t_----

There is no feast like the feast in the open--the feast in the flaring
light of a night fire--the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the
wild and the tang of the smoke in it!

CHAPTER VI

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

It all came back there by the smoldering fires--the wonder and the
beauty and the awe of being alive. We had eaten hugely--a giant feast.
There had been no formalities about that meal. Lying on our blankets
under the smoke-drift, we had cut with our jack-knives the tender
morsels from a haunch as it roasted. When the haunch was at last cooked
to the bone, only the bone was left.

Heavy with the feast, I lay on my back watching the gray smoke brush my
stars that seemed so near. _My stars!_ Soft and gentle and mystical!
Like a dark-browed Yotun woman wooing the latent giant in me, the night
pressed down. I closed my eyes, and through me ran the sensuous surface
fires of her dream-wrought limbs. Upon my face the weird magnetic lure
of ever-nearing, never-kissing lips made soundless music. Like a sister,
like a mother she caressed me, lazy with the huge feast; and yet, a
drowsy, half-voluptuous joy shimmered and rippled in my veins.

Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting smoke-wrack, I felt the sense
of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday,
no I! Only eternity, one vast whole--sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled,
changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than
other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that
now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous
sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy.

And then suddenly and without shock--like the shifting of the wood
smoke--the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity
were I--vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to
the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through
immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day;
through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived
and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly
revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star
jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the
murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart;
and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my
soul.

Bill sn