Mockingbird

and heard no sign of anyone following me. Nor did I see any sign of human habitation. The weather was cold, and for a while in the afternoon a light snow fell; but my prison clothes were warm enough and I was not seriously bothered by it. I found more clams for lunch, and ate half a soybar with them and drank some more of the liquid protein. Biff took easily to eating clams, lapping and biting them out of their shells with great enthusiasm. I soon became proficient at finding and opening them.

From time to time I would go inland for some distance and try to find some high ground and look around me for fresh water—a lake, river, or irrigation ditch—but I saw none. I knew I would eventually need more than the clams and the liquid protein.

It was like that for days; I lost count of them. Gradually my wrist became better, and one night by my fire I tried an experiment that worked and that made me feel much more confident about the future. There happened to be a sizable patch of ice and frozen snow trapped under a rocky ledge a short distance from the beach. I had a metal prison bowl in my backpack, brought along for cooking my shore dinners in; and I went to the patch of ice and, using my broken bracelet, chipped some into the bowl. Then I built a small fire, let it burn down, and set the bowl on the hot coals. When the ice melted I found that I could drink it! And I did, letting Biff have some of it. Then I added a few sticks to my fire, put more ice in the bowl to melt, and dug a double handful of clams while it did so. Then I added the clams to the now-boiling water and after a few minutes I had a delicious hot clam stew.

I survived that way for a month, finding what shelter I could to sleep by, and eating the food Belasco had given me a little at a time. But eventually Belasco’s food ran out, and I was forced to live on clams alone for days and days—I do not know how many, since I was not keeping this journal at the time—until I eventually found a frozen fish lying on the beach and cooked it. It gave me a change of diet for two days; but it was soon gone.

Biff caught herself several small shore birds, and I was able to get one of them away from her; but after that she would disappear up the beach to do her hunting. It would have been nice to make a hunting cat out of her, but I had no idea how to do that.

I knew, too, that the ocean was full of fish and crustaceans and other good things to eat; but I had no idea how to get any of them out of it. Cooking Shore Dinners spoke of berries and roots and potatoes, but there were none of these to be had. I kept making regular excursions inland in search of water and of fields like the one at the prison; I found nothing but wild, dead grass and weeds. There was no sense that the land had ever been cultivated, and no sign of any kind of life. I wondered if the Denver Incident had caused the land to be “stifled,” as my history books put it, back at that time, or during some later war after the death of literacy, unrecorded in books. When literacy died, so had history.

Toward the end of this time I must have gone twenty or more days with nothing to eat but clams, and sometimes even they were hard to find. I would wake up in the mornings with a metallic taste in my mouth and a cramping in my stomach, and I would find that after walking for only a short time I had to lie in the sand and rest. And my skin had become dry and itchy. I knew I needed something else in my diet, but there was nothing else to be had. I tried sneaking up on sleeping or resting gulls, but I was never able to get really close to one. Once, in a field of brown grass, I saw a snake and chased it, but it slithered away too fast for my tired legs to follow. I fell in the field exhausted; the snake would have made a meaty stew. Sometimes I would see a rabbit; but they were far too fast for me.

I began to get sick. My wrist was healed by then, although it was a bit crooked and stiff and would hurt when I picked up Biff with my right hand, but now my head began to ache furiously, and I would become terribly thirsty. I had to stop often to melt ice for water, and then sometimes I would throw it up. And one night I threw up my dinner and was too weak to cook anything more. I fell asleep, face down, by the remains of my fire, not really even sheltered from the weather.

When I awoke I was shivering terribly and my head was wet with perspiration. I was covered with a light blanket of snow; and the snow was still falling on me. The sky was a dark gray, and the sand around me had frozen. All of my joints ached.

I tried to get up, and could hardly stand. Eventually the best I could do was to sit up on the beach and look around me for wood to build a fire with. But there was none around; I had gathered up all of the sticks in the area the night before. I needed a fire desperately.

Biff rubbed herself against my hip, crying softly.

In a dormitory or in prison a robot would have given me a single Med Pill and I would have been all right. But I had no pills with me whatever.

I must have sat there for over an hour, waiting for the sky to become lighter and for the day to become warmer. But that did not happen. The sky remained very dark, and a cold wind began to blow, blowing snow into my face and stinging my cheeks and eyes.

I knew that if I continued to sit there, or lay down, I would become sicker. I kept thinking of a line from a poem by T. S. Eliot:

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Finally I said the line aloud, into the wind, as strongly as I could. And I knew that if I did not get up I would probably die, that my lean flesh would be picked by gulls and that my bones would eventually roll in the winds and the water on that beach. And I did not want that to happen.

Moaning slightly, I pushed myself upright, and then fell on one knee. “Up!” I said aloud, and stood up again. I staggered for a moment, my head hanging over, too weak to hold it erect. The pain and the vertigo were powerful. But I got my head up and began walking. Several times I veered into the surf and staggered out again.

But eventually I found some wood and, shaking terribly, managed to make a fire. And I reserved a sturdy, long stick of driftwood to use as a walking staff.

My backpack was empty now, except for my bowl. I was able to slide the denim material it was made of from the light metal tubes, take off my coat and sweater, and, shaking violently with the cold, button the fabric around me like a vest. Then I quickly put the sweater and coat back on and after I warmed my body up again at the fire I was even better sheltered from the cold. A scarf and a cap would have been very useful; but I had grown a beard and that helped keep my face and neck warm. I could have killed Biff and eaten her and used her skin for a hat; but I did not want to kill Biff. I was a changed person from what I had been trained to be; I no longer wished to be alone, private, or even self-reliant. I needed Biff. Self-reliance was not just a matter of drugs and silence.

I managed to tie the bowl with a string to the frame of my backpack. I put the frame back over my shoulders, took up my walking staff, and, still feverish and dizzy, but stronger now, continued northward along the empty beach.

It continued to snow, and as the day wore on I became colder. I stopped twice to attempt a fire, but I wasn’t able to get one lighted because of the wetness of what wood I could find and the way the wind kept blowing out my little lighter. When I became thirsty there was nothing to do but swallow handfuls of snow. The beach had become frozen too hard for me to be able to dig for clams. I kept moving ahead, slowly, and tried not to worry.

And then as I came around a curve in the beach toward evening, I saw in front of me, sitting on a low bluff back from the shore, a large old building, with lights in the windows. The snow was falling faster. The possibility of finding shelter, and warmth, gave me some strength, and I hurried forward, in a kind of limping half-run, until I came to the bottom of the bluff. But my heart sank. There were no stairs up to it—only loosely piled boulders all around, as a bulwark against the ocean.

I stood there for a while wondering what to do, until I realized that I must climb up there. I could not take the chance of sleeping on the beach and of being too weak and fevered in the morning even to sit up.

I began climbing, scrambling up a boulder, resting, and pushing myself slowly up the next one. Biff seemed to think I was playing, and ran up and down the rocks with ease, while my right wrist ached and my throat ached for water and the boulders scraped my legs and knees. It must have been immensely painful, but I did not think about the pain. I just kept clawing my way up those rocks, knowing that the snow-filled beach might be my death.

And I made it to the top and lay there, panting, while Biff snuggled against me. I patted her head. The palm