What if someday there were others? And
secondly, of more immediate concern, he felt he could not take care of
her, or give her the things she needed to live. His every attempt had
ended in failure and near disaster, and he clearly saw the price it cost
her. He felt for this reason, and others like it, that he had no right
to think of her as his own, a belief which galled his animal self to no
end.
*
As all of this passed inside him, Sylviana continued to work quietly
away, doing everything she could think of to stabilize the temperature
of the enclosure. First she took pine branches they had used as a blind
outside the barrier, and placed them in a careful thatching pattern
inside the shaft, here at the bottom where it was narrowest. This still
allowed the smoke to pass up through it, if more slowly, but also kept
out much of the wind, especially the sudden gusts which seemed to
trouble him so.
Then she made a canopy of the projecting altar above his bed, stitching
together a patchwork of smaller skins to hang down from it. She also
heated stones beside the fire, and placed them by his side when he
slept.
But perhaps the wisest and most beneficial thing she did for him in
those days, beside not giving up herself, was to read to him. It
occurred to her that one of the things that made his life so difficult
was the fact that his deepest thoughts remained isolated: he didn't
know that other men felt the same emptiness, and confronted the same
unspoken fears.
Pages:
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166