Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [59]
She backed away again. The second squirrel was starting to make a flanking maneuver around to her right. Carrying a cup. Some kind of acorn thing. The third was right behind it and making its own advance. What was it carrying? Some little scrap of soggy paper, Random thought.
She stepped back again, caught her ankle against the root of a tree and fell over backward.
Instantly the first squirrel darted forward and was on top of her, advancing along her stomach with cold purpose in its eyes, and a piece of wet rag in its fist.
Random tried to jump up, but only managed to jump about an inch. The startled movement of the squirrel on her stomach startled her in return. The squirrel froze, gripping her skin through her soaking shirt with its tiny claws. Then slowly, inch by inch, it made its way up her, stopped and proffered her the rag.
She felt almost hypnotized by the strangeness of the thing and its tiny glinting eyes. It proffered her the rag again. It pushed it at her repeatedly, screeching insistently, till at last, nervously, hesitantly, she took the thing from it. It continued to watch her intently, its eyes darting all over her face. She had no idea what to do. Rain and mud were streaming down her face and she had a squirrel sitting on her. She wiped some mud out of her eyes with the rag.
The squirrel shrieked triumphantly, grabbed the rag back, leapt off her and ran scampering into the dark, enclosing night, darted up into a tree, dived into a hole in the trunk, settled back and lit a cigarette.
Meanwhile Random was trying to fend off the squirrel with the acorn cup full of rain and the one with the paper. She shuffled backward on her bottom.
“No!” she shouted. “Go away!”
They darted back, in fright, and then darted right forward again with their gifts. She brandished her rock at them. “Go!” she yelled.
The squirrels scampered around in consternation. Then one darted straight at her, dropped the acorn cup in her lap, turned and ran off into the night. The other stood quivering for a moment, then put its scrap of paper neatly down in front of her and disappeared as well.
She was alone again, but trembling with confusion. She got unsteadily to her feet, picked up her rock and her parcel, then paused and picked up the scrap of paper as well. It was so soggy and dilapidated it was hard to make out what it was. It seemed just to be a fragment of an in-flight magazine.
Just as Random was trying to understand exactly what it was that this all meant, a man walked out into the clearing in which she was standing, raised a vicious-looking gun and shot her.
Arthur was thrashing around hopelessly two or three miles behind her, on the upward side of the hill.
Within minutes of setting out he had gone back again and equipped himself with a lamp. Not an electric one. The only electric light in the place was the one that Random had brought with her. This was a kind of dim hurricane lamp: a perforated metal canister from Strinder’s forge, which contained a reservoir of inflammable fish oil, a wick of knotted dried grass and was wrapped in a translucent film made from dried membranes from the gut of a Perfectly Normal Beast.
It had now gone out.
Arthur jiggled around with it in a thoroughly pointless kind of a way for a few seconds. There was clearly no way he was going to get the thing suddenly to burst into flame again in the middle of a rainstorm, but it’s impossible not to make a token effort. Reluctantly he threw the thing aside.
What to do? This was hopeless. He was absolutely sodden, his clothes heavy and billowing with the rain, and now he was lost in the dark as well.
For a brief second he was lost in the blinding light, and then he was lost in the dark again.
The sheet of lightning had at least shown him that he was very close to the brow of the hill. Once he had breasted that he would … well, he wasn’t certain what he would do. He’d have to work that out when he got there.
He limped forward and upward.
A few minutes later he knew that he was standing panting at the top. There was some kind of dim