Page:Son of the wind.djvu/143

RV 131 here. "I thought women liked to coax things to eat from the hand."

She shrugged. "I don't know what most women like, but I know what I like. I tuck myself away behind these trees so they won't know I am here. That is why they come so close. They've never even seen me. I am very careful about that!"

The words struck a chord of memory. He had heard those very sentences before, though then they had been spoken by Rader's lips. "It has never even seen her. She has been very careful about that."

He looked around at the stunted trees, at the hills like tiny mountains with tiny cliffs of stone, his fancy placing the little playing animals. He felt like a man who is looking at the small working model of a great machine. It was all there, Lilliputian size. He waited, for he saw she was going to speak again without his prompting.

"Most people don't know what wild animals are like at all," she said. "They think of them always as hiding or running. When they think of the word 'wild' they think it means afraid. But really it is just the opposite of that. It is when the creatures are playing with one another, when they are just alone and don't suspect any human being, when they are themselves, that you can see what a wild creature really means."