Several of us had borne children and had helped with deliveries, and anyhow most of what needs to be done is fairly self-evident; but a first labor can be long and trying, and we were all anxious, while Teresa was frightened out of her wits. She kept calling for her José till she was as hoarse as a skua. Zoe lost all patience at last and said, “By God, Teresa, if you say ‘José!’ once more I hope you have a penguin!” But what she had, after twenty long hours, was a pretty little red-faced girl.
Many were the suggestions for that child’s name from her eight proud midwife-aunts: Polita, Penguina, McMurdo, Victoria…But Teresa announced, after she had had a good sleep and a large serving of pemmican, “I shall name her Rosa—Rosa del Sur,” Rose of the South. That night we drank the last two bottles of Veuve Clicquot (having finished the pisco at 88° 30’ South) in toasts to our little Rose.
On the nineteenth of February, a day early, my Juana came down into Buenos Aires in a hurry. “The ship,” she said, “the ship has come,” and she burst into tears—she who had never wept in all our weeks of pain and weariness on the long haul.
Of the return voyage there is nothing to tell. We came back safe.
In 1912 all the world learned that the brave Norwegian Amundsen had reached the South Pole; and then, much later, came the accounts of how Captain Scott and his men had come there after him, but did not come home again.
Just this year, Juana and I wrote to the captain of the Yelcho, for the newspapers have been full of the story of his gallant dash to rescue Sir Ernest Shackleton’s men from Elephant Island, and we wished to congratulate him, and once more to thank him. Never one word has he breathed of our secret. He is a man of honor, Luis Pardo.
I add this last note in 1929. Over the years we have lost touch with one another. It is very difficult for women to meet, when they live so far apart as we do. Since Juana died, I have seen none of my old sledge-mates, though sometimes we write. Our little Rosa del Sur died of the scarlet fever when she was five years old. Teresa had many other children. Carlota took the veil in Santiago ten years ago. We are old women now, with old husbands, and grown children, and grandchildren who might someday like to read about the Expedition. Even if they are rather ashamed of having such a crazy grandmother, they may enjoy sharing in the secret. But they must not let Mr. Amundsen know! He would be terribly embarrassed and disappointed. There is no need for him or anyone else outside the family to know. We left no footprints, even.
She Unnames Them
Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that “yak” sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of the elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others, it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves, and hence might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw their agreement was reached and the designation “yak” was returned to the donor.
Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift’s attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom—as they put it—they belonged.
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats of course steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken, effanineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating—though none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is in fact their name, and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations poodle, parrot, dog, or bird, and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.
The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunneling away.
As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another’s smells, feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm,—that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, “You and your father lent me this—gave it to me, actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.”
It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, “Put it down over there, OK?” and went on with what he was doing.
One of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us nowhere; but all the same I felt a little let down. I had been prepared to defend my decision. And I thought that perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, “Well, good-bye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up.”
He was fitting parts together, and said without looking around, “OK, fine, dear. When’s dinner?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m going now. With the—” I hesitated, and finally said, “With them, you know,” and went on. In fact I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.
Record of First Publication
Volume One: Where on Earth
“Introduction,” copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“Brothers and Sisters,” copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Little Magazine.
“A Week in the Country,” copyright © 1976, 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Little Magazine.
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br /> “Unlocking the Air,” copyright 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Playboy.
“Imaginary Countries,” copyright © 1973, 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Harvard Advocate.
“The Diary of the Rose,” copyright © 1976, 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Future Power.
“Direction of the Road” copyright © 1974, 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Orbit 14.
“The White Donkey,” copyright © 1980 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in TriQuarterly.
“Gwilan’s Harp,” copyright © 1977, 2005 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Redbook.
“May’s Lion,” copyright © 1983 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fellowship of the Stars.
“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” copyright © 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“Horse Camp,” copyright © 1986 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“The Water is Wide,” copyright © 1976, 2004, by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared as a chapbook from Pendragon Press.
“The Lost Children,” copyright © 1996 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Thirteenth Moon.
“Texts,” copyright © 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in American Short Fiction as part of the PEN Syndication Fiction Project.
“Sleepwalkers,” copyright © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Mississippi Mud.
“Hand, Cup, Shell,” copyright © 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“Ether OR,” copyright © 1995 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“Half Past Four,” copyright © 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
“Introduction,” copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” copyright © 1973, 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in New Dimensions 3.
“Semley’s Necklace,” copyright © 1964, 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared as “Dowry of the Angyar” in Amazing Stories.
“Nine Lives,” copyright © 1969, 1997 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Playboy.
“Mazes,” copyright © 1975, 2003 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Epoch.
“The First Contact with the Gorgonids,” copyright © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Omni.
“The Shobies’ Story,” copyright © 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Universe.
“Betrayals,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Blue Motel.
“The Matter of Seggri,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Crank!
“Solitude,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“The Wild Girls,” copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Asimov’s.
“The Fliers of Gy,” copyright © 2000 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared on www.scifi.com.
“The Silence of the Asonu” copyright © 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared as “The Wisdom of the Asonu” in Orion.
“The Ascent of the North Face,” copyright © 1983 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
“The Author of the Acacia Seeds” copyright © 1974 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fellowship of the Stars.
“The Wife’s Story,” copyright © 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Compass Rose.
“The Rule of Names” copyright © 1964 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Fantastic.
“Small Change,” copyright © 1981 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Tor zu den Sternen.
“The Poacher,” copyright © 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Xanadu.
“Sur,” copyright © 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
“She Unnames Them,” copyright © 1985 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The New Yorker.
About the Author
Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud awards, among others. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, The Wild Girls, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and Finding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems. She lives in Portland, Oregon. (ursulakleguin.com)
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