Free The Sending by Geoffrey Household Page B

the shade of a big sycamore. I was some fifty yards from them downwind and completely hidden by the hedge. The thorn was thick in its third year from laying and the ditch on the far side was deep. To stop any cattle getting down in the ditch and eating hedge or trying to force a way through, Hutchins had fenced it with three strands of barbed wire to a height of some four feet.
    At that distance my glasses showed the colour of the ear tags and some of the numbers. I chose a powerful little beast from the group in the shade with a proud and gentle curly forelock, Red Tag 43, and put the glasses back in their case.
    Tiger brother taught me how to surrender to trance. Even in that mild form without the accompanying dance I dislike it. Very different is the holiness of self-hypnosis produced without intention and akin to the mystic vision of unity. However, I used the tiger brother technique, willing the bullock to leave the group and come towards me. Willing is the wrong word; it implies master and servant. It would be truer to say that I surrendered or tried to surrender to the oneness of me and the bullock.
    It blew through its nostrils, but that was all. I then took Meg from my pocket, and she at once climbed to the top of my head to see what I was stalking with such intentness. I raised both hands so that my finger tips were in her fur and again transmitted to the bullock. It left the group, slowly and doubtfully walking towards me. Then it began to trot with head lowered, charged the wire, broke it and subsided into the ditch. The rest of the herd straggled after it as if I were the stockman bringing hay, but with a difference in bearing. Their heads were lowered and they appeared more ready to repel than to receive. The unknown beyond the hedge was a danger, not a friend.
    I was appalled at what I had done, for the bullock was rushing up and down the ditch unable to find the gap in the wire that it had made and might well break a leg in good earnest. I could not force a way through the hedge so I showed myself and followed it, quietly talking. That calmed it down. It did not connect me at all with the summons which its receptors had answered; I had become a well-meaning, everyday human being. With the aid of a long stick and an occasional poke through the hedge I guided it back and out through the gap in the wire.
    I can draw some tentative conclusions from the experiment. As an analogy it may be helpful to think of the familiar as a transformer station, one of the little red brick huts one sees outside villages to reduce the voltage, though it is not voltage which needs transforming. The bullock can hardly receive me on the human wavelength, but can receive when it is modified by Meg.
    A second conclusion is most curious and unexpected. It was Red Tag 39, not the intended 43, which came to me. This indicates that even at close range the target cannot be identified with certainty when it is nameless or not conscious of any name. The simplest form of witch’s curse may therefore be in the nature of a broadcast.
    The aggression of the beast I can only explain by the assumption that it felt the signal received was ‘evil’, which I may perhaps define as deliberate abuse of love. There is a faint parallel with my own bouts of terror, but I cannot believe that I, like the bullock, am being ‘cursed’.
    June 24
    This evening Gargary dropped in on a casual visit to see how I was. He told me that he had been refreshing his memory of Jung but could not really understand him and was left wondering if such a thing as perfect mental health existed. If it did, he thought, it would exclude so much on the borderline that little individuality would remain; so nobody—meaning me—should be worried at divergence from the norm. Should accept it with pride, I suppose! Very questionable advice for the insane. But sane I am, though a haunted, hunted beast.
    I guessed that he had not just called to comfort me with Jung