I had not cooked my meat since Ute's capture. I was not confident of my ability to construct or use an efficient fire drill. More importantly, I knew that it was dangerous to make a fire. I had well learned this.
Mostly I ate fruits and nuts, and some roots. Occasionally I would supplement this diet with the raw flesh of small birds, or that of an occasional brush urt, which I would manage to snare. However, last night, and the night before, at another village, I had managed to steal meat. I had resolved that I would feed myself in this fashion. I was surely not tempted to sample the small amphibians or the loathsome, fat green insects Ute had called to my attention. They might have been a source of protein, but rather than touch such things to my lips I would have preferred to starve! It was easier to steal meat, good bosk meat, from ignorant peasants! I lay on my back, drowsy, looking up at the bright sky between the interlaced branches canopied over my head. The day was warm. I smiled.
Then, suddenly, far off, I became aware of a noise. It seemed like the shouting of men, and a clanging and beating of metals, as though pans or kettles might be being struck.
I did not much care for the noise.
In a few minutes it became clear that the sounds were becoming closer. I began to grow apprehensive.
In my camisk, I climbed to my feet, lifting my head.
There was a din, coming from the direction of the village, seeming to move towards me, gradually, through the thicket.
Irritated, I shrugged, and, picking up the fibers I had used for snares, began to move away from the din. I picked some fruit and nuts on the way. The din seemed to be getting louder, which I did not care for. It was coming from behind me.
I walked before it.
It was not long before I realized that if I did not alter my direction I would have departed the vast thicket, in which I had taken refuge.
Accordingly I turned to my left, picking some fruit as I went.
Then, to my irritation, even closer, I heard the din, and now part of it seemed to be coming from before me.
I then became apprehensive, and, half running, turned back the other direction. I had run no more than two or three Ihn when it became clear to me that the din was now, too, coming from in front of me.
I turned again, this time frantically.
The din, beating on pans and kettles, and the shouting, was now sweeping towards me, in a vast semicircle.
I suddenly realized I was being hunted!
Only from before me was there no sound. I was terrified. I began to run in that direction, toward the edge of the thicket, but then I was afraid. I would lose the cover of the thicket. Moreover, they might be driving me towards hunters, or nets! The silence terrified me as much as the din.
I must slip between their lines.
Some animals fled past me, away from the din, tabuk and brush urts. Carefully, concealing myself as much as possible, I started back toward the din. The din became loud, terrible, and the shouting. The noise, the knowledge that I was being hunted, made me suddenly feel irrational, driven. I wanted only to flee from the sound.
The din became insufferably loud.
I pressed toward it.
Then my heart sank!
There must have been two hundred or more peasants, men, children and women, all shouting, and beating on their kettles and pans. The women and children carried sticks and switches, the men spears, flails, forks and clubs.
They were too close together, there were too many of them!
A child saw me and he cried out and began to beat more loudly on his pan. I turned and fled.
The din now became maddeningly pressing, intolerable, ringing in my brain, closing in on me.
I could do nothing but fly toward the silence.
Then, in the sunlight of the bright morning, late, almost at noon, I fled from the thicket, across the grass of the open field.
I ran irrationally, driven, terrified.
I kept running.
Then, exhausted, I looked back. The peasants had stopped at the edge of the Ka-la-na thicket, in their great numbers. They no longer shouted, they no longer beat on their pans.
I looked ahead of me. There was nothing. No strong peasant lads waited there, to run me down, to strip and bind me, and lead me, my neck roped, back to the village. There were no nets. There was nothing. I cried out with joy and fled across the grasses.
They had wanted only to drive me from the thicket!
I was still free.
I stopped.
I stood in the bright, knee-high grasses of that windblown, flowing field. I felt the sun on my body, the grass touching my calves. My feet felt beneath them the black, warm, root-filled, living earth of Gor. The Ka-la-na thicket was yellow in the distance, the peasants standing at its edge, not moving. The sky was deep, and blue, and bright with sunlight. I inhaled the fresh, glorious air of the planet Gor. How beautiful it was!
The peasants did not pursue me.
I was free!
I put my head back and standing feet spread, leaned backwards, with my hands spreading my hair in the wind. I felt the wind lift it. I was pleased. I was free!
Suddenly my hand flew before my mouth. High, lofty, small in the vertical depths of that glorious sky, there was a speck. I shook my head, no! No!
I looked back toward the peasants. They had not moved.
I knelt down on one knee in the grasses, my eyes fixed on the speck. It was circling.
I saw it far overhead, first to my right, and then behind me, and then to my left, and then before me.
I cried out with misery.
I knew myself, small on the grasses, far below, to be the center of that circle. I began to run, madly, frantically across the grasses.
I stopped, and turned, and looked back and upward. I cried out with misery. I saw the bird turn, swirling in the sky. I saw the sun, for a brief instant, flash from the helmet of its rider. The bird had wheeled in my direction. It was now screaming, descending, wings beating, streaking towards me.
I screamed and began to run, madly, irrationally, across the grasses. I heard the scream of the bird behind me, and the beating of its great wings, closer and closer!
I stumbled, screaming, then running again. I might have been a golden-pelted tabuk, but I was a girl!
The scream of the bird deafened me and its wings broke like thunder about my ears.
The shadow streaked past me.
The leather loop dropped about my body. In an instant it had jerked tight, pinning my arms helplessly to my sides, and I felt my body, my back almost broken, jerked from the grass. The grass rushed swiftly past below me, and I could not touch it with my feet, and then it fled from me, dropping way, and then suddenly, in the rushing air, as I twisted and turned, buffeted in the blasts of wind, a prisoner of the forces, the physics, of the braided leather rope and the accelerations and attitudes, it seemed the sky was below me and the grass overhead, and then I lost my breath, as the tarn began to climb, and I gasped, the grass and the sky, and the horizon, now spinning, and I screamed, crying out, my arms pinned, my hands helpless, unable to hold the rope, and I felt it slip an inch on my body, and I saw the earth now below, so far below, and the Ka-la-na thicket in the distance, like a patch of foliage on a lawn, and I swung, wildly, helplessly, the captive of that taut, slender leather strand by which I was bound, forty feet below the tarn, now hundreds of feet above the earth below me.
The rope slipped another quarter of an inch on my body, and I screamed! Then, the rope, pressing itself cruelly into my arms and body, lodged itself firmly.
It slipped no more.
I was effectively imprisoned by the weight of my own body. I feared only that the rope might break.
The tarn then began to wheel, and soar, and I swung below it, dangling and bound, hundreds of feet above the grasses below. It was turning back toward the Ka-la-na thicket, now remote in the distance, far below.