Before Adam Read Free Page B

head at me threateningly and advanced a step. This he did again, and yet again.
    Then I screamed… or shrieked – I cannot describe it, but it was a shrill and terrible cry. And it seems that it, too, at this stage of the proceedings, was the thing expected of me. From not far away came an answering cry. My sounds seemed momentarily to disconcert the boar, and while he halted and shifted his weight with indecision, an apparition burst upon us.
    She was like a large orang-utan, my mother, or like a chimpanzee, and yet, in sharp and definite ways, quite different. She was heavier of build than they, and had less hair. Her arms were not so long, and her legs were stouter. She wore no clothes – only her natural hair. And I can tell you she was a fury when she was excited.
    And like a fury she dashed upon the scene. She was gritting her teeth, making frightful grimaces, snarling, uttering sharp and continuous cries that sounded like ‘kh-ah! kh-ah!’ So sudden and formidable was her appearance that the boar involuntarily bunched himself together on the defensive andbristled as she swerved towards him. Then she swerved towards me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just what to do in that moment of time she had gained. I leapt to meet her, catching her about the waist and holding on hand and foot – yes, by my feet; I could hold on by them as readily as by my hands. I could feel in my tense grip the pull of the hair as her skin and her muscles moved beneath with her efforts.
    As I say, I leapt to meet her, and on the instant she leapt straight up into the air, catching an overhanging branch with her hands. The next instant, with clashing tusks, the boar drove past underneath. He had recovered from his surprise and sprung forwards, emitting a squeal that was almost a trumpeting. At any rate it was a call, for it was followed by the rushing of bodies through the ferns and brush from all directions.
    From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space – a score of them. But my mother swung over the top of a thick limb, a dozen feet from the ground, and, still holding onto her, we perched there in safety. She was very excited. She chattered and screamed, and scolded down at the bristling, tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too, trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to imitate my mother’s cries.
    From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper, into a sort of roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and soon I saw him approaching: my father – at least, by all the evidence of the times, I am driven to conclude that he was my father.
    He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers go. He seemed half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not yet man. I fail to describe him. There is nothing like him today onthe earth, under the earth, nor in the earth. He was a large man in his day, and he must have weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat, and the eyebrows overhung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small, deep set, and close together. He had practically no nose at all. It was squat and broad, apparently without any bridge, while the nostrils were like two holes in the face, opening outwards instead of down.
    The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair began right at the eyes and ran up over the head. The head itself was preposterously small and was supported on an equally preposterous, thick, short neck.
    There was an elemental economy about his body – as was there about all our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true, cavernously deep; but there were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that body of my father’s, strength without beauty; ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and destroy.
    His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were crooked and stringy muscled.