Read Online The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin - Free Book Online

wanted to sleep longer, she wanted to stay longer. When she left would the gate close again? When would she be able, would she ever be able, to come back? The reason why she must go was remote, meaningless: She had been gone a whole night now and if she did not get back to the apartment by seven in the morning she would be late to work … . Work, apartment, night, morning, none of it made sense here, words without meaning. Yet, like the force or fear that kept the townspeople from leaving their town, senseless as it might be it must be obeyed. As they must not go, so she must.
    As always, Palizot and Sofir were up to breakfast with her before she left, and Sofir had a packet of bread and cheese for her to take on the long walk back to the gate. They were troubled, and unable to hide their trouble. They were, she saw, afraid for her.
    She looked back once as the way turned. The windows of the town glimmered faint gold in the dark sweep of the forests to the valley floor. Northward above the mountain shoulder she saw one bright star shine clear, gone the next instant, lost, like the reflection in a raindrop or the glitter of mica in sand.
    After crossing the Middle River she ate Sofir’s bread and cheese, and drank the aching-cold water of the river; rested a while and would have liked to fall asleep, but did not, could not; and went on. Nothing threatened her in the forest, nothing frightened her, but she could not rest. She must keep on. She held her light, fast pace, and came at last to the last rise,
the crest between red-trunked firs, down the long slope to the rhododendron thickets and through them to the beginning place, the gateway clearing—and saw, before she crossed the water, the blackened ring of stones, the plastic sack half hidden under ferns, the ugly rubbish of the intruder’s camp.
    She drew back at once to the thickets and from their shelter watched for some while. There was no sign of the man himself. Her heartbeat slowed, her face began to burn and her ears to sing a little. She crossed the river, went to the hearth ring—cold—and kicked it apart stone by stone, kicking the stones into the water. She picked up the plastic sack and the bedroll and turned to the river; then, whispering under her breath, “Out, get out, clear out,” she lugged the stuff through the gateway, up the path, and dumped it in the middle of Pincus’s woods at the foot of a blackberry thicket, just off the path. Hurrying on to the edge of the woods she picked out of the ditch a board nailed to a post, the NO HUNTING sign long torn or rotted away, which her eyes if not her mind had noted twelve days (or hours) ago when she came this way. With it she returned at a run to the threshold. Only when she was across it did she think, “What if I couldn’t have got through?”—but without any thrill of retrospective alarm. She was too angry for fear. She snatched a lump of charred wood from the ruined hearthplace, crossed the river, and sat down on a boulder with the signboard on her knees. Carefully, in black block letters on the ribbed, rain-bleached wood, she printed: KEEP OUT—NO TRESPASSING.
    She planted the sign on the crest of the bank, where it
would dominate the whole clearing to the eyes of anyone coming through the gateway. The foot of the post went into the sandy soil easily enough, but the whole thing tended to slant, and she was fetching a rock to pound it in solid when some movement across the water caught her eye. She froze, looking up over the glimmering rush of the river. The man, coming down from the threshold, straight at her. Nothing between them but the water.
    He knelt down, there on the far bank, and put his head down to the water to drink. Only then did she understand that he had not seen her.
    She was near enough to the great rhododendron bushes that she could crouch and draw back, all in one long pulling motion, till the white of her shirt and face was concealed by leaf and shadow. When she looked for