Free City of Illusions by Ursula K. LeGuin Page B

snowstorm, when the snow would hide us and our tracks. But how far could we get on foot in a buzzard? You've got a compass; but the cold…"
    Falk's wintercloth clothing had been confiscated, along with everything else he possessed, even the gold ring he had always worn. They had left him one gun: that was integral with his being a Hunter and could not be taken from him. But the clothes he had worn so long now covered the bony ribs and shanks of the Old Hunter Kess-nokaty and he had his compass only because Estrel had got it and hidden it before they went through his pack. He and she were well enough clothed in Basnasska buckskin shirts and leggings, with boots and parkas of red cowhide; but nothing was adequate shelter from one of the prairie blizzards, with their hard subfreezing winds, except walls, roof and a fire.
    "If we can get across into Samsit territory, just a few miles west of here, we could hole up in an Old Place I know there and hide till they give up looking. I thought of trying it before you came. But I had no compass and was afraid of getting lost in the storm. With a compass, and a gun, we might make it…We might not."
    "If it's our best chance," Falk said, "we'll take it." He was not quite so naive, so hopeful and easily swayed, as he had been before his capture. He was a little more resistant and resolute. Though he had suffered at their hands he had no special grudge against the Basnasska; they had branded him once and for all down both his arms with the blue tattoo-slashes of their kinship, branding him as a barbarian, but also as a man. That was all right. But they had their business, and he had his. The hard individual will developed in him by his training in the Forest House demanded that he get free, that he get on with his journey, with what Zove had called mans work. These people were not going anywhere, nor did they come from anywhere, for they had cut their roots in the human past. It was not only the extreme precariousness of his existence among the Basnasska that made him impatient to get out; it was also a sense of suffocation, of being cramped and immobilized, which was harder to endure than the bandage that blanked his vision.
    That evening Estrel stopped by his tent to tell him that it had begun to snow, and they were settling their plan in whispers when a voice spoke at the flap of the tent. Estrel translated quietly: "He says, 'Blind Hunter, do you want the Red Woman tonight?'" She added no explanation. Falk knew the rules and etiquette of sharing the women around; his mind was busy with the matter of their talk, and he replied with the most useful of his short list of Basnasska words—"Mieg!"—no.
    The male voice said something more imperative. If it goes on snowing, tomorrow night, maybe," Estrel murmured in Galaktika. Still thinking, Falk did not answer. Then he realized she had risen and gone, leaving him alone in the tent. And after that he realized that she was the Red Woman, and that the other man had wanted her to copulate with.
    He could simply have said Yes instead of No; and when he thought of her cleverness and gentleness towards him, the softness of her touch and voice, and the utter silence in which she hid her pride or shame, then he winced at his failure to spare her, and felt himself humiliated as her fellowman, and as a man.
    "We'll go tonight," he said to her next day in the drifted snow beside the Women's Lodge. "Come to my tent. Let a good part of the night pass first."
    "Kokteky has told me to come to his tent tonight."
    "Can you slip away?"
    "Maybe."
    "Which tent is Kokteky's?"
    "Behind the Mzurra Society Lodge to the left. It has a patched place over the flap."
    "If you don't come I'll come get you."
    "Another night there might be less danger—"
    "And less snow. Winter's getting on; this may be the last big storm. Well go tonight."
    "I'll come to your tent," she said with her unarguing, steady submissiveness.
    He had left a slit in his bandage through which he