The Female of the Species Read Online Free PDF

keenly back at her. You didn’t look at a face like that without staring for a second, even if it was yours. Not bad hair. Kind of strange the way that collarbone stood out, but interesting, too…No, he wouldn’t shoot her. Not right away, she was sure. Gray wrapped the straps around the tent summarily; it fit in the bag.
    Gray did own a handgun, and considered taking it. The gun had been a gift from an earlier suitor, the one he’d captured in the war. (It chilled Errol how often Gray was given weapons as presents, all over the world. As if she weren’t destructive enough already.) Yet finally Gray decided to leave the gun behind. To prepare for a military encounter was to create one. As many movies as she might have seen, Gray knew she would not succeed in her mission by hiding behind a boulder andpicking off the troops. That hair and collarbone would surely prove more powerful weapons than her German Luger.
    Throwing the rest of her gear together through the day, Gray thought about the Great White Corgie. She already had a strong sense of the man. He was arrogant. Ruthless. Racist. Brave, she conceded. But cruel and condescending.
    And for some reason she decided he was handsome.

3
    Hassatti’s mother also called Gray ’l-oo-lubo , taking her into the family like a stray from the plains—isolated from the herd, difficult, but a fine specimen, and tamable.
    The boy from the Land of Corgie, Osinga, was as terrified of Gray as Hassatti had predicted, but bent on his brothers’ revenge; after repeated reassurances, Osinga agreed to guide her to Toroto. Hiking out, however, he insisted on walking behind her, which made it awkward for Gray to follow him.
    Errol could easily imagine Gray on this trip. Many was the time he himself had hiked behind her while a voice screamed in his head, “Go ahead, Gray, say, ‘I am tired.’ Say, ‘My muscles are killing me, Errol.’” But Gray would keep going silently in front of him, until finally Errol would growl in irascible defeat about needing a break, and Gray would answer smoothly, never out of breath, “Oh, would you like to stop, Errol? Of course. Maybe I’ll do a few push-ups while you’re resting…”
    She was too goddamned much.
    Toward dusk, Osinga speared mongooses and brought them to Gray like sacramental offerings. She skinned and gutted them quickly and without queasiness, for Gray enjoyed butchery. Errol had watched her take animals apart before. She liked tostudy the muscles glistening underneath the skin of a fresh kill, and move the joints in their sockets to see how they worked. She never called small prey “cute,” and when the glazed eyes of a mongoose in her hands rolled up, her face never softened.
    Nights Gray slept fitfully, dreaming of Corgie. The dreams flipped from terror to pleasure and back again. Corgie would reach for her in her sleep, and she wouldn’t know if he meant to caress or strangle her until the moment his fingers wrapped around her neck.
    The bush got thicker and more hazardous as they advanced. Through thorn trees Osinga stared at Gray’s hands, surprised that they bled. Yet she didn’t cry out or complain when the thorns stuck far into her flesh, so he assumed she felt no pain. All her life people had made this mistake with Gray.
    When she stepped on a trail of fire ants and they swept up her legs, Osinga stood back and watched as she rapidly picked the insects off. At last she stamped angrily and shouted for him to help her, and he was surprised that these small animals could hurt such a thing. She seemed impregnable; she seemed that way to everyone.
    There came a moment when Osinga looked up at a particular mountain and went wild-eyed. He wouldn’t go any farther; he’d only point. Gray walked the last length alone.
    Once she’d climbed to the top ridge, Gray looked down into a deep valley with cliffs shooting steeply up on all sides and waterfalls sweeping down in white rushes. Finding only trees below, she worried