Well, but you see the fever had left him and he was in his senses again and there was my ugly old face staring at him out of nowhere. He stared too and then he whispered, “Who the hell are you?” This is from “Mary Kingsley” and collected in the Sussex Edition Vol. XXX, and the Burwash Edition Vol. XXIII. This is a brief but heartfelt tribute to Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1862-1900), the indomitable Victorian writer, naturalist, and West African explorer.
John Radcliffe’s “Three Quotations”
One night Kotuko the dog, who, had been unusually sullen in harness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko’s knee. Kotuko patted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward, fawning. Then Kadlu waked, and gripped the heavy wolf-like head, and stared into the glassy eyes. The dog whimpered and shivered…
…the minute I released her she mouthed my right wrist once more, and waited with her ears back and all her body flattened, ready to bite. The big dog’s tail thumped the floor in a humble and peace-making way. I grabbed Vixen a second time, lifted her out of bed like a rabbit (she hated that and yelled), and, as I had promised, set her out in the verandah.
The lightning spattered the sky as a thrown egg spattered a barn door, but the light was pale blue, not yellow; and looking through my slit bamboo blinds, I could see the great dog standing, not sleeping, in the veranda, the hackles alift on her back, and her feet planted as tensely as the drawn wire rope of a suspension bridge. In the very short pauses of the thunder I tried to sleep, but it seemed that someone wanted me very badly.
Here are the sources of these extracts