手斧男孩英文版 Hatchet chapter 8

8
AT FIRST he thought it was a growl. In the still darkness of the shelter in the middle of the night his eyes
came open and he was awake and he thought there was a growl. But it was the wind, a medium wind
in the pines had made some sound that brought him up, brought him awake. He sat up and was hit
with the smell.
It terrified him. The smell was one of rot, some musty rot that made him think only of graves with
cobwebs and dust and old death. His nostrils widened and he opened his eyes wider but he could see
nothing. It was too dark, too hard dark with clouds covering even the small light from the stars, and he
could not see. But the smell was alive, alive and full and in the shelter. He thought of the bear,
thought of Bigfoot and every monster he had ever seen in every fright movie he had ever watched,
and his heart hammered in his throat.
Then he heard the slithering. A brushing sound, a slithering brushing sound near his feet—and he
kicked out as hard as he could, kicked out and threw the hatchet at the sound, a noise coming from his
throat. But the hatchet missed, sailed into the wall where it hit the rocks with a shower of sparks, and
his leg was instantly torn with pain, as if a hundred needles had been driven into it. "Unnnngh!"
Now he screamed, with the pain and fear, and skittered on his backside up into the corner of the
shelter, breathing through his mouth, straining to see, to hear.
The slithering moved again, he thought toward him at first, and terror took him, stopping his breath.
He felt he could see a low dark form, a bulk in the darkness, a shadow that lived, but now it moved
away, slithering and scraping it moved away and he saw or thought he saw it go out of the door opening.
He lay on his side for a moment, then pulled a rasping breath in and held it, listening for the
attacker to return. When it was apparent that the shadow wasn't coming back he felt the calf of his
leg, where the pain was centered and spreading to fill the whole leg.
His fingers gingerly touched a group of needles that had been driven through his pants and into the
fleshy part of his calf. They were stiff and very sharp on the ends that stuck out, and he knew then what
the attacker had been. A porcupine had stumbled into his shelter and when he had kicked it the thing
had slapped him with its tail of quills.
He touched each quill carefully. The pain made it seem as if dozens of them had been slammed into
his leg, but there were only eight, pinning the cloth against his skin. He leaned back against the wall for
a minute. He couldn't leave them in, they had to come out, but just touching them made the pain
more intense.
So fast, he thought. So fast things change. When he'd gone to sleep he had satisfaction and in just a
moment it was all different. He grasped one of the quills, held his breath, and jerked. It sent pain signals
to his brain in tight waves, but he grabbed another, pulled it, then another quill. When he had pulled
four of them he stopped for a moment. The pain had gone from being a pointed injury pain to spreading
in a hot smear up his leg and it made him catch his breath.
Some of the quills were driven in deeper than others and they tore when they came out. He
breathed deeply twice, let half of the breath out, and went back to work. Jerk, pause, jerk—and three
more times before he lay back in the darkness, done. The pain filled his leg now, and with it came new
waves of self-pity. Sitting alone in the dark, his leg aching, some mosquitoes finding him again, he
started crying. It was all too much, just too much, and he couldn't take it. Not the way it was.
I can't take it this way, alone with no fire and in the dark, and next time it might be something
worse, maybe a bear, and it wouldn't be just quills in the leg, it would be worse. I can't do this, he
thought, again and again. I can't. Brian pulled himself up until he was sitting upright back in the corner
of the cave. He put his head down on his arms across his knees, with stiffness taking his left leg, and
cried until he was cried out.
He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of
the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that
feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered
incorrect. It was more than that—it didn't work. When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was
done, was all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and
the self-pity had accomplished nothing.
At last he slept again, but already his patterns were changing and the sleep was light, a resting
doze more than a deep sleep, with small sounds awakening him twice in the rest of the night. In
the last doze period before daylight, before he awakened finally with the morning light and the
clouds of new mosquitoes, he dreamed. This time it was not of his mother, not of the Secret, but of
his father at first and then of his friend Terry.
In the initial segment of the dream his father was standing at the side of a living room looking at him
and it was clear from his expression that he was trying to tell Brian something. His lips moved but
there was no sound, not a whisper. He waved his hands at Brian, made gestures in front of his face as
if he were scratching something, and he worked to make a word with his mouth but at first Brian could
not see it. Then the lips made an mmmmm shape but no sound came. Mmmmm—maaaa. Brian
could not hear it, could not understand it and he wanted to so badly; it was so important to
understand his father, to know what he was saying. He was trying to help, trying so hard, and when
Brian couldn't understand he looked cross, the way he did when Brian asked questions more than
once, and he faded. Brian's father faded into a fog place Brian could not see and the dream was almost
over, or seemed to be, when Terry came.
He was not gesturing to Brian but was sitting in the park at a bench looking at a barbecue pit and
for a time nothing happened. Then he got up and poured some charcoal from a bag into the cooker,
then some starter fluid, and he took a flick type of lighter and lit the fluid. When it was burning and
the charcoal was at last getting hot he turned, noticing Brian for the first time in the dream. He turned
and smiled and pointed to the fire as if to say, see, a fire.
But it meant nothing to Brian, except that he wished he had a fire. He saw a grocery sack on die
table next to Terry. Brian thought it must contain hot dogs and chips and mustard and he could think
only of the food. But Terry shook his head and pointed again to the fire, and twice more he pointed to
the fire, made Brian see the flames, and Brian felt his frustration and anger rise and he thought all right,
all right, I see the fire but so what? I don't have a fire. I know about fire; I know I need a fire.
I know that.
His eyes opened and there was light in the cave, a gray dim light of morning. He wiped his mouth
and tried to move his leg, which had stiffened like wood. There was thirst, and hunger, and he ate some
raspberries from the jacket. They had spoiled a bit, seemed softer and mushier, but still had a rich
sweetness. He crushed the berries against the roof of his mouth with his tongue and drank the sweet
juice as it ran down his throat. A flash of metal caught his eye and he saw his hatchet in the sand
where he had thrown it at die porcupine in the dark.
He scootched up, wincing a bit when he bent his stiff leg, and crawled to where the hatchet lay.
He picked it up and examined it and saw a chip in the top of the head.
The nick wasn't large, but the hatchet was important to him, was his only tool, and he should not
have thrown it. He should keep it in his hand, and make a tool of some kind to help push an animal
away. Make a staff, he thought, or a lance, and save the hatchet. Something came then, a thought as he
held the hatchet, something about the dream and his father and Terry, but he couldn't pin it down.
"Ahhh.. ." He scrambled out and stood in the morning sun and stretched his back muscles and his
sore leg. The hatchet was still in his hand, and as he stretched and raised it over his head it caught the
first rays of the morning sun. The first faint light hit the silver of the hatchet and it flashed a brilliant
gold in the light. Like fire. That is it, he thought. What they were trying to tell me.
Fire. The hatchet was the key to it all. When he threw the hatchet at the porcupine in the cave and
missed and hit the stone wall it had showered sparks, a golden shower of sparks in the dark, as
golden with fire as the sun was now.
The hatchet was the answer. That's what his father and Terry had been trying to tell him. Somehow
he could get fire from the hatchet. The sparks would make fire.
Brian went back into the shelter and studied the wall. It was some form of chalky granite, or a
sandstone, but imbedded in it were large pieces of a darker stone, a harder and darker stone. It only
took him a moment to find where the hatchet had struck. The steel had nicked into the edge of one of
the darker stone pieces. Brian turned the head backward so he would strike with the flat rear of the
hatchet and hit the black rock gently. Too gently, and nothing happened. He struck harder, a glancing
blow, and two or three weak sparks skipped off the rock and died immediately.
He swung harder, held the hatchet so it would hit a longer, sliding blow, and the black rock exploded
in fire. Sparks flew so heavily that several of them skittered and jumped on the sand beneath the
rock and he smiled and stuck again and again.
There could be fire here, he thought. I will have a fire here, he thought, and struck again—I will have
fire from the hatchet.