She shook her head. “I do not understand anything,” she said.
Tree took her ankles and turned them, throwing her to her stomach. Then he knelt across her body and, again, tied her hands behind her back.
When he had done so, she turned, and struggled to a sitting position, and again regarded him, her captor.
He removed the rope from her ankles, tied one end of it about her neck, and tied the other end about a tree and over a branch some five feet from the ground. He regarded her, his captive.
She looked upon him. Never before in her life had she seen such a male. He made even Gunther seem a lesser man. Her imagination had not even dreamed that such a man could exist. The men she had known earlier, even Gunther, had been no intimation that there might be such males as these. Such men, she thought, could not exist in her time. In her time there was no place; there could be no place, for such men as these.
Before him she felt, as never she had in her own time, even before Gunther, a complete female. Never before had she understood the import of two sexes, as she did now. It suddenly seemed to her, as it had never before, radically and explosively significant that there were two sexes. And how overjoyed she was that she was one of them. But, in fear, and still feeling pain, she drew back from him, for he had hurt her.
And, too, she was a woman of another time. Such a man terrified her.
And suddenly she understood that the cost of civilization, and the ascendancy of women, was the crippling of such men, or their destruction.
They were like great beasts that must be broken, or killed, that there might be the triumph of mildness, the victory of plows and religion, of fears and superstition, of complacency, of contentment, of smallness, and being afraid and mediocrity, and keeping in one’s place and being polite, of camouflage and invisibility, of passionless comraderie, of achieving prescribed adjustment, of smiling normality, and being safe, and indistinguishable from others, and quiet, and then dying.
She looked upon him.
He was not such a man.
Tree did not try to speak further to her. He sat across from her, observing her.
“Please do not hurt me,” said Brenda Hamilton to him. She knew it was foolish to try to speak to him, but she could not stand the silence, his watching her. In the group, men and women often looked at one another, sometimes for minutes at a time, simply seeing one another. In Hamilton’s time men and women looked at one another, but they seldom saw one another. There is a great difference. Hamilton was uneasy, and wanted to cry out. She had never, in this way, been seen.
In his eyes, and the carriage of his head, and body, the subtle movements of his face, Hamilton sensed, even though he was a gross savage, little more than an animal, great intelligence. She sensed, somehow, looking at him, that his intelligence was far greater than hers, or perhaps even Gunther’s, or Herjellsen’s, in spite of the fact that, doubtless, he could not read nor write, in spite of the fact that he must be little more than a primeval barbarian, ignorant, uncouth, illiterate. And in looking at him she understood sharply, with devastating force, for the first time, the clear distinction between learning and intelligence. He could not be learned, certainly not in the senses in which she understood that word, but she knew, and felt, looking upon him, that he was of incredible intelligence.
But his hands, too, seemed strong and cunning, supple and powerful, like the rest of his body.
It startled her to find, conjoined with intelligence, such strength and power, such size, such supple muscularity. The mighty brain she sensed had in such a body its mighty throne.
He seemed one thing to her, though, not a brain and a body, but one thing, somehow, a complete, and magnificent animal, whole, no part of him questioning or despising another part, not divided against himself, not diverted into attacking himself, not set at war with himself. There was no war here between this man’s brain, and his glands, and blood, no more than between the left hand and the right hand, no more than between the beating of the heart and the breathing of the lungs. In him Brenda Hamilton sensed a terrifying unity, as simple as that of the lion or leopard. In his eyes she read power and intelligence, and lust and cruelty, and the desire for her body, and she read these things not as furtive glimmers but as a snared hind might read them in the eyes of the tiger, sinuously approaching, preparing to feed.
“Don’t hurt me!” she begged.
Tree had not moved. He had not yet seen her, as he wanted to see her. When he had seen her, and wanted to, then he would move.
Hamilton turned her head away from him. She could not bear to look at him. She could not meet his eyes.
She knew now why civilization had no option but to break or destroy such creatures.
It had no place for them. It had no place for hunters. It needed diggers, not hunters.
Such a man, she knew, would never dig. There would always be another mountain, another horizon.
He would never make a civilization. It did not interest him.
Others would make a civilization, and breed in their hundreds, and thousands, and then millions, and the world of the hunters would be smothered, and the planet would be covered, and crowded, with the diggers. The giant cheetah would be extinct; the mammoth would no longer roam; the steppes would no longer shake to the charge of the wooly rhinoceros; and where the horses had run there would triumph the fumes of the internal combustion engine; the cave lion would be dead, and the cave bear, and there would be no striking of flints and hunting salt, for the hunters, too, like the lion and the bear, would have gone.
But Gunther had said that the hunters might not be dead, but only sleeping.
And Herjellsen had said to her, “Turn their eyes to the stars.”
“There is nothing more to hunt,” Hamilton had told Gunther.
“There are the stars,” had said Gunther.
Hamilton again looked at Tree.
The hunters would rule the world for thousands of years, and the diggers, perhaps, for little more than some dozens of centuries.
The longer triumph would be that of the hunters, and the beasts.
And they might not wish to share the digger’s world.
But Gunther had said that the hunters might not be dead, but only sleeping.
“There is nothing more to hunt,” Hamilton had told Gunther.
“There are the stars,” had said Gunther.
“Turn their eyes to the stars,” had said Herjellsen.
But Herjellsen was mad, mad!
Tree had decided that he would not, this day, take the white-skinned slave girl to the camp. He would take her to the camp tomorrow. He had never seen a woman like this. He did not wish, immediately, to share her with the others. For the time he would keep her for himself.
He looked at her. Her wrists were bound behind her back. She was sitting, with her knees bent. She seemed very much afraid of him. His rope, knotted about her neck, tethered her to a tree.
He was hungry. From his pouch he took a strip of dried meat, antelope meat, and chewed it.
He did not offer the slave any.
He was puzzled. She did not lie before him and lift her body. She did not beg meat. Perhaps she was not hungry. It did not occur to Tree that she did not know how to beg meat. He thought all women knew how to beg meat.
“Please,” she said. “I am hungry.”
He swallowed the meat. Then he got up to look about, for three suitable roots.
“What are you going to do?” asked Brenda Hamilton.