Arslan

Hunt?”

My clothes were saturated with dust, my eye swollen all but shut, my shirt torn and a little messed with blood. “Walking,” I said, “in the corn.”

I liked to walk in the corn. From August on, when the great stalks stood higher than my head, the corn fields were a world apart, a world aloof and alien as pale Bukhara. I walked in the corn alone, or sometimes with a dog as a convenient switch by which to connect myself now and then with reality. After a late-summer rain, the field steamed. I walked in a dense green heat, my feet in the mud, my body and soul washed with sweat. Midges and mosquitoes twinkled. My ears hummed. And all around me the enormous grass-leaves hung and crowded, rubbing their moist rough blades against my clothes, shouldering and slapping as I pushed through the rows, spilling their drops upon my hair.

But it was in waiting autumn that I liked best to walk in the corn. It was dry then, colored like the yellow dust, a gold without luster. The blades still curved and drooped in the easy postures of life; but with every stir of air they clashed faintly, a sound of thin brass. Their edges cut, cruel grating cuts like those of stiff paper. I paced slowly through the dusty stillness, surrounded, surrounded—ahead, behind, to left, to right, above—by the great tawny leaves, alone in the harsh ripe corn.

I was teaching myself to see and hear in the dim world of the corn, as Arslan had taught me in the woods, and in the dazzling nights and colorless days of Bukhara. In the lion-colored noonday dusk of the corn, the eye lost itself. The brazen rustling had the very quality of silence. It was easy to drift in a hot, buzzing dream, down aisles cross-laced with ragged swords. But I was learning. So I heard, in the unresonant clangors that ran like muffled alarms through the corn with the changing breeze, a more purposeful rustle. I stood at gaze. Ahead, behind, the tall files closed in. The blades clashed. The bronze shadows crossed and waved. I walked on, stirring the blades carefully out of my way.

Again. But this time it was the wind. Again. A mist of gnats hung quivering in the heat. Dogs ranged sometimes in the corn. I waited.

He was two rows away from me, a dark shape without outline. I wiped my hand carefully and drew Arslan’s knife. One row. It was the dark Russian uniform. I stood with the knife held behind me. He stepped into my aisle, four yards away, perhaps. I had seen him before, I thought—a middle-aged lieutenant, big-eared and stupid-faced. I discarded my experimentally friendly greeting. All doubts were removed by the light in his pale eyes, the clubbed pistol in his red hand.

The corn slashed at me as I ran—head down, to save my eyes from the blades and my feet from the roots. I heard, over the pounding of my steps, the slower pounding of his. It seemed not unnatural to be hunted in the corn, and it seemed to follow (seemed, with the distorted clarity of heat waves) that if I could escape from the corn, the hunt would be over.

A stunning shock thudded my back, between my right shoulder and the base of my neck, a blow outrageously hard and heavy. I was scrabbling angrily in the hot-smelling dust. He must have thrown the gun at me; ergo, the gun was somewhere near. But my right arm refused to act, my neck and shoulders were heavy as stone. I heaved myself over, seeing the prop roots of the near stalks standing out like flying buttresses. The Russian plunged upon me like a falling cloud, and I realized that I had lost the knife.

I was initiated long since in the actuality of physical contact; it was old familiar business, serious, deliberate, and there could be nothing more real. He had the advantages of weight and position. But I had been thrown by Arslan. I knew all the art of the underdog.

He had my left wrist. Before he could gain the right, I got a grip on his left thumb, and bent, and as his right hand twisted and crushed, we strove in mutual torture. With furious joy I felt my wrist spring free. I writhed, gouged, suffered his clubbing fist. I was tipped—folded, rather—upon my side, my still-free hand (the immediate jewel of my soul) crushed under our double weight. He pulled busily at my clothes. My left eye was in the dust; my right contemplated a blond cornstalk. A terrific decision enacted itself: no! And I exploded in the self-forgetful fury that had burst me in the beginning so long ago. And though it had failed me then (even in total war somebody loses), now the Russian hunched backward off me, grunting. I spraggled up to knees and elbows. Arslan’s miraculous knife winked in the dust. My hand sprang to meet it, and I crouched and panted.

He backed away, shaking his head, grinning, stumbled on his gun (to each his own), paternally dusted and holstered it, and disappeared gradually through the successive curtains of the corn, still backing, still grinning, still shaking his head.

I tidied myself triumphantly. My nose was bleeding. (Had he his hurts before? Ay, on the front.) I sat among the shattered stalks and nursed it patiently, while the long shafts of sunlight broke among the corn.

Franklin looked at me with care. He didn’t ask, “What happened?” He didn’t ask, “Who was it?” He didn’t ask even, “Are you all right?” He set his chin and turned away into the kitchen, his back broad to my gratitude. “Why don’t you wash up,” he said, “while I fix the fire?”

Winter came, passed, with the beautiful ashes of wood fires under the grate, to be carried out and shed like hushed snowflakes or blessings on the frigid earth; with dried corn, hard and dimpled, the seeds that could not sow themselves (corn, that hapless species, reproducing only by the service of man). The deer pushed thicker into the easy browsing of the fields and fencerows, and were shot with our clumsy arrows. And the Russians departed, sudden and noisy as a migration of purple martins, with great pretense of secrecy. Spring came, speciously wholesome, feeding eyes and tongues while winter-lean bellies grew leaner still. Merely, winter rains changed to spring rains. Yet it was true that the skewed earth thrust us ever deeper, for a time, into the sunshine; and it was presumable that these green shoots would bear again the golden fruits of their fathers.

After the long, vague days of mist, I loved the sleek sky; loved especially the clear and brilliant clouds, truest white on their heights and ridges, shadowing their own slopes with the blue of ashes. They stood pure and definite like piled snow, unneatly firm as some engraving by William Blake. What had Blake said about line? Outline is reality. He had said it Blakishly, of course. Standing in far air, the real clouds shone and shadowed. But at close range they would be edgeless, lineless—a vague mist, obscure and obscuring. Yet that very obscurity was the sum of myriad surfaces, the entangled glitter of a billion crystal spheres, each comprised in a bounding line of mathematical trueness and demonstrable reality; so that (unless, as was probable, my grasp of Newtonian physics was infirm) the slovenly gray of Kraftsville’s mists and heaven’s exploded clouds was only, in generalized form, the radiant precision of the misty rainbow.

I watched the nobility of the ranked clouds, passing, with that stateliest motion perceivable by human eyes, across the high hemisphere of Heaven. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud. Well, it was not the thorns of life that had drawn my blood, and I was, to all perception, tame, slow, and humble; but certainly I could feel my leaves falling. (Oops, there goes another—hectic red, that one.) Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth. Alas, poor Shelley. It took more than withered leaves. And no doubt Pluto, as much as Earth, had its forever-sequent spring.

Patterns of leaves upon the wind, billowing flights that went nowhere, sails of green lace that moved nothing, moved me. Through March and April I drifted, my horse unguided, along fencerows and woods’ margins. As burnist silver the leaf onglidez That thick con trill on everich bough. The little leaves, furred with their delicate birthcoats, colors of silver, colors of wine, and the hearttouching innocence of young green, misted the great elastic branches that surged and sprang in ponderous sweeps above my head. Every species had its shape—the lifting fountains of the dying elms, the broad layered pyramids of oaks, the rustic bouquets of the little blossoming redbuds. Already the eager maples spread broad leaves, like flocks of green stars, upon the wind.

They were not my friends, the trees. My friend was the chestnut horse that moved under me, warm in the sterile air. But I admired the trees, those static galleons, rooted like me in the graves of their ancestors. They drank the traveling air, the dead radiance of a star. They shadowed their shapes upon the passing wind and light. Every leaf held its place, a stitch of the tapestry, disordered by every breeze, primly returning with every calm. And when at last it fell, its one flight, spinning and beautiful, bore it to the grave of its birth. Year by year the epicycles wheeled. The trees remained. They bent; they broke at last; but they did not budge.

Under the trees, my chestnut’s hooves among the thick gold stars of dandelions, I took relief in the slow, traveling spiral of the world, the great pacific resultant of how many billion impassioned problems, the moving equilibrium of all forces. Humanity was a plague. Locustlike, we ripped holes in the world’s fabric. The locusts met their controlling limits—birds and starvation, fungi and disease—and the fabric healed itself; and mankind had met