“But the bird was alive!” she exclaimed.
He stared at her.
“What of it?” said he. “Look at the lots of ’em there are!”
She said nothing.
“Who’d miss it?” he argued. “Who wants it? You always kill things.”
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why. But it don’t seem right.”
Women were like that, he reflected. They hated blood. But—a bird! It was unfathomable.
High noon found them on the summit of Whiteface, looking down upon the crouching shoulders of the east foothills. Where they stood, the sun beat hotly, and the bare rocks and the coarse growth lay in intense brooding quiet. Everything there was flat, as if the long pressure of the sun had told, like weight.
Electrically, the Inger’s spirits returned to him. Here on the height, kindling fire, boiling water, spreading food, were no such business as these had been to him down on his little shelf. Here everything had a way of being that was hitherto unknown to him. When their table was spread in the shade of a pine, and the wood duck roasted slowly over the fire on a spit which he had fashioned, he stood up and surveyed their work, and his look fell on the girl, sitting relaxed, with loosely fallen hands, the sun striking her hair to brightness.
For a moment he let himself watch her, and catching his look, she smiled, as she had smiled when his eyes had met hers as he woke.