not live."
"Does your spirit make you talk crazy like that?"
Katsuk felt hysterical laughter in his throat, said: "Go to sleep or I will
kill you before you have lived."
David heard intensity in the words, began to tremble. The man was crazy. He
could do anything. He had murdered.
Katsuk felt the trembling, reached back, and patted the boy's shoulder. "Do
not worry, Hoquat. You will yet live. I promise it."
Still the boy's trembling continued.
Katsuk sat up, took the old flute from his belt pouch, blew softly into it.
He felt the song go out, smoke-yearning sounds in the shelter.
For a few moments, Katsuk imagined himself in some old, safe-place with a
friend, with a brother. They would share music. They would plan the hunt for
the morrow. They would preserve the dignity of this place and of each other.
David listened to the low music, lulled by it.
Presently, Katsuk stopped, restored the flute to its pouch. Hoquat breathed
with the even rhythm of sleep. As though it were a thing of reality which
could be seen and touched, Katsuk felt a bond being created between himself
and this boy. Was it possible they were really brothers in that other world
which moved invisibly and soundlessly beside the world of the senses?
My brother, Hoquat, Katsuk thought.
* * *
From a paper by Charles Hobuhet for Philosophy 200:
Your language is filled with a rigid time sense which denies the plastic
fluidity of the universe. The whole universe represents a single organism to
my people. It is the raw material of our creation. Your language denies this
with every word you utter. You break the universe into lonely pieces. My
people recognize immediately that Whitehead's
"bifurcation of nature" is illusion. It is a product of your language. The
people who program your computers know this. They say: "Garbage In --
Garbage Out." When they get garbage out, they look to the program, to the
language.
My language requires that I
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participate with my surroundings in everything I do. Your language isolates
you from the universe. You have forgotten the origin of the letters in which
your language is written.
Those letters evolved from ideographs which stood for movements in the
surrounding universe.
* * *
In the low light of morning, David stood beneath a tall cedar, fingered the
five pebbles in his pocket. There was dew on the grass outside the cedar's
spread, as though each star from the night had left its mark upon the earth.
Katsuk stood in the grass adjusting the straps of the pack. Morning's red
glow remained on the peaks beyond him.
David asked: "Where are we going today?"
"You talk too much, Hoquat."
"You're always telling me to shut up."
"Because you talk too much."
"How'm I going to learn if I don't talk?"
"By opening your senses and by understanding what your senses tell you."
Katsuk pulled a fern frond from the ground, set off through the trees. He
swung the fern against his thigh as he walked, listened to the world around
him -- the sounds of the boy following, the animals -- Quail ran through an
opening off to his left: He saw the yellow-brown patch of an elk's rump far
off through the moss-green light of the morning.
They were climbing steadily now, their breath puffing out in white clouds.
Presently, they came to a saddleback filled with old-growth hemlock and went
down into a gloomy valley where lichen grew like scabs on the trees.
Water ran down their trail, filling the deep elk tracks, exposing small rocks,
splashing off the downhill side wherever a channel formed. The dominant sound
around them was the fall of their own footsteps.
Once, they passed a squirrel's head left on a log by a predator. The head was
being picked at by birds with black topknots and white breasts. The birds
continued their feeding even when the two humans walked within a pace of them.
At the foot of the valley, they came out of the trees to the reed fringe of a
small lake.
There was a dun-blue skyline full of haze beyond the lake; wax-green trees
came down to the far shore. A stretch of mud indicated shallows off to the
right. Bird tracks were written in the mud, crisscrossing from food to food.
Mergansers fed alertly along the far shore. As Katsuk and the boy emerged
from the screening trees, the ducks fled, beating the water with a whistling
in their wings, gaining flight at the last moment and circling back above the
intruders.
David said: "Gosh. Has anybody ever been here before?"
"My people . . . many times."
Katsuk studied the lake. The ducks had been wary. That was not a good sign.
A windfall hemlock lay across the reeds into the lake. Its back was scarred
by the passage of many hooves. Katsuk dropped the pack, stepped out onto the
log. It trembled beneath him. He wove his way between upthrusting limbs to a
flat space near the open water, hesitated. A black feather floated beside the
log. Katsuk knelt, plucked the feather from the water. He shook away
clinging moisture.
"Raven," he whispered.
It was a sign! He thrust the feather into his headband, steadied himself with
one hand on a limb, immersed his face to drink from the lake. The water was
cold.
The log trembled under him and he felt the boy approach.
Katsuk stood up and once more studied his surroundings. The boy made noisy
splashings drinking. There was a marsh at the lake's upper end and a meadow
beyond the marsh with a
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stream slashing through it. He felt the boy leave the log, turned.
The pack was an alien green mound beyond the reeds. He thought of the food in
it: a package of peanuts, two chocolate bars, tea bags, a bit of bacon, some
cheese.
Katsuk considered these things, thought:
I am not yet hungry enough to eat hoquat food.
The boy stood waiting beside the pack, staring at it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]