Docile girl, good night. What does he have for her but a last snapshot of a trudging pig in motley, merging with the stars and woodpiles, something to put beside that childhood still of her father? He impersonates flight though his heart isn’t in it and yet he’s lost all knowledge of staying… . Good night, it’s curfew, get back inside, back in your room… good night… .

He keeps to open country, sleeping when he’s too tired to walk, straw and velvet insulating him from the cold. One morning he wakes in a hollow between a stand of beech and a stream. It is sunrise and bitter cold, and there seems to be a warm tongue licking roughly at his face. He is looking here into the snout of another pig, very fat and pink pig. She grunts and smiles amiably, blinking long eyelashes.

“Wait. How about this?” He puts on the pig mask. She stares for a minute, then moves up to Slothrop and kisses him, snout-to-snout. Both of them are dripping with dew. He follows her on down to the stream, takes off the mask again and throws water at his face while she drinks beside him, slurping, placid. The water is clear, running lively, cold. Round rocks knock together under the stream. A resonant sound, a music. It would be worth something to sit day and night, in and out, listening to these sounds of water and cobbles unfold… .

Slothrop is hungry. “Come on. We got to find breakfast.” Beside a small pond near a farmhouse, the pig discovers a wood stake driven into the ground. She begins snuffling around it. Slothrop kicks aside loose earth and finds a brick cairn, stuffed with potatoes ensiled last year. “Fine for you,” as she falls to eagerly, “but I can’t eat that stuff.” Sky is shining in the calm surface of the water. Nobody seems to be around. Slothrop wanders off to check the farmhouse. Tall white daisies grow all over the yard. Thatch-hooded windows upstairs are dark, no smoke comes from the chimneys. But the chicken-house in back is occupied. He eases a big fat white hen up off of her nest, reaches gingerly for the eggs—PKAWW she flies into a dither, tries to peck Slothrop’s arm off, friends come shooting in from outside raising a godawful commotion, at which point the hen has worked her wings through the wood slats so she can’t get back in and is too fat below the wingpits to get the rest of the way out. So, there she hangs, flapping and screaming, while Slothrop grabs three eggs then tries to push her wings back inside for her. It is a frustrating job, especially trying to keep the eggs balanced. The rooster is in the doorway hollering Achtung, Achtung, discipline in his harem is shot to hell, noisy white tumbleweed hens are barrelassing all over the inside of the coop, and blood is flowing from Slothrop in half a dozen places.