“Feed me, Master,” wheedled Hamilton, putting her chin on Tree’s right shoulder.
He passed her back a piece of meat, with his right hand, over his right shoulder, not looking at her.
“Here is a piece of sinew,” said Hamilton to the miserable Butterfly, “which I have been saving. It is long enough. Now sew well. Next time measure more carefully.”
“Thank you, Turtle,” said Butterfly, gratefully. She knelt, bending over her sewing.
The brief skin which Butterfly wore about her hips was tanned from a hide, that of a deer, which Hawk had slain. Her first task, after pleasing Hawk, had been the preparation of the bearskin which he had brought back to camp with him. Turtle and Cloud had helped her with it.
It had been evident, from the first, that Hawk had a special interest in slender Butterfly. It was almost always she whom he called upon to serve him. He insisted on exact and total obedience from her, as Tree did from Hamilton. Hamilton could see that the girl, to uphold her self-respect, pretended to resent this, and hotly, but was secretly, as could be seen from her smiles and expressions, much pleased. Hamilton supposed that Butterfly, an intelligent, arrogant, spoiled, vital girl could only respect a man who was her total master. Hamilton, in living among the Men, had, for the first time, begun to understand the ratios of dominance and submission, endemic in the animal kingdom. She saw it in wildlife about her, and among the Men. Had Hawk been crippled by a subsequent psychological conditioning or caught in the meshes of social restraints, Butterfly would have constantly, protected by his imprinted conflicts, his self-alienation, and reinforced by a world invented to exclude hunters, fought him for dominance and, instinctually yearning for his authority to be imposed upon her, she genetically a hunter’s woman challenged him continually, both to his misery and hers. But Hawk was not weak. He could not have been weak, unless there had been a defect in his brain. His world had not been built to make him weak. Weakness is not a useful property of hunters. It reduces their effectiveness. Weakness and gullibility are virtues only in an agricultural world, or a technological one, where, in a complicated network of interrelationships, it is important to keep men bound to the soil, or to their machines or desks. Weakness in a hunter would work against the survival of the group. But this did not mean that Butterfly would not, from time to time, if only to call herself to his attention, or to reassure herself of his mastery and strength, challenge him. It only meant that her subordination, on such occasions, to her pleasure and satisfaction, would be again taught to her, promptly and effectively. Yesterday, Hamilton recalled, when Butterfly had spoken back to Hawk, he had, laughing, taken her by the hair into the woods. There he had switched her a few times and, finishing her discipline, thrown her over a log. She had followed him back to camp, red-faced, but pleased.
“Since I gave you the sinew,” said Hamilton to Butterfly, “you must, when the men return tonight, give me your share of the dried sugar berries, if Old Woman lets us have them.” These were almost the last of the berries, dried and hard, but sweet when chewed, left over from the preceding fall.
“No!” said Butterfly.
“Give me back the sinew!” laughed Hamilton.
“No!” said Butterfly. “I will give you the sugar berries! I will, Turtle!”
“Very well,” said Hamilton. She looked down at Butterfly. “For whom are you making that garment?” she asked.
“For Hawk,” said Butterfly, angrily. “He makes me work so hard!”
“Men are all beasts,” said Hamilton.
“Yes,” said Butterfly. “They are! They are!”
Hamilton looked away from Butterfly, happy. She breathed in the delicious spring air.
The men were hunting. They would return by nightfall. There was now no man in the camp, with the exception of Hyena, who seldom ran with the hunters. He was in his cave, arranging stones in patterns, about the skull of an aurochs. He spent much time doing this, and such things. Hamilton hoped that the men’s hunt would be successful. She was hungry. They had been gone now for two days. She had missed Tree last night. She saw Antelope returning to camp with water. Cloud was with her. Cloud no longer wore Gunther’s watch, taken from him when he had been driven from the camp. She kept it among her belongings.
Hamilton made her way up the face of the cliff. She made the ascent less circuitously than she would have the preceding fall. She did not take the sloping path used by Old Woman, that used, too, by those who carried burdens, but scrambled upward, foot by foot, toward the second tier of caves, to the first broad ledges. Some forty feet from the ground, on – a broad ledge, she looked out across the woods. The sky was very blue, with white clouds. The first leafage, delicate, very green, was on the trees and bushes. This past winter there had been only one visitor other than Gunther and William, a trader from the Bear People. He had brought shells from the Coast People, for which he had traded skins, and, for them, received salt from the Men. He had stayed for ten days. He had been known. Gunther and William had arrived some four weeks later. Hamilton was looking forward to the summer camp, in which the Men moved sometimes marches away, for new hunting, in which huts were built. It had been to a summer camp that Tree had first brought Hamilton. And from the camp they had gone to fetch flint and salt before returning to the shelters. The women did not know the location of the salt. Hamilton recalled how bard she had worked at the flint lode. But she was anxious to see it again. Flint, and salt, were necessary. She recalled how Spear h4 scratched out the sign of the Weasel People at the flint lode and drawn over it the sign of the Men, the arm and the spear. She wore that same sign on the five leather squares of her necklace, among the leather, the claws, the threaded shells. The flint belonged to the Men, and so, too, she thought, smiling, did the women of the Men, no less claimed, no less owned. She saw Flower below, at the foot of the cliffs. Flower, too, of course, wore the necklace of the Men. It was a pleasant day, shortly past noon. From where she knelt she could see the children playing.