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long and lively. "A little girl about my age, from her size," he said.
His grandmother threw a flat pod out of the door so the chickens could
peck it up.
"I saw a little girl with the wolves," he said.
His grandmother tipped water into the pot, got up from the table and
hung the pot of peas on the hook over the fire. There wasn't time, that night,
but next morning, very early, she herself took the boy back up the mountain.
"Tell your father what you told me."
They went to look at the wolves' tracks. On a bit of dampish ground they
found a print, not like that of a dog's pad, much less like that of a child's
footprint, yet Peter worried and puzzled over it until he made sense of it.
"She was running on all fours with her arse stuck up in the air. . .
therefore. . . she'd put all her weight on the ball of her foot, wouldn't she?
And splay out her toes, see. . . like that."
He went barefoot in summer, like all the village children; he inserted
the ball of his own foot in the print, to show his father what kind of mark he
would have made if he, too, always ran on all fours.
"No use for a heel, if you run that way. So she doesn't have a
heelprint. Stands to reason."
At last his father made a slow acknowledgement of Peter's powers of
deduction, giving the child a veiled glance of disquiet. It was a clever
child.
They soon found her. She was asleep. Her spine had grown so supple she
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could curl into a perfect C. She woke up when she heard them and ran, but
somebody caught her with a sliding noose at the end of a rope; the noose over
her head jerked tight and she fell to the ground with her eyes popping and
rolling. A big, grey, angry bitch appeared out of nowhere but Peter's father
blasted it to bits with his shotgun. The girl would have choked if the old
woman hadn't taken her head on her lap and pulled the knot loose. The girl bit
the grandmother's hand.
The girl scratched and fought until the men tied her wrists and ankles
together with twine and slung her from a pole to carry her back to the
village. Then she went limp. She didn't scream or shout, she didn't seem to be
able to, she made only a few dull, guttural sounds in the back of her throat,
and, though she did not seem to know how to cry, water trickled out of the
corners of her eyes.
How burned she was by the weather! Bright brown all over; and how filthy
she was! Caked with mud and dirt. And every inch of her chestnut hide was
scored and scabbed with dozens of scars of sharp abrasions of rock and thorn.
Her hair dragged on the ground as they carried her along; it was stuck with
burrs and it was so dirty you could not see what colour it might be. She was
dreadfully verminous. She stank. She was so thin that all her ribs stuck out.
The fine, plump, potato-fed boy was far bigger than she, although she was a
year or so older.
Solemn with curiosity, he trotted behind her. Granny stumped alongside
with her bitten hand wrapped up in her apron. Once the girl was dumped on the
earth floor of her grandmother's house, the boy secretly poked at her left
buttock with his forefinger, out of curiosity, to see what she felt like. She
felt warm but hard. She did not so much as twitch when he touched her. She had
given up the struggle; she lay trussed on the floor and pretended to be dead.
Granny's house had the one large room which, in winter, they shared with
the goats. As soon as it caught a whiff of her, the big tabby mouser hissed
like a pricked balloon and bounded up the ladder that went to the hayloft
above. Soup smoked on the fire and the table was laid. It was now about
supper-time but still quite light; night comes late on the summer mountain.
"Untie her," said the grandmother.
Her son wasn't willing at first but the old woman would not be denied,
so he got the breadknife and cut the rope round the girl's ankles. All she did
was kick, but when he cut the rope round her wrists, it was if he had let a
fiend loose. The onlookers ran out of the door, the rest of the family ran for
the ladder to the hayloft but Granny and Peter both ran to the door, to shoot
the bolt, so she could not get out.
The trapped one knocked round the room. Bang -- over went the table.
Crash, tinkle -- the supper dishes smashed. Bang, crash tinkle -- the dresser
fell forward upon the hard white shale of crockery it shed in falling. Over
went the meal barrel and she coughed, she sneezed like a child sneezes, no
different, and then she bounced around on fear-stiffened legs in a white cloud
until the flour settled on everything like a magic powder that made everything
strange. Her first frenzy over, she squatted a moment, questing with her long
nose and then began to make little rushing sorties, now here, now there,
snapping and yelping and tossing her bewildered head.
She never rose up on two legs; she crouched, all the time, on her hands
and tiptoes, yet it was not quite like crouching, for you could see how all
fours came naturally to her as though she had made a different pact with
gravity than we have, and you could see, too, how strong the muscles in her
thighs had grown on the mountain, how taut the twanging arches of her feet,
and that indeed, she only used her heels when she sat back on her haunches.
She growled; now and then she coughed out those intolerable, thick grunts of
distress. All you could see of her rolling eyes were the whites, which were
the bluish, glaring white of snow.
Several times, her bowels opened, apparently involuntarily. The kitchen
smelled like a privy yet even her excrement was different to ours, the refuse
of raw, strange, unguessable, wicked feeding, shit of a wolf.
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Oh, horror!
She bumped into the hearth, knocked over the pan hanging from the hook
and the spilled contents put out the fire. Hot soup scalded her forelegs.
Shock of pain. Squatting on her hindquarters, holding the hurt paw dangling
piteously from its wrist before her, she howled, in high, sobbing arcs.
Even the old woman, who had contracted with herself to love the child of
her dead daughter, was frightened when she heard the girl howl.
Peter's heart gave a hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling;
he was not conscious of his own fear because he could not take his eyes off [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]