While she watched everything he did with intense interest, she seemed discouragingly stupid. She learned to speak only a few words, although she understood a good many of the simple commands he gave her and went through a stage when she was quick to obey them. Her own chirps, he discovered had a certain internal logic. And before he realized it she had imposed her language system on him. They got along quite well this way, since they did not bother to hold symposiums on art or science, but he began to worry about what she would do when she came into the uncompromising atmosphere of an institution. Probably throw a tantrum the way she did when I slapped her for eating baby chicks, he thought. He could understand her feeling, for to her they must have seemed as intended for eating as the mice she sometimes caught and crunched with delight. As the months crept by she seemed to lose her awe of him. She would not sweep or hoe without whining. His imperative voice had to be reinforced with a slap to make her obey. He was worrying about this on a walk one day, far down the valley where the peach tree grew, when she ran to him waving a human pelvis and smiling and chirping. "Don't smile," he said, talking now as he would talk to a dog. "That was probably your mother. What I think is that a woman, your grandmother, escaped with several children, one of them your mother. But your grandmother died very soon and the children were afraid of the shack for some reason, for I have found no signs of them there, and they hunted through the woods like wild things and forgot what they knew. They bred you at least. Then they died while you were quite small, perhaps five or six years old, and you forgot whatever was left to forget of man's five hundred thousand years of cumulative learning. It isn't like instinct; it can all be lost like that!" He snapped his fingers in her face. He made her throw the bone away before they reached home. He suspected that some things like language, if not learned when the organism is young, might always prove difficult. He thought of stories of wolf children and of how they soon died when placed in institutions. As she danced before him, he noticed how prettily she was filling out. The conviction that she had better have a dress and soon, hit him like an axe blow. He began to watch the trees, the sky, the ground. He made it from one of his shirts, and she squawled with fright when he slipped it over her head. Whenever she started to take it off, he would speak sharply to her. But she had a strong will. Soon he was forced to chase her and slap her to make her obey. She would pretend to pull it off just to tease him and one day when he was burning leaves she threw it on the fire and fled.