Earth Abides

The cow had run a few yards after the shot, and now she stood and turned uncertainly. Ish did not know what she might do in the defense of her calf. Taking good aim again, he put a bullet just behind her shoulder. He fired twice more, for mercy, as she toppled.

He had to walk back to the cabin for the hunting-knife. When he returned, he carried the reloaded rifle. He felt his own reaction as curious. Before this time he had never thought much about weapons, but now it was as if he had declared war upon creation and should look for retaliation upon himself. Yet, when he came to where the cow and the calf were lying, and climbed over the fence, he met no resistance or opposition. The calf, to his dismay, was still breathing. Not liking the job, he cut its throat. He had never been a hunter, and had never butchered an animal; so he made a bad haggling job of it. Getting himself well bloodied in the process, he managed to hack out the liver, when he had got it, he realized that he had no way to carry it, except in his hand. He had to lay the bloody mass back among the entrails of the calf, and go back again to the cabin to get a pan. When he returned to the calf, a crow was already at work upon the eyes.

When he finally had the liver safely at the cabin, he was so covered with blood and dirt that he had lost all desire to eat it. He washed as well as he could at the cabin, and waited around listlessly, since the rain had again begun to fall. Princess returned, and demanded entrance. Since she had, by this time, lost most of the skunk’s smell, he admitted her. She was wet and scratched with briers, dirty and foot-sore. She lay on the floor putting herself into shape with her tongue; he himself lay on the bed as if spent by emotion, yet in some way satisfied at last. Outside, the rain fell steadily, and after an hour, for the first time since it all happened, Ish realized that he had a new sensation—he was merely bored.

He looked around at the cabin, and found a six-months-old magazine; he settled down to read a story which dealt with the old boy-meets-girl theme, taking its particular slant from the problems winch arose to hinder true love as the result of a housing shortage. It was all as far away, Ish concluded, from his present situation, as if it had been a story about building the Pyramids. In the course of the morning, he read three stories, but he found the advertisements much more fascinating. Not one in ten of them seemed to have any relation to his present situation, because they were not aimed at man, the individual, so much as at man, the member of a group—for instance, you should avoid bad breath, riot because it might be a symptom of approaching toothache or digestive discomfort, but because if you had bad breath the girls would not like to dance with you or your boy-friend would not propose.

Yet the magazine had the good effect, at least, of taking him out from himself again. By noon, he was hungry, and when he looked at the liver now lying peacefully in a pan, he found that the memory of the bloody and dying calf had passed out of his mind. He fried a fine succulent piece of it for his lunch, and enjoyed it greatly. A bit of fresh meat, he concluded, was what he had been wanting. He gave a piece to Princess, also.

As he sat quietly after lunch, he had a new feeling of satisfaction and release. To shoot a calf was certainly no feat of sportsmanship, and it was not getting very close toward the production of one’s own food. Yet it was a little closer to reality than the opening of a can. He seemed to have moved one step away from a mere scavenging existence, and to be getting a little closer to the state in which the three Negroes were living. To put it that an act of destruction had been an act of creation might seem a paradox, but he felt of it as something of that sort.