defining moment [e a caça]

"Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved - from a distance, though - and given what he wanted. And in return he would be...what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhapiness.

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self - the cocoon that was "personality" - gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself. There was nothing here to help him-not his money, his car, his father's reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact, they hampered him. Except for his broken watch, and his wallet with about two hundred dollars, all he had started out with on his journey was gone: his suitcase with the Scoth, the shirts, and the space for bags of gold; his snap-brim hat, his tie, his shirt, his three-piece suit, his socks, and his shoes. His watch and his two-hundred dollars would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance. Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch-and some other sense that he knew he did not have: the ability to separate out, of all the things there were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on.

(...)

He could still hear them-the way they had sounded the last few hours. Signalling one another. What were they saying? "Wait up?" "Over here?" Little by little it fell into place. The dogs, the men - none was just hollering, just signaling location or pace. The men and the dogs were talking to each other.In distinctive voices they were saying distinctive, complicated things. That long yah sound was followed by a specific kind of howl from one of the dogs. The low howm howm that sounded like a string bass imitating a bassoon meantsomething the dogs understood and executed. And the dogs spoke to the men: singleshot barks - evenly spaced and widely spaced - one every three or four minutes, that might go on for twenty minutes. A sort of radar that indicated to the men where they were and what they saw and what they wanted to do about it. And the men agreed or told them to change direction or to come back. All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeee's of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass cords. It was all language. An extension of the click peope made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them. And he was hearing it in the Blue Ridge Mountains under a sweet gum tree. And if they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn't they know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter. It was more than tracks Calvin was looking for-he whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning though his fingers."

em Song of Solomon de Tony Morrison.
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