Davy

I must have turned when she spoke as quickly as the others, yet I felt as if my head were moving against a resistance, unready to behold a thing that all my life I had feared and in some way desired to behold. Smelling the beast on the road, I had known him from catching that smell once before in the hill country west of Skoar. It’s ranker than puma smell, seems to hang heavier in the air. At that earlier time it had seemed just not quite right for puma, and I had climbed a tree and spent a long night there shivering, smelling him and thinking I did but not once hearing or seeing him. In the morning I’d wobbled down and found his enormous pugs in a bare spot of earth, deep, as if he might have stood there some time observing me through the dark, old Eye-of-Fire, and maybe thinking: Well, let’s wait till Red gets a mite bigger and fatter…

Now, I saw him.

A short way down from the crest of the hill we had descended lay a high flat-topped rock, thirty feet from the road on the open side, across from the forest. The top was slightly tilted, away from the road, so that when we walked past, it had looked like a simple edge, nothing to tell of the slanting platform. Had he watched us go by, or only just now arrived there? Maybe he had been not hungry, or restrained by the fact there were four of us. Maybe he knew my bow meant danger. I imagined him amusing himself with false starts, quivering his hindquarters, playing and enjoying the cat-game of delayed decision and finally for his own reasons allowing us to proceed. Now, following his immediate whim, he stood tall, and I saw him in remote dark gold against the deepening midsummer sky.

He gazed down toward us, or more likely beyond us. He must have known or sensed that the distance was too great for the flight of an arrow from my bow, if he was experienced in such things. He turned on his high rock with no haste at all, flowingly, to stare in another direction, off to the south across the valley, perhaps indifferently observing the smoke of other human places.

He sat down and raised a curled paw to his mouth to lick it and rub it comfortably over the top of his head. Then he washed his flank, and up went a hind leg catstyle so he could lean down and nuzzle his privates. He lost balance comically because of the slope of the rock, righted himself with a comedian’s ease, and lay down and rolled with his feet in the air. And when he tired of that he yawned, and jumped down, and strolled across the road into the woods, and for a while he was gone.

16

That was the first time I had seen the inside of a village. Since then I’ve seen more than I can plainly remember, for when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers we visited one after another throughout Leva

They are usually laid out in a square, in some location where a stream crosses fairly level ground. The drinking water comes from the upstream end, and the rest of the stream is regarded as a sewer — saves digging. Main Street , ru

In between those extremes stand the middle-class blocks, where the ideal is a harking back to Old Time, with all the houses exactly alike, all yards and gardens exactly alike, all the privies exactly alike with small crescent windows of precisely the same size emitting the same flavor of socially significant togetherness.

Now that I’d made Sam a Mister in my hasty way, he couldn’t get out of it, and figured he might as well r’ar back and enjoy it. He was still carrying himself like God’s favorite adviser when we blew in at the Black Prince. As a result, the weedy ancient in charge of the flea-bag fawned all over us, charging twice the normal rate for two of his best rooms which would have done credit to a hog fa

A group of pilgrims from up north had already got the very best rooms at the Black Prince, overlooking Main Street; our two were second best, I guess, each with a slit of window looking north; I would have hated to see the worst. Beside the rickety cots they called beds the walls displayed dark smears telling of collisions between the human race and one of its closest, sincerest admirers. And over all things like a saintly benediction lay the smell of cabbage.

In a bedbug, so far as I understand him, there is not a trace of mirth or loving-kindness. Even their admiration for humanity is based on deep-seated greed. They have intellect, to be sure — how else would they know the exact moment when you’re about to fall asleep, and select that moment for a stab? Dion says bugs go by instinct. I asked him: “What’s instinct?” He said: “Oh, you go to hell!” Then Nickie flung in the statement that when you do something p’ison clever without a notion of what it’s all about, that’s instinct. But I still think they have intellect, and they probably brood too much until it curdles their dispositions, for note this: I never met a bug who showed me a trace of liking or respect, no matter what I’d done for him. Contempt is what they show, contempt. I’ve known a bug to stare me in the eye with my gore dripping from his jaws, and anyone could tell from his vinegary face that he was comparing me with other meals in the past and finding fault with everything — too salt, too gamy, needing more sass, something. He wouldn’t have complimented me if I’d spiced my ass and put butter on it. So I contemptify ’em right back. I hate bugs. Damn a bug.