Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 51

"KESSNOKATY'S old woman says it's going to snow," his friend's
voice murmured near him. "We should be ready, if there comes a chance
for us to run away."
Falk did not reply but sat listening with sharpened hearing to the
noises of the camp: voices in a foreign tongue, distance-softened; the dry
sqund of somebody nearby scraping a hide; the thin bawl of a baby; the
snapping of the tentfire.
"Horressins!" someone outside summoned him, and he got up
promptly, then stood still. In a moment his friend's hand was on his arm
and she guided him to where they wanted him, the communal fire in the
center of the circle of tents, where they were celebrating a successful hunt
by roasting a whole bull. A shank of beef was shoved into his hands. He
sat down on the ground and began to eat. Juices and melted fat ran down
his jaws but he did not wipe them off. To do so was beneath the dignity of
a Hunter of the Mzurra Society of the Basnasska Nation. Though a
stranger, a captive, and blind, he was a Hunter, and was learning to
comport himself as such.
The more defensive a society, the more conformist. The people he was
among walked a very narrow, a tortuous and cramped Way, across the
broad free plains. So long as he was among them he must follow all the
twistings of their ways exactly. The diet of the Basnasska consisted of
fresh half-raw beef, raw onions, and blood. Wild herdsmen of the wild
cattle, like wolves they culled the lame, the lazy and unfit from the vast
herds, a lifelong feast of meat, a life with no rest. They hunted with
hand-lasers and warded strangers from their territory with bombirds like
the one that had destroyed Falk's slider, tiny impact-missiles programmed
to home in on anything that contained a fusion element. They did not make
or repair these weapons themselves, and handled them only after
purifications and incantations; where they obtained them Falk had not
found out, though there was occasional mention of a yearly pilgrimage,
which might be connected with the weapons. They had no agriculture and
no domestic animals; they were illiterate and did not know, except perhaps
through certain myths and hero-legends, any of the history of humankind.
They informed Falk that he had not come out of the Forest, because the
~ 49 ~