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man is a horribly misshapen beast. EDWARD WELLEN He was so hideous at birth that his mother, believing a demon had possessed her, abandoned him at the jungle's edge to the demons everyone knew dwelled in the jungle. She was, as they say, little more than a child herself, one of many children of poor and unworldly farm folk, and the baby was the get of a passing stranger who had taken her by force, and she delivered the baby secretly in lonely pain and fear. Almost she welcomed the baby's frightfulness as a sign to rid herself of the burden of child and guilt. She bit and tied off the clue that led back into the labyrinth of her womb. Then she stole home and remained silent about what had happened and even forgot in time it was anything more, as they say, than a bad dream. The baby himself was far from silent. It was the old blind man living alone in the jungle who heard the wailing and found the baby and poked it with his stick to make sure it was not really an animal that snapped and bit, and took him in and gave him a name and brought him up. The old blind man lived under a thatch by the side of a stream and hoed a painfully-cleared patch of vegetable garden, and set snares for smaller animals, and followed bird-song to find and eat the berries birds ate, though he never wandered too far from the smell and sound of the running water. It was on one such following of birdsong that he came upon the cross-trail infant cry. He carried the naked slimy thing back to his thatch and dipped his little finger in fermented fruit juice and |
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