How I Live Now Read Online Free PDF

you.
    Isaac was more shadowy and Kept His Counsel, as my doorman used to say about anyone who didn't like to gossip. This doesn't mean there was anything sneaky about his way of watching, or anything sentimental either. He just accepted the things people did, without comment or judgment and maybe without being terribly concerned. Even his family seemed to interest him in an abstract way, like lab specimens he'd come to feel responsibility and affection for.
    At times I thought he was more animal than human. For instance if you were walking in town on market day and there were tons of people milling around, you would never have to worry about losing him in the crowd even if you totally forgot he was there and got separated for ages. You could zig and zag and make turns on a sudden whim and stop for tea and cut across a few back streets and decide that today would be a good time to do something totally different and try that bakery that none of you normally went to when in actual fact you had plenty of bread already at home so there'd be no reason to be in a bakery at all, and the next time you looked up Isaac would be right at your elbow, totally casual, like he'd been there all along or possibly just followed your train of thought through the crowd.
    It was like he understood humans objectively and could see your entire life stretching out in both directions including whether you were going to make a detour to the bakery and which one and when.
    With nonhumans he was completely different. With a dog or horse or badger or fox every fiber of his being was totally engaged. Even his face was different around animals, with the expression of polite distance he always wore for humans replaced by something concentrated and alive.
    They knew it too. You could search hours for a pregnant cat and Isaac would tell you to Look under the hedge felt in the garden shed and there she'd be with five kittens, probably already having told him what each one was named. Piper said people used to borrow him when they went to buy a new dog because he could always see if something wasn't quite right just by looking, or if it was the type to savage your new baby to death on a whim.
    You might wonder, as I did, what a dog or a sheep had to say to a person like Isaac that's so interesting but I guess he might have said the same thing about a foreign life-form like me. What have I ever said that's so riveting to anyone but myself?
    Shrinks don't count.
    They listen for cash.

9
    T oday there was a knock on the door and it turned out to be two bored-looking men From the Council coming to register us and Determine our Medical and Nutritional Exigencies which turned out to mean did any of us have appendicitis or scurvy?
    They had a list about as thick as a phone book with names and addresses and some were checked off and some crossed out and there were hundreds of question marks scattered around the pages and boy did you ever get the sense that they wished they'd asked a few more questions before signing up for this job.
    After finding Aunt Penn on the list and putting a bunch of x's and a question mark by her name and asking a few official-type questions, they asked to speak to our guardian and seemed fairly taken aback to discover that the closest we had to a grown-up on the premises was Osbert.
    But seeing as how there wasn't much they could do about our situation short of filing an official report that no one would ever notice or read or care about, they decided to stick to the questions they'd asked everyone else for miles around like, Were any of the animals on the farm kept for food? Osbert said the sheep were very rare and kept for breeding and wool and for selling on to other farms, and the goats were pets but the hens were all layers which struck me as funny because after that all I could think of was layers and layers of hens.
    Then they asked for everyone's names and ages and Osbert said that I was their American cousin and they looked even more