himself up
the rocks.

"You're a slow one." The old woman paused and waited for him to catch
up. "Where've you been all your life? You don't act like a mountain
boy."

"I'm not," Eric said. "I'm from the valley...."

He stopped talking. He realized, suddenly, the futility of trying to
explain his life to her. If she had ever known the towns, it would have
been years ago. She was too old, and tattered, and so dirty that her
smell wasn't even a good clean animal smell.

"Hurry up, boy!"

He felt unreal, as if this were a dream, as if he would awaken suddenly
and be back at the museum. He almost wished that he would. He couldn't
believe that he had found another like himself and was now following
her, scrambling up a mountain as if he were a goat.

A goat. Smells. The dirty old woman in front of him. He wrinkled his
nose in disgust and then was furious with himself, with his reactions,
with the sudden knowledge that he had glamorized his kind and had hoped
to find them noble and brilliant.

This tattered old woman with her cackling laugh and leathery, toothless
face and dirt encrusted clothing couldn't be like him. He couldn't
accept it....

Mag led him up the slope and then over some heaped boulders, and
suddenly they were on level ground again. They had come out into a tiny
canyon, a blind pocket recessed into the mountain, almost completely
surrounded by walls that rose sharply upward. Back across the gorge,
huddled against the face of the mountain, was a tiny hut.

It was primitive, like those in the prehistoric sections of the old
history books. It was made of branches lashed together, with sides that
leaned crookedly against each other and a matted roof that looked as if
it would slide off at any minute. It was like a twig house that a child
might make with sticks and grass.

"Our home," Mag said. Her voice was proud.

He didn't answer. He followed her across toward it, past the mounds of
refuse, the fruit rinds and bones and skins that were flung carelessly
beside the trail. He smelled the scent of decay and rottenness and
turned his head away, feeling sick.

"Lisa! Lisa!" Mag shouted, the words echoing and re-echoing.

A figure moved just inside the hut doorway. "She's not here," a voice
called. "She's out hunting."

"Well, come on out, Nell, and see what I've found."

The figure moved slowly out from the gloom of the hut, bending to get
through the low door, half straightening up outside, and