Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

“Will the child be all right?” he asks.

“Yes,” says the woman calmly. “Already the tooth holes are closing. See?”

The rest of the women are doing the things they usually do in the morning. Some are tending the central fire; others squat around it, warming themselves. Their body thermostats are set for tropical conditions, so they sometimes find it cold before the sun is high. The fire is fed with dead twigs and branches, but primarily with dung, made into patties the size and shape of hamburgers and dried in the noonday sun. Since the Children of Crake are vegetarians and eat mostly grass and leaves and roots, this material burns well enough. As far as Snowman can tell, fire-tending is about the only thing the women do that might be classified as work. Apart from helping to catch his weekly fish, that is. And cooking it for him. On their own behalf they do no cooking.

“Greetings, oh Snowman,” says the next woman he comes to. Her mouth is green from the breakfast she’s been chewing. She’s breastfeeding a year-old boy, who looks up at Snowman, lets the nipple pop out of his mouth, and begins to cry. “It’s only Snowman!” she says. “He won’t hurt you.”

Snowman still hasn’t got used to it, the growth rate of these kids. The yearling looks like a five-year-old. By the age of four he’ll be an adolescent. Far too much time was wasted in childrearing, Crake used to say. Childrearing, and being a child. No other species used up sixteen years that way.

Some of the older children have spotted him; they come closer, chanting, “Snowman, Snowman!” So he hasn’t yet lost his allure. Now all the people are gazing at him curiously, wondering what he’s doing here. He never arrives without a reason. On his first visits they’d thought—judging from his appearance—that he must be hungry, and they’d offered him food—a couple of handfuls of choice leaves and roots and grass, and several caecotrophs they’d kept especially for him—and he’d had to explain carefully that their food was not his food.

He finds the caecotrophs revolting, consisting as they do of semi-digested herbage, discharged through the anus and reswallowed two or three times a week. This had been another boy-genius concept on the part of Crake. He’d used the vermiform appendix as the base on which to construct the necessary organ, reasoning that at an earlier evolutionary stage, when the ancestral diet had been higher in roughage, the appendix must have fulfilled some such function. But he’d stolen the specific idea from the Lepor idae, the hares and rabbits, which depend on caecotrophs rather than on several stomachs like the ruminants. Maybe this is why bobkittens have started hunting the young Crakers, Snowman thinks: beneath the citrus overlay, they can smell the rabbity aroma of the caecotrophs.

Jimmy had argued with Crake over this feature. However you look at it, he’d said, what it boiled down to was eating your own shit. But Crake had merely smiled. For animals with a diet consisting largely of unrefined plant materials, he’d pointed out, such a mechanism was necessary to break down the cellulose, and without it the people would die. Also, as in the Leporidae , the caecotrophs were enriched with Vitamin B1, and with other vitamins and minerals as well, at four or five times the level of ordinary waste material. Caecotrophs were simply a part of alimentation and digestion, a way of making maximum use of the nutrients at hand. Any objections to the process were purely aesthetic.

That was the point, Jimmy had said.

Crake had said that if so it was a bad one.

Snowman is now surrounded by an attentive circle. “Greetings, Children of Crake,” he says. “I have come to tell you that I’m going on a journey.” The adults must have deduced this already, from his long stick and the way he’s tied his sheet: he’s gone on journeys before, or that’s what he’s called his looting forays into the trailer parks and adjacent pleeblands.

“Are you going to see Crake?” asks one of the children.

“Yes,” says Snowman. “I’ll try to see him. I’ll see him if he’s there.”

“Why?” says one of the older children.

“There are some things I need to ask him,” says Snowman cautiously.

“You must tell him about the bobkitten,” says Empress Josephine. “The one that bit.”

“That is a matter for Oryx,” says Madame Curie. “Not for Crake.” The other women nod.

“We want to see Crake too,” the children begin. “We too, we too! We want to see Crake too!” It’s one of their favourite ideas, going to see Crake. Snowman blames himself: he shouldn’t have told them such exciting lies at the beginning. He’d made Crake sound like Santa Claus.

“Don’t bother Snowman,” says Eleanor Roosevelt gently. “Surely he is making this journey to help us. We must thank him.”

“Crake is not for children,” says Snowman, looking as stern as he can manage.

“Let us come too! We want to see Crake!”

“Only Snowman can ever see Crake,” Abraham Lincoln says mildly. That seems to settle it.

“This will be a longer journey,” Snowman says. “Longer than the other journeys. Maybe I won’t come back for two days.” He holds up two fingers. “Or three,” he adds. “So you shouldn’t worry. But while I’m away, be sure to stay here in your home, and do everything the way Crake and Oryx have taught you.”

A chorus of yesses, much nodding of heads. Snowman doesn’t mention the possibility of danger to himself. Perhaps it isn’t a thing they ever consider, nor is it a subject he brings up—the more invulnerable they think he is, the better.

“We will come with you,” says Abraham Lincoln. Several of the other men look at him, then nod.

“No!” says Snowman, taken aback. “I mean, you can’t see Crake, it isn’t allowed.” He doesn’t want them tagging along, absolutely not! He doesn’t want them witnessing any weaknesses or failures on his part. Also, some of the sights along the way might be bad for their state of mind. Inevitably they would shower him with questions. In addition to all of which, a day in their company would bore the pants off him.

But you don’t have any pants , says a voice in his head—a small voice this time, a sad little child’s voice. Joke! Joke! Don’t kill me!

Please, not now, thinks Snowman. Not in company. In company, he can’t answer back.

“We would come with you to protect you,” says Benjamin Franklin, looking at Snowman’s long stick. “From the bobkittens that bite, from the wolvogs.”

“Your smell is not very strong,” adds Napoleon.

Snowman finds this offensively smug. Also it’s too euphemistic by half: as they all know, his smell is strong enough, it just isn’t the right kind. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “You stay here.”

The men look dubious, but he thinks they’ll do as he says. To reinforce his authority he holds his watch up to his ear. “Crake says he’ll be watching over you,” he says. “To keep you safe.” Watch, watching over , says the small child’s voice. It’s a pun, you cork-nut.

“Crake watches over us in the daytime, and Oryx watches over us at night,” Abraham Lincoln says dutifully. He doesn’t sound too convinced.

“Crake always watches over us,” says Simone de Beauvoir serenely. She’s a yellow-brown woman who reminds Snowman of Dolores, his long-lost Philippina nanny; he sometimes has to resist the urge to drop to his knees and throw his arms around her waist.

“He takes good care of us,” says Madame Curie. “You must tell him that we are grateful.”

Snowman goes back along the Snowman Fish Path. He feels mushy: nothing breaks him up like the generosity of these people, their willingness to be of help. Also their gratitude towards Crake. It’s so touching, and so misplaced.