Free Cat Country by Lao She Page B

eye they were dispersed like autumn leaves scattered by the wind – a little pile here, a little pile there, one to the east, two to the west. They were running and screaming as though they were completely out of their minds, and by the time that my hundred-yard dash was over, there were only a few of them left at the finish line, lying scattered about on the ground.
    I grabbed one of them, but saw that his eyes were closed and he had stopped breathing. My regret at having killed him was much more intense than the panic of the calamity itself. I shouldn’t use my superiority in order to kill; however, what was done was done. Without thinking, I grabbed another fallen spectator. His leg was broken, but he was still alive. I’m really not proud of what I did next, for although I clearly saw his leg was broken, I went ahead and seized him for interrogation. Knowing one had already died of fright, I cruelly went ahead and grabbed another whom might very well also scare to death. If I can be excused for all of this on the grounds that I was acting ‘unconsciously’ in the heat of the excitement, then the argument for the innate goodness of man won’t hold water.
    To get a half-dead cat-man to speak – and to speak to a foreigner at that – is the most difficult thing imaginable. I knew that forcing him to talk would be no different from murdering him, for he would certainly die of fright in a very short time. Poor unfortunate! I let him go, and looked around again. The few that had fallen were all injured, of course, and were reduced to crawling on the ground. They were crawling very fast, but I didn’t pursue them. Two of them were no longer moving at all.
    I am not usually afraid of danger, but this time I felt that I had really stirred up a hornets’ nest. Who could tell what odd kind of concoction the Cat People’s law might turn out to be. Even though there might be a legal difference between murdering a man and scaring him to death, wasn’t it the same thing from the point of view of conscience? I couldn’t decide what to do. Perhaps I’d go and hunt down Scorpion. After all, he’d got me into this mess in the first place and he certainly ought to have some way of getting me out of it. But even if I did find him, he wouldn’t be likely to tell me the truth. Why not wait for him to come looking for me? Why not take advantage of this opportunity to find the spacecraft and take care of my dead friend’s body? Then if Scorpion ran into any danger in the reverie forest and came looking for me, I would be in a good position to interrogate him. For if he didn’t tell the truth, I’d refuse to return. Extortion? Perhaps. But how else can you handle a man to whom trust means nothing and who doesn’t consider lying as shameful?
    I tucked my gun under my belt and with a heavy heart, followed the river. The sun was very hot and I felt that I lacked something – of course, those goddamned reverie leaves! Without them I wouldn’t be able to resist either the rays of the sun or the noxious mist that was rising from the river. Cat Country will never produce a sage, I said to myself. (I had to content myself with disparaging the Cat People in order to lighten my own sense of shame.) I thought of going over and taking the reverie leaves from the hands of those two dead cat-men. Was I really going to go so far as to rob the dead? After all, I could always go back to the reverie forest and break off a big branch; there would certainly be no one to stop me. But I didn’t feel like walking that far. In the end, I did indeed wrest the leaves from the dead hands of the fallen cat-men! Half of one leaf had already been eaten; I ate the other half and continued my way along the river bank.
    After walking for some time, I recognised a dark grey hill, a hill that I knew was not far from where our spacecraft had crashed. However, I didn’t know how far the crash site was from the river or which side of the river it was on. It was