THE HUNTER abandoned his task and took two steps towards Ivy. His right arm dangled at the side of his tanned body, his hand grasping the parang, whose blade, streaked with pig’s blood, was a good thirty centimeters long. Ivy looked into the man’s steel-gray eyes. They were empty. The photographer’s right hand slipped towards her left hip and drew the Colt .45, which she aimed at the hunter’s muscled abdomen. The little girl leapt to her feet but stayed where she was. The man froze and smiled vaguely. He was two meters from Ivy. The parang blade swung slightly and those parts of it that were not greasy with blood glinted in the sunshine.
“I come as a friend,” said Ivy bookishly. “Please be so kind as to put your knife away.”
Unhurriedly, the hunter returned the parang to its canvas sheath by his right thigh. The thigh was powerful and reasonably hairy, but its fair hairs were almost colorless, just like the man’s eyebrows.
“All right,” said Ivy. “I guess that’ll do like that.”
The hunter, half-smiling, took two steps forward and grabbed the pistol from Ivy. He looked at her, scoffed wordlessly, disengaged the safety and racked the slide to arm the Colt and chamber a round. While he still had the barrel pointed at the ground, Ivy kicked the man in the balls. He gave a cry of pain and bent double. Ivy straightened his head up with a knee to the jaw and delivered a forearm blow below the nose. The hunter fell to the ground and, dropping the Colt, rolled over onto his side, protecting his groin by pulling his knees up and clutching his testicles with both hands, grinding his teeth, and groaning with pain as tears leaked from his tightly closed eyelids. He rolled slowly this way and that amidst the dust and the stones and the sand. The sand stuck to his sweaty bare back. Ivy retrieved her Colt .45 semiautomatic and kept the safety off and the hammer cocked.
The adolescent girl named Negra had meanwhile rushed into their shelter, a low hutment camouflaged with earth and branches. She came back out holding a Winchester .30-30 carbine, operated the lever action, braced the butt against her hip, took aim at Ivy, and fired. Ivy heard the air part as the bullet passed fifteen or twenty centimeters from her right ear. By reflex she fired her .45 into the air and then dashed for the nearby trees and took cover as best she could behind a pine. A .30-30 round buried itself in the tree’s trunk.
“Stop that bullshit!” cried the man on the ground in a voice distorted by pain. “Hold your fire! It’s just a misunderstanding. And what’s more,” he added in a calmer tone, “ammunition is precious, so stop wasting it. Negra, put that rifle away, the young lady is nice, and she’s done us no harm.”
“The young lady may be nice,” answered Negra, “but she hurt you. Your fault, though, you had to go and grab her revolver.” She spoke English with the same slight accent as the man, possibly a Northern European accent. “You haven’t broken anything, have you?”
“It’s not a revolver, it’s a pistol,” said the man didactically as he got back to his feet, still wincing a little with pain. Then he called out to Ivy: “Mademoiselle, would you care to join us? Everything will be all right now.”
Ivy emerged hesitantly from her precarious cover. For a few moments she stayed at a respectable distance, sizing up the hunter and the young girl. But then she engaged the Colt’s safety, returned the weapon to its holster and returned to the center of the clearing. The man held out his hand.
“I am Victor,” he said.
He was as courtly as one can be when dressed in nothing but raggedy shorts.
“My name is Marie, but they call me Ivy,” replied the photographer as she shook the extended hand. The man was strong but did not play up his strength: his shake was firm but not excessively so. “I am a photographer and I’m spending some time in the mountains to take pictures of animals and plants.” She turned to the adolescent and held out her hand. “Good day, Negra,” she said, and Negra shook her hand without a word and stepped back while continuing to look Ivy in the face.
“As for us,” muttered the hunter uncertainly, “I suppose you could say we’re on a camping trip. Would you care to sit down?” They sat down on some smooth rocks. “Light a fire,” the man called Victor told the adolescent girl called Negra. And to Ivy: “You mentioned lunch before. You are welcome.”
“Thank you,” said Ivy, with a sideways glance at the bloody carcass of the wild pig.
Victor laughed softly.
“No, no,” he said. “Negra has prepared an excellent stew this morning. It’s just a matter of putting the pot on the fire. Sometimes we eat raw meat, which is not bad, even if it goes against prejudices. But you are going to have stew. Would you like a shot of rum in the meantime?”
“No thank you.”
“I’m afraid I have no tobacco.”
“I have,” said Ivy, producing an open pack of Cuban cigarettes and holding it out to Victor; he shook his head with a smile; she put her cigarettes away again without taking one.
Negra had lit a very small fire in a ring of stones. Above it she had built a sort of gantry composed of stripped and charred branches, from which a cooking pot now hung. Negra continually fed the little fire with dry wood chips, which created very little smoke or any other sign that might have been seen from a distance.
“Your daughter?” asked Ivy, nodding in Negra’s direction.
“No, she was entrusted to me a long while ago.” Victor chose his words with a kind of hesitancy, but he spoke with less uncertainty than earlier. “She is an orphan. She no longer has anyone. It was me or the orphanage. I don’t care for orphanages.”
“Nor do I,” said Ivy with great force.
The man’s gray eyes gazed at her for a moment.
“But,” he went on, “I live a primitive life. I don’t like civilization, cities, cars, factories, offices, jobs. I lived for a time in cities, when I first began taking care of Negra. But afterwards we were in jungles. We have lived with natives. Mostly we lived alone. We’ve been in the Maestra for two years. On our own.”
Victor glanced at Negra, who was stirring the stew.
“I teach her what I know of the world,” he said. “Not much of an education now that she’s growing up. She is thirteen. Soon she’ll be a young woman. It’s not a very good thing for a young woman to be living alone with me all the time.” He looked soberly at Ivy’s face, then at her body, then at her legs, and then he raised his head again and smiled sheepishly. “Nor is it good for me to be alone with her all the time.”
“Come and get it!” cried the girl.
For the meal they sat with wooden bowls on their rocks and ate with their fingers. Slices of snake meat, lizard flank, banana, and wild potato—Ivy had occasionally eaten more exotic dishes, but not very often. Victor watched her surreptitiously as she tasted her first mouthful.
“Excellent,” she observed courteously.
“I did everything myself,” declared Negra boastfully with her mouth full. “I caught the animals, picked the vegetables, cooked it all up. I added herbs.”
“Bravo!” said Ivy.
“Did you learn to fight in Southeast Asia?” asked the man.
“Mostly I learnt to fight in France when I was just a little kid. Then the English gave me some lessons in close combat. And I did a little Thai boxing in Siam. But basically I learnt as a little kid, in my own way.”
“At that age you develop good habits,” said Victor. “Or bad ones. That’s why I worry about Negra. She has learnt many things with me. Good things, I think. But there are lots of things that she hasn’t learnt. Just look how grubby she is.”
Negra was chewing, indifferent to what was being said.
“I can see,” said Ivy. “But what’s the problem? Can’t you teach her to wash herself?”
“I always used to wash her, but now I’ve stopped, and she doesn’t want to do it by herself.”
“For Pete’s sake, give her a bath!”
“I’ve waited too long. Now she is too big. She’d want me to towel her all over. You see what I mean?”
“I’d have to consult Professor Freud,” answered Ivy. “But I think I understand you, yes.”
“You!” cried Victor.
“Me what?”
“Wouldn’t you like to give her a bath?”
Ivy looked at him in perplexity, then she stared at Negra, who was no longer munching and returned her gaze. The adolescent had a triangular face with high cheekbones, a very straight little nose and coal-black eyes. That face was coated with dirt, dust, sauce, and dried blood. She smiled, exposing quite regular but yellow teeth. There had been no mention of the toothbrush or of the other pilfering.
“Negra,” said Ivy, “would you like me to give you a bath?”
“Yes,” said the kid. “I’m completely disgusting. I’d like you to give me a bath and towel me all over.”