The Spirit

This was directed at Roy Curtis, who was the group’s treasurer. “We’re the only ones that have anything to do with the Fund, so I don’t know why not.”

“I don’t like to sound like a great white hunter,” said Nicolson. “But I’m wondering if we should load our guns with real bullets.”

“What on earth for!” Curtis replied.

“He’s a meat eater, isn’t he? That’s not your normal ape.”

That stopped Curtis. “Maybe we can just load one of the guns.”

“No,” said Jason, knowing his word would be final. “We don’t want to kill it. There’s absolutely no report of this thing being dangerous to anybody. If we load a rifle we’ll use it. No,” he repeated with final indissoluble certainty. “We can keep watches if that will make you feel better.”

“Yes,” said Nicolson, holding his rifle. “It would.”

They pitched camp under the trees, close by a gurgling stream. Curtis and Nicolson played three quick backgammon games on a portable board, as they had done nearly every night since meeting twelve years before in Kansas. Jason offered to take the first watch. He sat with his back against a tree, a little apart from the other three men, with his blanket over his legs and rifle across his lap.

By midnight Hill, Curtis, and Nicolson were lumps of nylon curled around the glowing campfire embers, which pulsed whenever a breeze crossed them. Except for a marmot whose whistle broke the block of quiet that settled over the forest, Raymond Jason might have been alone at the end of the world.

He clasped his hands together and tightened all the muscles of his arms. Wrists, forearms, biceps. A pleasurable tension in the shoulders. Then he relaxed and felt blood pump through the strained tissues.

Raymond Jason had spent the better part of his life being successful. Success was money, security, and physical comfort. He had waited until his first million, accumulated by the age of thirty-­five, to cash in on physical comfort. He got married. He bought a house and several cars. Having done all that, he discovered something was wrong with him.

This thing that was wrong had driven him to a psychiatrist, who had told him a human being is just a log of the past. Jason considered that, then rejected it. “Doc, I’ve got everything I want. I had a perfectly normal childhood and everything, you said it yourself. By any sensible standards I should be as happy as a clam, but I’m putting on weight, I get depressed, and my temper’s getting worse when it should be getting better.”

Jason had a vicious temper, which had been an asset in his business career. He was a man with a short fuse and a long memory, whose reserves of sheer anger had crashed him through all obstacles, commercial, personal, and social. This temper was damaging his marriage.

“Human beings are slates upon which experience writes the only words,” said the psychiatrist. Then after a moment he said, “Do you believe in God, Mr. Jason?”

“No.”

“God is one of the words on most humans’ slates. Mystery. I hesitate to say mysticism. It is an essential part of life. It is a center, a magnetic core as necessary to a human as sex.”

Being a supremely rational man, Jason simply did not understand what the psychiatrist was talking about.

“Do you know what material success is, Mr. Jason? It is an earthly substitute for going to heaven. It is a non­existent place where rich people live cushioned by money, with no cares or worries forever. When you made your first million, you died in a way. Only heaven isn’t where you went. Heaven does not necessarily come after success.”

Jason was not paying a shrink forty dollars an hour for a religious lecture. He found himself getting mad.

“You are angry because you are fundamentally frustrated, Mr. Jason. You are searching for something to devote yourself to, something to lose yourself in. A purpose to your life. More money probably isn’t the answer.”

“You mean find a religion,” Jason asked through clenched teeth.

“You are a hungry man, Mr. Jason. Hungry for something irrational. If this were the Middle Ages, yes, you’d be hungry for God. But this is the twentieth century, so let’s say you’re looking for something . . . inexplicable. Something to challenge you. Some—” which was as far as the psychiatrist got, because Jason had lost his temper and thrown an ashtray at him.

Shortly after that, his marriage broke up. He had struck his wife with his fist after an argument about vacations. He threw his fiercest energies into dozens of projects, including the Wildlife Fund. He decided to go to Canada and look for oxen. His business expertise and a sense of organization had slipped control of the expedition into his hands, and he welcomed it.

A hand touched his shoulder. He jumped in shock, clutching his rifle. Hill’s hand clamped over his mouth.

“Listen,” whispered Hill.

Jason was embarrassed at being such a lousy watchman. All three men had awakened and dressed while his mind drifted.