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

shirt, blur of black hair, white face staring.
    “I can’t get out,” Hugh said. “There isn’t any way.”
    The loud sweet voices of the water ran between them.
    He was very deeply frightened. He said, “If you know this place, if you live here, tell me how to get out!”
    The woman came forward abruptly, crossed the creek, going light and lithe from stone to stone. She stopped by the shelving rock and pointed to the gateway. “There.”
    He shook his head.
    “That’s the gate.”
    “I know.”
    “Go on!”
    “It’s changed,” he said. He turned and crossed the glade,
went between the bushes and the pine, and went on. There was no darkening of the way, no steep scramble under shrubs and blackberry, no sunlight ahead. The trees stood close and dim in the windless dusk and there was no sound but the music of the creek behind him. He turned at last and saw the figure by the water watching him.
    He came back. She came across the grass to meet him. “It goes on,” she said in a whisper. “I never saw that. It’s never been closed on this side.—Come on!” She passed him, quick, rageful, going towards the gate. He came with her. The rough reddish trunk of the pine brushed his shoulder. On the dark path a bramble caught at his hair. He could scarcely see her scrambling ahead. A bird chip-chipped dryly overhead. The air smelled of smoke, rubber, gasoline, sunwarmed pine needles. The path underfoot was dry. “There’s your stuff,” the woman said. His pack and bedroll lay in the scruffy grass by the thickets.
    He looked at them, as if to check that everything was there. He did not dare look back. He was afraid that if he looked back the twilight would rise and come with him. The woman, the girl, his age, stood on the path, black hair, black eyes, white face.
    “What place is that?” he asked her. “Do you know?”
    She did not answer at once, and he thought she was not going to. “If you belonged there, you’d know,” she said in her harsh, thin voice.
    “I need—” He could not get the words out. Why did he stand here letting her shame him? His face was hot and stiff,
had he been crying? He rubbed his jaw with his hand, hiding his mouth, to hide his shame.
    “It isn’t a boy scout camp,” she said. “It’s not for bringing all your crap into and camping and—It isn’t any state park. You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know the rules. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know their—It isn’t your place. You don’t belong. It isn’t safe.”
    No anger would rise to relieve him of shame. He had to stand there and take what she said, and then repeat the only thing he had to say, “I need to come back.” His voice was a mumble. “I won’t leave stuff there.”
    She shook with rage like a bit of newspaper shaken by the wind, a bit of blazing paper in a fire.
    “I warn you!”
    What she had said before was getting through to him.
    “There are—people that live there?”
    After a long pause she said, “Yes. There are.”
    Her eyes flashed queerly in the restless light.
    “They’re waiting for you,” she said in her stifled, jeering voice, and then came forward suddenly and passed him, not going back, as he had expected, down the path into the evening land, but passing him, abrupt, swift, solid, and going forward into the morning. Within a few feet the bulk of the thickets hid her, another moment and the slight sound of her steps was gone.
    Hugh stood bewildered and bereft in the warm, slightly dusty air of the woods, which was continually shaken by the vibration of distant engines on the ground and in the air. A
spot of sunlight filtering in through leaves danced on the dun cover of his bedroll, in constant motion.
    Where do I go now? There isn’t anywhere to go.
    He was tired, worn out by emotions—anger, fear, grief. He sat down there beside the path, one hand on his backpack, protectively, or for reassurance. The dreary ache of loss would not leave him or grow