41
" Torka extended a conciliatory hand and laid it upon the old man’s shoulder. “Umak, Manaravak, Dak, and Tankh and Chuk will walk at my side. We will miss your strength, courage, and wisdom, but a man in possession of these qualities is needed here”.They left Grek standing at the edge of camp with his spear in hand and his pack frame on his back. As Torka walked on without looking back he wondered if he had ever done anything in his life as difficult as that.”You had no choice.” Umak came to walk beside him with Dak and Companion at his side. Manaravak and the two boys trotted on ahead.Torka eyed Dak and Umak without slowing his step. “Do you two imagine that you will never be old?”Dak replied with his usual curtness. “When I am old, I will have sense enough to know when it is time to step aside and let younger men take my place on the hunt”." It would seem the best thing to do,” Torka agreed. “But will you know when you are old? Or will your years sneak up on you like hunters tracking caribou… one after the other, each looking just the same until the stalking cloaks fall away and the spears of truth come out to wound you… until one day you are a young man trapped and rattling around in an old man’s skin, still believing that your old bones can do all the things they once did in your youth and trying to prove it even if it kills you? "
42
" In the South American rainforest, there is a tribe called the Desana, who see the world as a fixed quantity of energy that flows between all creatures. Every birth must therefore engender a death, and every death brings forth another birth. This way, the energy of the world remains complete.When they hunt for food, the Desana know the animals they kill will leave a hole in the spiritual well. But that hole will be filled, they believe, by the Desana hunters when they die. Were there no men dying, there would be no birds or fish being born. I like this idea. Morrie likes it, too. The closer he gets to goodbye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest. What we take, we must replenish." It's only fair," he says. "
45
" Perhaps that was just a hunch." Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the " nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it.That dim sense had been useful to him - on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade's grave.Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason. "
50
" Bianca, camp is cool! It's got a pegasus stable and a sword-fighting arena and… I mean, what do you get by joining the Hunters?" To begin with," Zoe said, " immortality." I stared at her, then at Artemis. " She's kidding, right?" Zoe rarely kids about anything," Artemis said. " My Hunters follow me on my adventures. They are my maidservants, my companions, my sisters-in-arms. Once they swear loyalty to me, they are indeed immortal… unless they fall in battle, which is unlikely. Or break their oath." What oath?" I said.To foreswear romantic love forever," Artemis said. To never grow up, never get married. To be a maiden eternally." Like you?" The goddess nodded.I tried to imagine what she was saying. Being immortal. Hanging out with only middle-school girls forever. I couldn't get my mind around it. "