Chapter 21

I have spent now three days with Danny almost all of the day. I do this because Linda asks it.

Danny seems good man. I think I could be a friend to him, perhaps good friend. But he is not entirely easy with me, I think he still has doubt about me and wishes in this time with me to test that doubt in his mind.

Linda absents herself often, and even when she is near she does not speak much but lets Danny and me talk without taking part. This is much as it is when I am in my own hearth, the men talking among themselves and the women making their own separate talk or doing other things. When it was so I accepted it, it was the way of our people, but now it does not seem to me so good. Linda is not less than we men, and it does not seem right that she be shut out of our talk.

To begin Danny asks me to tell of my life. I begin to say short, for most people do not interest themselves in small things about others, but again and again he stops me to ask about this thing I say and that one, and I come to understand that he wishes to know all I will tell him.

He is especially interested when I tell him of my time of travels. Not all do this, but many when they are newly grown to men leave where they were boys and go to other places and other groups of people. Some return after, others do not. I was one who returned, but I did not bring with me a woman as many do, M’kamba was of my own people.

Danny asks what will become of her now that I am gone. I tell him she will mate with another, she is still of an age to bear children and she is a good woman who will not lack for men to pursue her. Perhaps she will mate with Siefert, I think, his own woman died in the winter of an illness and he had not yet taken another.

Then Danny bids me to continue the tale of my travels, and I tell him of those I encountered. I traveled for more than a full time of seasons, and I met many. Not all were good, but most allowed me to stay with them for short if I did my part in bringing food and helping them build and other such things.

One group, I remember, did live near a large cave, though not in it. They would go to the cave for ceremony, to dance and sing and make words to what they called spirits. I have never seen a spirit or felt one, and I am not sure that I believe there are such things, but I did not say this to them; it is not polite to question the beliefs that people have.

In one day Danny and I do not remain in the dwelling but take up our outer clothes and go abroad. We walk long and far through the snow, which remains deep though it has melted a little. I must go slow because Danny does not walk so fast as I am used to, I think he is older, perhaps as old as Siefert, and he is not so strong in the body. But it is pleasant, this is a good place with many things of beauty.

Near the end of our walk, when we start to return to the dwelling where Linda waits, there is a rabbit that startles and runs across our path. My hand moves quickly before I remember that I have not my sling with me—I do not take when we go to hunt aurochs—but Danny sees this and asks about it. I tell him of sling and how it is used to hunt such as birds and small creatures of the earth.

“Can you make one and show me?” he asks.

I laugh aloud. “Do you still test me?”

He stops and turns to face me, and his manner and his voice are very serious. “Please understand, Hugo,” he says. “I like you. You seem like a nice guy. You’re good, you’re more than good to my sister, and that’s very important.”

For a moment he pauses in his speech, but I see he is not done and I wait.

“But this story about your coming through time from more years ago than I can imagine is...” He shakes his head. “It’s never happened before, not that I or anybody else knows about. And then I watch you simply adjust and keep on going, and the whole thing seems unbelievable. How can you accept all the things you’re seeing if you’re who you say you are?”

I do not understand all, but I hear his sense. “What other will I do?” I ask. “Am I to scream and weep and go running from things that are ordinary to others because they are strange to me?”

“I think I would,” he tells me.

“Sometimes it is in my head to do so,” I say. “One wonder follows so quickly on another that it is almost too much. All is strange, there is nothing I know, and I have no place of ease, no rest from strangeness. If Linda is not with me perhaps I would do that, I must take from her strength in the mind.

“But I see much on my travels that is also very different from what I know before. Not so different as here, but enough that I learn to think less on what I know and give my mind over to what is where I am even if it is strange to me. I tell you of those who visit spirits in cave. In another place I visit there are men and women who do not lie with each other but with their own. In a third they make drawings on their bodies with sharp points so that the drawing remains always. I do not do as they do in these places, but these things are something that is and I cannot change, and why should I seek to change?”