The Naked Country by Morris West

Author:Morris West [West, Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760638467
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

Mundaru, the buffalo man, heard it too – so close that he could see through the stalks of the grass, the trunk of the shouting man. A single leap and a single spear thrust would silence the shout for ever: but Mandaru squatted, motionless as a rabbit in the depths of the grass until the man and the voice had passed far beyond him. This was not his victim. To kill him would profit nothing. Besides, he was tired now from the day’s stalking, from hunger, and from the long, violent ravishing of Menyan.

It was a thing he had not counted on: her terror, her cowering rejection of him, as if he were unclean or a threatening spirit man. Withdrawal, yes – a token flight, an ultimate surrender – this was the ritual of a tribal abduction when a young wife was ‘pulled’ from an ageing husband. The woman must prove fidelity before she could be unfaithful. The man must prove strength before he could possess another man’s woman.

But Menyan’s reaction had been quite different: a panic horror, the desperate bone-breaking struggles of a trapped bird; so that in the end he had to stifle her and beat her savagely before he took her. Only afterward, in the hour of staleness and disgust, did he understand the reason: Menyan knew what he himself had only suspected. The tribe had ranged itself against him. They had pointed the bone at him and sung him to death. Already the executioners were on his traces.

So now he sat crouched in the six-foot grasses, listening to the retreating voices of the white man, listening for the sounds that would herald the coming of the kadaitja men and clinging to his last tenuous hope: that he might find his own victim, eat his liver fat and arm himself against the magic of the tribal avengers. If he failed in this, he was lost and he might as well lie down and die in his tracks.

He had not much time. Night was coming down on the land. He must spend it alone, without fire or company, in a last desperate search for his victim. He clasped his hands round his knees and let his head drop forward, lapsing like an animal into fitful sleep while far voices rang above the clatter of the evening insects.

‘Dillon!…Where are you? Dillon…!’

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