The Perfect Host Read Online Free Page B

her that these rabbits were part of the place, as the corn was, as were the tomatoes. And she no longer had any part of it.
    She nodded, looked briefly, bleakly, up at the house and strode away through the orchard. She did not look back for an hour, when she was on the mountain’s shoulder. Then she paused.
    The house was invisible now, and dark. So he had gone away. She wondered remotely if she hated him. She had never hated anything in her life. She missed him, however, as much as one can who has never attached any importance to the idea of loneliness.
    Beyond the house, far beyond, the lights of the town drifted like crumbs in a cup of ink. She had had no compulsion to go to the town. She was not known there, but she knew that she resembled her father very strongly, and that she would be brought back to the house by well-meaning but uncomprehending strangers who would do what they could to upset her father’s plans for her. She did not question those plans for a moment. Her father held a position in her cosmos outside such mutable abstracts. His law governed her as completely as did gravity.
    The wind touched her again, colder now, and, as before, its breath brought her back to her immediate problem. She cast about her for a fallen tree, found one, and broke off a thick four-foot piece. She worked her way carefully into the darkening forest. A glance up through the trees told her that tonight, at least, she need not fear rain.
    She chose a spot where two large trees grew close together, with a bed of moss at their roots. She gathered up dry leaves and piled them up over and beside the moss. Setting her club close to her hand, she lay down, pulled a mountain of leaves over her, and almost instantly lost her hunger in a deep sleep.
    She woke before the sun was up, rested and ravenous. She stood up, shaking the leaves from her firm body, and immediately set about the business of breakfast. Retracing her steps of the night before,she reached a meadow. She gathered clover heads and tender shoots of upland grass, and found, to her joy, the “walking” vine known as a Judas traveller. She uprooted about twenty feet of its tough, meandering stem and carefully stripped it until she had ten or twelve feet of flexible withe. This she took back into the woods, made a noose-snare by tying down a sapling so that when triggered, it would snap up and draw the noose tight. She put down the clover and shoots as bait, blocking them from behind so that they must be approached through the noose, and then went back to the meadow. She selected some round, smooth stones, and then stepped to a tree at the edge of the forest, put her back against the trunk, and stood there motionless.
    The sun was up now. Great lazy clouds floated overhead, brindling the hills. She saw a woodchuck out on the meadow, and let it be. Hungry as she was, she did not consider its rank flesh worth the trouble of cutting it off from its nearby burrow. She waited patiently.
    A movement caught her eye—something like a clump of grass moving within the field of grass. Moving very carefully, she set down her handful of stones. She raised her club up and back in her right hand, and with her left tossed a pebble to the side of the moving thing she had seen. As it fell, the surprised head of a grouse popped upward. Quietly’s club, unerringly thrown to turn end over end in a horizontal plane, caught the bird solidly on its ruff. In a half-dozen great bounds she was on the stunned creature and had wrung its neck.
    She carried it back into the woods toward the two trees where she had slept. On her way was the snare. The sapling was upright, and a fat cottontail hung kicking in the noose. It had caught him around the withers; he was very much alive and frightened. Quietly looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then dropped her grouse and bent the sapling down, catching the rabbit deftly at the nape of the neck. She slackened the noose, smoothed the animal’s rumpled fur, and