Free Giles Goat Boy by John Barth

willows along the creek, or up in the rise of nibbled hemlocks where the woods began.
    From these latter, one bright April morning, a flash of light came.Looking more closely I spied a movement in the scrub perhaps two hundred meters from where we grazed. In all likelihood it was a deer, and the flash some tin or bit of glass he’d turned with his hoof; just possibly it was a human student, escaped into our pasture. In any case my curiosity was pricked; I teased Redfearn’s Tommy into chasing me that way. Dear Tom was a strapping fellow then; it was his last month to run with us before being penned up for stud. But he still loved a romp, and while there was no way to tell him my intentions, I knew that once he saw the intruder we’d have great sport running it back into the bush.
    “Ho, Tom!” I urged. Midway between herd and hemlocks I saw the flash again; so must have Tommy, for he drew up short, bobbed his head—and galloped back, pretending not to hear the gibes I sent after him. I looked around for Max; he had not come out with us that day. I went on alone. For prudence’s sake I came up noisily, to give the creature warning. I rather expected to find nothing but dung and hoof-prints by the time I got there: Instead, just behind the first tree, I found the cream-haired weeper. She stood uncertainly a dozen yards off, wearing green this time and clutching a leathern bag against her belly; it was her eyeglasses, I observed, that had flashed in the sun.
    “Nice Billy?”
    I pawed the brown needles and threatened with my forehead.
    “Look here, I brought you something good.” As before, she drew a square white handful from her bag. I felt no anger, but a grand discomfiture; I ought to have gone back with Tommy. I feigned a charge just to send her off to her own pasture, but she only waggled her offering at me.
    “Come, dear, don’t be afraid. It’s a peanut-butter sandwich.”
    I bounded at her with a snarl—but faltered just before her. Quite clearly she would suffer my attack if need be. Was she so fearless, or merely stupid? Now she dared to toss the white food at my feet and come up to me with hands extended. I ignored the bribe (which however had a most sharp fragrance): what arrested me was that her eyes already brimmed with that water so familiar lately to my own. She knelt and patted my curls; her human odors filled my nostrils; I forgot even to growl.
    “There, he’s a friendly Bill, he is.” How different her voice was from dear Max’s, and her manner of touching. I shivered under it; made nervous water when she stroked my barrel. “Sure he wouldn’t hurt his friend,” she went on. “Do you know how much I hoped you’d see me? Andwasn’t I afraid of that brute you play with! Good Billy, gentle Billy, that’s a Billy. Here, you just try this, Dr. Spielman won’t mind …”
    She held the sandwich to my lips. I chewed a corner off it and drooled at its outlandish savor. The woman wiped my chin with a scented white cloth and clucked about the dirt on me. I gobbled up the rest of the sandwich.
    “Wasn’t that fine? Tomorrow I’ll give you another one. And milk, if you want, and some more things you never had before. What do you say, Billy?”
    It was a civil question, plainly put and plainly requiring a yes or no, but my new friend seemed astonished when I said “
Ja ja
, dot’s OK.”
    “Oh, my gracious, you can
talk
, can’t you!” She flung her arms about my neck; I thought myself threatened and wrenched back with a snort. But the woman was weeping, and unused though I was to such behavior, I understood that it was not in anger she hugged me to her woven coat. It was such a hug Max hugged me the day I had learned to cry—but rockinger, more croonish—and I wept in rhythm with her, a sweeter thing than doing it alone.
    We tarried for the queerest forenoon of my life. Having discovered that I could speak, she plied me with questions: Did Max beat me? Wasn’t I wretched in that