The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

  He expected no reply, and got none. But the animal did not leave, either, and as it began to resume its snuffling search for dinner Joseph saw that he was going to have to find another camping-ground for himself. He was hardly likely to be able to fall asleep again here, not with a thing this size, be it harmless or not, prowling around so close by him. Gathering up his belongings, he moved a dozen yards away and settled down again, but that was no better; soon the animal was coming in his direction once more. “Go away,” Joseph told it. “I don’t want to be your friend. Not right now, anyway.” He made the shooing motions again. But it was hopeless. The animal would not leave, and Joseph was wide awake, probably irreparably so, besides. He sat up unhappily the rest of the night, watching the beast poking unhurriedly about among the needles.

  Dawn seemed to take forever to arrive. From time to time he fell into a light doze, not really sleep. Somewhere in the night, he realized, the striped beast had wandered away. Joseph offered a morning prayer—he still did that, though he was not sure any longer why he did—and sorted through his bag of provisions, calculating how much he could allow himself for breakfast. Not very much, he saw. And the remainder would go at lunchtime. This was the day when he would have to start hunting for his food, or scratch around in the needles on the ground for whatever it was that the striped creature had been looking for, or else prepare himself for a new descent into famine.

  Hunting it would be. Barren-looking though the land appeared, there were plenty of animals roaming hereabouts, a whole zoo’s worth of them, in fact. But he had nothing with him in the way of a real weapon, of course. What did castaways without weapons do when they needed to catch something to eat?

  A sharpened stake in a pit, he thought. Cover it with branches and let your quarry tumble down onto it.

  It seemed an absurd idea even as Joseph thought of it, but as he set about contemplating it as a practical matter it looked sillier and sillier to him. A sharpened stake? Sharpened with what? And dig a pit? How, with his bare hands? And then hope that something worth eating would obligingly drop into it and neatly skewer itself? Even as he looked around for something he could use as a stake, he found himself laughing at his own foolishness.

  But he had no better ideas at the moment, and a stake did turn up after a lengthy search: a slender branch about five feet long that had snapped free of a nearby tree. One end of it, the end where it had broken off, was jagged and sharp. If only he could embed the stake properly in the ground, it might actually do the trick. But now he had to dig a hole as deep as he was tall, broad enough to hold the animal he hoped to catch. Joseph scuffed experimentally at the ground with the side of his sandal. The best he could manage was a faint shallow track. The dry, hard soil would not be easy to excavate. Perhaps he could find some piece of stone suitable for digging with, but it would probably take him a month to dig the sort of pit he needed. He would starve to death long before that. And he had wasted the whole morning on this ridiculous project, without having moved so much as an inch closer to his destination.

  The last of his food went for his midday meal, as he knew it would. A prolonged search afterward for edible nuts or even insects produced nothing.

  What next? He reached once more into his recollection of old boys’ adventure books. String a snare between two trees, he supposed, and hope for something to get entangled in it. He did have a reel of metallic cord in his utility case, and he spent a complicated hour rigging it between two saplings a short distance above the ground. The black-and-white burrowing animal of the night before came snuffling around while he worked. Joseph was fairly sure it was the same one. By daylight it looked larger than it had seemed in the night, a short-legged, fleshy, well-built creature that weighed at least as much as he did. Its thick white-striped pelt was quite handsome. The animal seemed entirely unafraid of him, coming surprisingly close, now and then pushing its flat bristly snout against the cord that Joseph was trying to tie to the saplings and making the task harder for him. “What is this?” Joseph asked it. “You want to help? I don’t need your help.” He had to shove it out of the way. It moved off a short distance and looked back sadly at him with a glassy-eyed stare. “You’d like to be my friend?” Joseph asked. “My pet? I wasn’t really looking for a pet.”

  Finally the job of fashioning the snare appeared to be done. Joseph stepped back, admiring his handiwork. Any animal that ran into it with sufficient velocity would find itself caught, he hoped. Those lively little tawny-skinned animals that went frisking swiftly around the place in groups of five or six: they were just reckless enough, possibly, to be taken that way.

  But they were not. Joseph hid himself behind a big three-sided boulder and waited, an hour, two hours. It was getting on toward twilight now. In this early dusk his snare would surely be invisible: he could barely see it himself, looking straight toward the place where he knew it to be. From his vantage-point behind the boulder he caught a glimpse of his furry striped friend browsing around nearby, scratching up large rounded seeds out of the ground and munching on them in a noisy crunching way. But he doubted that that would bother the little tawny animals. And at last they came frolicking along, a good-sized herd of them, a dozen or more this time, tails held stiffly erect, ears pricked up, nostrils flaring, small hooves clacking as they skipped over the rocky soil. They were moving on a path that seemed likely to take them straight toward Joseph’s trap. And indeed it was so. One by one they danced right up to it, and one by one as they reached it they launched themselves into the air in elegant little leaps, soaring prettily over the outstretched cord with two or three feet to spare and continuing on beyond, switching their tails mockingly at him as they ran. They went over his snare like athletes leaping hurdles. Scarcely believing it, Joseph watched the entire troop pass by and prance out of sight.

  He waited half an hour more, hoping some less perceptive animal might come by and fall victim to the snare, one of the many wandering beasts of these unpromising fields. That did not happen. Darkness was coming on and he had nothing whatever to eat. In the morning things would be no better. He was looking at starvation again, much too soon. None of the parched, gnarly plants that grew in this dry land looked edible to him, though the grazing animals plainly did not mind them. He could not bring himself to eat the three-sided saw-edged blades of tough red grass that grew in sparse clumps everywhere around. There were no likely roots or tubers, no snails, perhaps not even ants. Somewhere beyond those white-edged hills there might be a land of tender fruits and sweet, succulent, slow-moving land crabs, but he might not live long enough to reach it, if indeed any such place existed. Nor could he hope that Folkish rescuers would come conveniently to his rescue a second time when he collapsed once again by the wayside in the last stages of hallucinatory exhaustion.

  I must find something that I can kill and eat, Joseph thought, and find it quickly.

  There was a familiar snuffling sound off to his left.

  No, Joseph thought, aghast. I can’t! And then, immediately afterward: Yes! I must!

  His new friend, his self-appointed companion. This slow-moving musky-smelling seed-eating thing, so trusting, so unthreatening. It was not just any animal; somehow this day it had turned into an animal that he felt he knew. That is sheer imbecility, he told himself. An animal is an animal, nothing more. And he was in dire need. But could he kill it, this harmless, friendly creature? He must. There was nothing else. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It was a horrifying idea, but so too was starving. He had experienced starvation once already, and once was more than enough: the steady melting away of his flesh, the shriveling of his muscles, the weakening of his bones, the blurring of his vision, the swollen tongue, the taste of copper in his throat, the quivering legs, the headaches, the giddiness, the craziness.

  He picked up a wedge-shaped rock, a large one, the biggest one that he could hold. The animal was looking at him in a vague incurious way. Clearly it did not have the slightest awareness of Joseph’s intentions. Joseph prayed th
at there was little or no intelligence behind those dull eyes. Did you ever really know how intelligent any creature might be? No. You never did, did you? He thought of the poriphars who had shared their food with him beside that stream in the lovely springtime country just below the mountains. No one doubted that they were intelligent beings. Stand this creature on its hind legs and it would look a little like a poriphar, Joseph thought: a distant cousin, possibly. He hoped it was only a coincidental resemblance. “Forgive me,” he said foolishly, taking a deep breath, and raised the rock in both hands and brought it down as hard as he could across the striped animal’s wide flat forehead.

  The impact barely seemed to register on it. It stared stupidly at Joseph and took a couple of wobbly uncertain steps backward, but did not undertake any real retreat. Joseph hit it again, and again. And again. He went on and on, to little apparent avail. The animal, staggering now, made a sorrowful rumbling noise. I must be unrelenting, Joseph told himself, I must be ruthless, it is too late to stop. I must carry this through to the end. He struck it once more and this time the thing fell, toppling heavily, landing on its side and moving its feet through the air in a slow circular path. The rumbling continued. There was a breathy whimper now, too. The reddish-green eyes remained open, peering at him, so Joseph thought, with a reproachful stare.

  He felt sick. It was one thing to hunt like a gentleman, with a weapon that spat death cleanly and quickly from a distance. It was another thing entirely to kill like a savage, pounding away brutishly with a rock.

  He went to his utility case and found his little knife, and knelt, straddling the creature, feeling strong spasms of some sort going through its back and shoulders, and, weeping now, drove the blade into the animal’s throat with all his strength. The rear legs began to thrash. But the knife was barely adequate to the task and it all took very much longer than Joseph expected. I must be unrelenting, Joseph told himself a second time, and clung to the animal, holding it down until the thrashing began to diminish.

  He rose, then, bloodied, sobbing.

  Gradually he grew calm. The worst part of it is over, he thought. But he was wrong even about that, because there was still the butchering to do, the peeling back of the thick pelt with the knife that was scarcely more than a toy, the slitting of the belly, the lifting out of the glistening abdominal organs, red and pink and blue. You had to get the internal organs out, Anceph had taught him long ago, because they decayed very quickly and would spoil the meat. But it was a frightful task. He was shaken by the sight of the animal’s inwardness, all that moist shining internal machinery that had made it a living, metabolizing thing until he had picked up his rock and begun the ending of its life. Now those secret things were laid bare. They all came spilling forth, organs he could not begin to identify, the sacred privateness of the creature he had killed. Joseph gagged and retched and turned away, covered with sweat, and then turned back and continued with what he had to do. Twice more he had to pause to retch and heave as he went about the work, and the second time the nausea was so intense that it was necessary for him to halt for some five or ten minutes, shaking, sweating, dizzied. Then he forced himself to continue. He had arrogated unto himself the right to take this innocent creature’s life; he must make certain now that the killing had not been without purpose.

  When he was done he was slathered with gore, and there was no stream nearby in which he could bathe himself. Unwilling to squander his small supply of drinking-water, Joseph rubbed himself with gritty handfuls of the sandy soil until his hands and arms seemed sufficiently clean. Then he searched in his utility case for his firestarter, which he had not used in such a long time that he was not at all sure it still worked. The thought that it might be necessary for him to eat the meat raw brought Joseph to the edge of nausea again. But the firestarter worked; he built a little bonfire of twigs and dried leaves, and skewered a steak and roasted it until the juices dripped from it; and then, the culminating monstrous act, he took his first bite. The meat had something of the same sharp and musky taste that he had smelled in the animal’s pelt, and swallowing it involved him in a mighty struggle. But he had to eat. He had to eat this. And he did. He ate slowly, sadly, chewing mechanically, until he had had his fill.

  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.