Free The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin

less.
    Maybe she feels like this too, he thought. Like I took it away from her.
    But I can’t help it. I have to go back. I don’t have anywhere else. She has no right … . That was not the appropriate word, but he did not know how else to put it.
    I will go back. I won’t leave my stuff there. Not at the gateway clearing, anyhow. I could go farther—up the creek a ways. She can’t go everywhere. There’s no reason we’d ever have to see each other.
    Unless I can’t get out again.
    That thought went through his mind quite lightly. The panic terror he had submitted to when the gateway led only farther into the twilight had already sunk down deep in him, too deep to stir up easily. If it’s like that again I can wait, he told himself, and go through with her when she comes.
    She’s like me, she comes from here. But there are people who live there, she said.
    But his mind slipped away from this idea too. I don’t have to meet them. There’s never been anybody at the creek place. And she’s gone now. I’m going back … .
    He shoved his gear under the dusty, spiny outskirts of the
thicket, stood up, and went back down the path to the threshold and into the twilight, to the clear water where, at last, he knelt and drank. The water washed his face and his hands, washed away shame and fear. “This is my home,” he said to the earth and rocks and trees, and with his lips almost on the water, whispered, “I am you. I am you.”
     
     
    He got to Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart at ten and by ten-five was opening up Line Seven. Donna looked over from the register in Six. “You O.K., Buck?”
    For Hugh two days and three nights had passed since he left work an hour early yesterday afternoon; he did not remember why Donna might think he wasn’t O.K. “Sure!” he said.
    She looked him up and down with a curious expression, cynical yet admiring. “You wasn’t sick at all,” she said. “You had something better to do.” She rang up a sixpack of cola and a packet of cocktail cheese snacks for a shaky, unshaven old man, remarking to him and to Hugh, “Ain’t it wonderful to be young? But I wouldn’t go through it again if you paid me.”
     
     
    He did not explore far downstream. The gorge of the creek deepened; it always seemed darker in that direction. Upstream
from the gateway clearing there was less underbrush, and in many places the creek had clear, broad, sandy verges. He came to a place where the creek, under a stand of big willows, was narrowed by an outcropping of red rock that slanted across the streambed in steps and shelves. Above the white water lay a deep, long pool. The shores were overhung by trees, but the pool itself lay open to the sky. The place had about it a sense of remoteness, self-containment; no one else would come here.
    He made a cache for his gear, the fork of a low tree, so thickly overgrown with a small-leafed vine that it was hidden even from him till he put his hands on it. He gathered a little supply of firewood, mostly branches from a dead tree nearby, and scooped a fireplace in the sand of the sheltered bank just above the barrier of red rocks. He laid a fire ready. Then he took off his shirt and jeans and silently, holding his body straight, walked out into the still pool. Just above the rock barrier it was deeper than he was tall. There he swam in silent and intense delight until he could bear the cold no longer, and made for the shore cramped and shuddering, and lighted his fire.
    The flames were beautiful in the clear twilight. He crouched naked to get the heat on his skin, in his bones. At last he dressed, and made himself a cup of the sweet coffee-chocolate mix he had bought on sale, and sat drinking it in peace of heart. When the fire had burned down he covered all trace of it with sand, put on his shoes, and set off to explore farther upstream.
    He came daily now. Half his life was spent in the twilight land. When he was there even the rhythm of his breathing was different; was