recognize it as a mule deer—the blood still dripping from its mouth was coal-black in the moonlight—maybe even the deer he’d marveled at earlier.
Like an atheist uncertain of his convictions and alone in a great and gloomy cathedral, he discovered suddenly that he believed the horrible stories he’d been told about Outsiders all his life, whether he wanted to or not. They had guns. They all had guns. They had murdered a helpless, beautiful animal he’d admired.
And they were laughing about it.
Afraid, deep inside, that such a fate awaited any interloper who caught these monsters in the middle of their terrible deed, he fearfully concealed himself in the all-too-sparse undergrowth beside the road and waited, almost afraid to breathe for fear of being discovered, until the hunting party was safely past.
So this was the freedom, he thought bitterly, to be afraid for his life. Shivering in the darkness, he wondered if that was all there might be to freedom.
Mrs. Singh
You are what you eat—which sort of accounts for vegetarians, I guess.
—Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, Hunting and Humanity
E merson didn’t cry.
Shaken by what he’d witnessed, cold, tired, aching, and hungry from his long ride in the rollabout—and what by this time seemed an even longer walk—he stumbled along the rough-surfaced roadbed in the moonlight, terrified of accidentally catching up with the deer hunters and trying not to travel too fast. He was too exhausted for it in any case, and had no idea where he was going.
For the first time since he’d left the Project that morning, he thought of his family—of his mother, father, five brothers and sisters—but it wasn’t the thinking of a tired, cold, aching, hungry runaway. It never occurred to him to miss them. Miserable as he was, he never wasted a fraction of a second on the idea of going back. It was only that he’d just realized that his family had never been very real to him, and it had suddenly occurred to him to wonder why.
Emerson had no way of knowing, because he had nothing to compare it with, that he’d grown up in a kind of silence as thorough and effective as if he’d been born deaf. Whenever he thought about it—something he’d indulged himself in less and less often as he’d gotten older—he did u n derstand that he hardly knew his father.
Walter Ngu had been a closemouthed, stoic-jawed man to begin with, lean and sinewy, with hard hands and sun-blackened skin. No trace r e mained of his past life—which, lacking any visible or tangible substance, had assumed the proportions of myth in his eldest son’s mind—as a s e nior accountant with a powerful Los Angeles law firm. On becoming foreman, something Emerson did remember, he’d begun rising even ea r lier than his fellow workers, laboring all day beside them in the fields—doing what he calculated was his own fair share in addition to the supervising—and returning after dark in a state of wordless exhaustion which left him no choice but to delegate the raising of his children to his wife.
Where Emerson’s father was thin, and as tall as any of his people ever got, his mother was soft, and as round as it was in her to become. Alice Ngu considered herself fortunate to have been chosen as the Chief A d ministrator’s housekeeper and would do or say nothing to jeopardize a position she believed offered her family certain advantages—which her idea of personal integrity invariably prevented her from pressing—over the ordinary peasants of the Project. If Walter’s strategy for survival consisted of working ten percent harder than anybody else, Alice’s was to demand ten percent less than she had a right to expect.
Emerson gathered that they’d been different before coming to Pallas, both of them ambitious and dissatisfied with political and economic ci r cumstances in their home state which were increasingly indistinguishable from those their own parents had fled in Asia. It was said—he
Like an atheist uncertain of his convictions and alone in a great and gloomy cathedral, he discovered suddenly that he believed the horrible stories he’d been told about Outsiders all his life, whether he wanted to or not. They had guns. They all had guns. They had murdered a helpless, beautiful animal he’d admired.
And they were laughing about it.
Afraid, deep inside, that such a fate awaited any interloper who caught these monsters in the middle of their terrible deed, he fearfully concealed himself in the all-too-sparse undergrowth beside the road and waited, almost afraid to breathe for fear of being discovered, until the hunting party was safely past.
So this was the freedom, he thought bitterly, to be afraid for his life. Shivering in the darkness, he wondered if that was all there might be to freedom.
Mrs. Singh
You are what you eat—which sort of accounts for vegetarians, I guess.
—Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, Hunting and Humanity
E merson didn’t cry.
Shaken by what he’d witnessed, cold, tired, aching, and hungry from his long ride in the rollabout—and what by this time seemed an even longer walk—he stumbled along the rough-surfaced roadbed in the moonlight, terrified of accidentally catching up with the deer hunters and trying not to travel too fast. He was too exhausted for it in any case, and had no idea where he was going.
For the first time since he’d left the Project that morning, he thought of his family—of his mother, father, five brothers and sisters—but it wasn’t the thinking of a tired, cold, aching, hungry runaway. It never occurred to him to miss them. Miserable as he was, he never wasted a fraction of a second on the idea of going back. It was only that he’d just realized that his family had never been very real to him, and it had suddenly occurred to him to wonder why.
Emerson had no way of knowing, because he had nothing to compare it with, that he’d grown up in a kind of silence as thorough and effective as if he’d been born deaf. Whenever he thought about it—something he’d indulged himself in less and less often as he’d gotten older—he did u n derstand that he hardly knew his father.
Walter Ngu had been a closemouthed, stoic-jawed man to begin with, lean and sinewy, with hard hands and sun-blackened skin. No trace r e mained of his past life—which, lacking any visible or tangible substance, had assumed the proportions of myth in his eldest son’s mind—as a s e nior accountant with a powerful Los Angeles law firm. On becoming foreman, something Emerson did remember, he’d begun rising even ea r lier than his fellow workers, laboring all day beside them in the fields—doing what he calculated was his own fair share in addition to the supervising—and returning after dark in a state of wordless exhaustion which left him no choice but to delegate the raising of his children to his wife.
Where Emerson’s father was thin, and as tall as any of his people ever got, his mother was soft, and as round as it was in her to become. Alice Ngu considered herself fortunate to have been chosen as the Chief A d ministrator’s housekeeper and would do or say nothing to jeopardize a position she believed offered her family certain advantages—which her idea of personal integrity invariably prevented her from pressing—over the ordinary peasants of the Project. If Walter’s strategy for survival consisted of working ten percent harder than anybody else, Alice’s was to demand ten percent less than she had a right to expect.
Emerson gathered that they’d been different before coming to Pallas, both of them ambitious and dissatisfied with political and economic ci r cumstances in their home state which were increasingly indistinguishable from those their own parents had fled in Asia. It was said—he
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