Robert Silverberg - The Longest Way Home

It was dark, now, and time for sleep. But he did not want to use the same campsite that he had used the night before. That would summon too many memories of the animal that had visited him there. Instead he settled down not far from the dying ashes of his fire, though the ground was bare and uneven there. While he lay waiting for sleep to take him Joseph remembered a time he had gone with Anceph on a three-day hunting trip in Garyona Woods, he and Rickard and some of their friends, and on the second morning, awakening at daybreak, he had seen Anceph crouching over the faintly glowing coals of their campfire, staring at small plump animals, vivid red in color, that seemed to be leaping around and across them.

“Ember-toads,” Anceph explained. “You find droves of them in the morning whenever there’s a fire burning down. They like the warmth, I suppose.” He was holding a little net in one hand; and, as Joseph watched, he swept it swiftly back and forth until he had caught a dozen or more of the things. “Plenty of good sweet meat on their legs,” said Anceph. “We’ll grill ’em for breakfast. You’ll like the way they taste.” He was right about that. Rickard refused indignantly even to try one; but Joseph had had his fill, and recalled to this day how good they had been. He wondered if there would be ember-toads hopping about what was left of his fire in the morning, but he did not think there would—they were found only in Helikis, so far as he knew—and indeed there was nothing but white ash in his fire-pit when he woke. No ember-toads, not here, and the body of good-natured Anceph, who knew so much about hunting and all manner of other things, lay in some unmarked grave far to the north at Getfen House.

The task for this morning was to cut and pack however much of the striped creature’s meat he could carry with him when he resumed his march. Joseph could not say how long the meat would last, but he wanted to waste as little of it as necessary, and perhaps in this dry climate it would be slow to spoil.

He got down to the job quickly and in a businesslike manner. It did not make him suffer as the killing and the first stage of the butchering had made him suffer: this part of it was just so much work: unpleasant, messy, slogging work, nothing more. He was greatly relieved not to feel any but the faintest vestige of last night’s grief and shame over the killing of that harmless, friendly animal. Everything has to die sooner or later, Joseph told himself. If he had hurried the event along for the striped animal, it was only because his own life would have been imperiled if he could not quickly find food, and in this world those who are quicker and stronger and smarter end up eating those who are not: it was the rule, the inflexible rule of the inflexible universe. Even Thayle, who thought it was wrong that the Masters should have set themselves up as overlords over the Folk, did not see anything wrong with eating the flesh of the beasts. It was a normal, natural thing. He had eaten plenty of meat in his life, just like everyone else, without ever once weeping over it before; the only difference this time was that the act of slaughtering it himself had brought him that much closer to the bloody reality of what it meant to be a carnivore, and for a moment in his solitude here he had let himself give way to feelings of guilt. Some part of him, the Master part that had been so rarely in evidence these recent days, found that unacceptable. Guilt was not a luxury he could afford, out here in this lonely wilderness. He must put it aside.

Joseph spent the first half of the morning cutting the meat up into flat strips, letting all residual blood drain away, and carefully wrapping them in the thick, leathery leaves of a tree that grew nearby. He hoped that that might preserve it from decay for another few days. When he had loaded his pack with all that it could hold, he roasted what was left of the meat for his midday meal, and set out toward the south once more. After a few dozen steps something impelled him to look back for one last glance at his campsite, and he saw that two scrawny yellow-furred beasts with bushy tails were rooting around busily in the scattered entrails of the animal he had killed. Nothing goes to waste, Joseph thought, at least not in the world of nature. Man is the only animal that countenances being wasteful.

The day was uneventful, and the one after that. Though there was no actual path for him to follow, the land was gently undulating, easy enough to traverse. Far off in the distance he saw mountains of considerable size, purple and pink in the morning haze, and he wondered whether he was going to have to cross them. But that was not something to which he needed to give much thought at the moment. The immediate terrain presented no problems. Joseph’s thighs and calves had shed the stiffness of a few days before, and he saw no reason why he could not cover twenty miles a day, or even thirty, now that he was in the rhythm of it.

He was pleased to see that the territory through which he was passing grew less forbidding as he continued onward: before long the soil became blacker and richer, the vegetation much more lush. Soon the ominous sharp-ridged salt-encrusted black hills dropped away behind him. There was more moisture in the air, and better cloud-cover, so that he did not have to endure the constant pounding presence of the summer sun, although by mid-morning each day the heat was considerable. He found water, too, a thin white sheet of it that came sluicing down over a mica-speckled rock-face from some clifftop spring high above, collecting in a shallow basin at the foot of the cliff; he stripped gladly and washed himself from head to toe, and drank deep, and refilled his flask, which had gone so low that he had been permitting himself only the most niggardly sips at the widest possible intervals. A bush not far away was bowed down under heavy clusters of fat, lustrous, shining golden berries that looked too attractive not to be edible. Joseph tried one and found it full of sweet juice, soft as honey. He risked a second, and then a third. That had become his wilderness rule, three berries and no more, see what happens next. By the time he had built a fire to roast his evening meat, no harmful effects had manifested themselves, so he allowed himself another dozen with his meal. When he resumed his journey after breakfast he took three big clusters with him, but later he saw that the bush was common all along his path, wherever a source of water was to be found, and he did not bother carrying such a large supply. Within a couple of days, though, the berry-bushes were nowhere to be seen, and when he tried a smaller, harder red berry from a different bush it burned his mouth, so that he spat it quickly out. Even that one taste was enough to keep him awake half the night with a troublesome griping of the abdomen, but he felt better in the morning.

An hour into his morning march Joseph came up over a gentle rise in the land and saw a road cutting through the valley below him, looping down from the northeast and aligning itself with the route that the position of the sun told him he must take. Quite possibly it was the same road that Thayle had left him on, the one that he had abandoned when it seemed to turn eastward. It did at least look similar to that one, rough and narrow and badly in need of maintenance. There was no traffic on it. He had never realized how sparsely populated so much of the northern continent was.

After only a few days back in the purity of the wild Joseph felt a strange reluctance to set foot again on anything so unnatural as an asphalt highway. But the road did seem to run due south from where he was, and therefore was probably his most direct course toward the Isthmus. There was no harm in following it by day, he thought. He would go off into the bush each evening when it came to be time to settle down for the night.