The Female of the Species Read Online Free PDF Page B

whether this was the right place. Yet as she inched down the steep cliff toward the valley, grabbing scraggly trees and sometimes crawling on all fours, Gray could gradually discern one odd structure jutting from the foliage below, a strange, towerlike thing in blond wood. When she was nearly down, manyatta after manyatta also appeared among the trees. Aside from these traditionally constructed mud-and-dung compounds, Gray could now see three other blond-wooded buildings, large and angular and queer even by Western standards.
    The rest of her way to the village Gray walked slowly, with her head high, nose to the wind. Gone was the smell of curlingpages. Smoke drifted from the huts, and colors flushed beside her. Gray Kaiser was alive and in Africa and something was happening at last. When she glided past the mud-packed walls, children fled before her; men and women swept into their compounds and posts cracked against the gates inside.
    As Gray drew into view of the blond tower, natives stopped carrying wood, froze mid-circle as they lashed joints on the tower with vine, left off mid-sentence as they called in their gnarled Masai. In the stillness, one figure kept jabbing angrily from the ground at a man on the third story. He was the last to turn to her, following the line of the native’s gaze as he might have tracked a fuse to dynamite.
    “What doesn’t belong in this picture?”
    “I don’t,” said Gray. “You don’t, either.”
    “You don’t feel a little the lost sheep?” he asked. “Astray.”
    It was a big comedown from antelope to sheep. “On the contrary,” said Gray, “I’ve found my way quite nicely. I have arrived.”
    “I was unaware we’d become a tourist attraction.”
    “Oh yes,” said Gray. “I’m here to help you set up a hot-dog concession. I thought you’d want to get in on the ground floor.”
    The man smiled a little, perhaps in spite of himself. Gray took the moment to assess him more closely. Errol had seen several brownish photographs of Charles Corgie. He always wore a wide hat with a sloppy brim. His coloring was dark, his bearing sultry. His eyes flickered as if long ago someone had done something terrible to him for which he had planned a perfect revenge; when it came due he would laugh without sympathy or regret. In a few of these snapshots he was smiling, like now, though always with both humor and disdain, as if the two of you could have a high old time if he would only let you in on the joke. Of course, he was not about to.
    Casually, Corgie pointed his rifle at Gray. Through their interchange he played with the gun distractedly, as people will toy with an object on a coffee table in a conversation that is sometimes awkward.
    Gray nodded at his tattered khaki. “So you deserted.”
    “I got lost.”
    “And you still haven’t found your way home? You must not have tried very hard.”
    “I tried clicking my heels together three times,” he said congenially. “It didn’t work.” Corgie turned and said something in Il-Ororen to one of the natives. The man shrank back and shook his head. Corgie repeated himself in a steelier tone; it was a voice that made all present, even Gray, take a breath. The native approached Gray and frisked her sides with a gingerly touch. “Raise your hands over your head, would you?”
    Gray did not. “I’m unarmed.”
    “If that’s true, then you’re very foolish. But it’s not necessarily true. White people aren’t to be trusted.”
    “I’ve found that people’s generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.”
    “So what kind of generalizations do you make?”
    “I’m more inclined to see people as judicious and reasonable. Unless presented with evidence to the contrary.” She raised her eyebrows at Corgie. “Which I sometimes am.”
    “Some woman who can see the human race as judicious and reasonable in light of World War II.”
    “What concerns me about World War II is that barbarity on such a scale seems