The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels by William Golding

Author:William Golding [Golding, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571267392
Publisher: Faber and Faber Fiction
Published: 2013-04-04T07:00:00+00:00

IV

In the moon-drenched hunting country, the business of the animals was in full swing. But in the forested foothills there was little to be done, and nothing to be done at all on the bare cliffs. Life went on noisily in the tree tops, among birds and apes. But the cliffs seemed to hold no life at all, for the birds had either returned to their eyries, or had flown out in the light air across the plain to mingle with the bird societies by the waterholes. There was only one place of visible life—two sparks that appeared every now and then, when Chimp shifted his head. He squatted high up on a ledge where only the birds could get at him; and they did not want to. His spear stood against the rocks at his right hand and his bone flute lay on the ledge beside the spear where he had put it down as if it were no more to him than a stick. Every now and then, he stroked his ankle as he looked this way or that. He was still unaware that he had a problem to solve. He felt nothing but anger and grief. Instinct had bidden him remedy this by eating. So at first he had squatted, gnawing the dried fish that the women had provided for him. Yet this was not proper food but only stuff to be eaten in extremity. In itself, it was advertisement of the fact that the eater had somehow failed to be a man. It added humiliation to what he felt already. He got no good of it and he had given up the attempt to eat so that he was at a loss again. The hunting group drew him and repelled him at the same time. He shouted aloud.

“Fish men! The girls take you in their nets!” Because anger was so much easier to bear than humiliation he dwelt on them, sneering at the plain. They would, his mind said, in its man’s way, have grown the fireflower and set a necklace of hunters round it. He saw them in his mind with a sudden precision that brought back a wave of grief. He moaned and writhed his body as if the grief were a physical pain. Yet there was nothing else to think of; and his mind, once turned that way would go nowhere else. It examined the fire, the broken, toasted meat, the laughter, the singing. He saw Furious Lion beat at his little drum, he watched Stooping Eagle strum his three-stringed bow. He saw Chimp there too, happily tootling away on his bone flute. At that, the mixture of Chimp being there and here too, satisfactorily there and unsatisfactorily here, turned the pain to gross anguish, so that he wailed aloud and a nearby roosting bird flapped and squawked. He saw them singing, heard them singing.

“A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go!”

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