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ely, missing other grown-ups to talk to, and told us that she would have gone
crazy without us. If she missed sex she never showed it. I think, though, that
her Report is not very complete about sexual matters, perhaps because she was
troubled by them. I know that when we first lived in the auntring, two of the
aunts, Hedimi and Behyu, used to meet to make love, and Behyu courted my mother;
but Mother didn't understand, because Behyu wouldn't talk the way Mother wanted
to talk. She couldn't understand having sex with a person whose house you
wouldn't enter.Once when I was nine or so, and had been listening to some of the older girls, I
asked her why didn't she go out scouting. "Aunt Sadne would look after us," I
said, hopefully. I was tired of being the uneducated woman's daughter. I wanted
to live in Aunt Sadne's house and be just like the other children."Mothers don't scout," she said, scornfully, like an aunt."Yes, they do, sometimes," I insisted. "They have to, or how could they have
more than one baby?""They go to settled men near the auntring. Behyu went back to the Red Knob Hill
Man when she wanted a second child. Sadne goes and sees Downriver Lame Man when
she wants to have sex. They know the men around here. None of the mothers
scout."I realized that in this case she was right and I was wrong, but I stuck to my
point. "Well, why don't you go see Downriver Lame Man? Don't you ever want sex?
Migi says she wants it all the time.""Migi is seventeen," Mother said drily. "Mind your own nose." She sounded
exactly like all the other mothers.Men, during my childhood, were a kind of uninteresting mystery to me. They
turned up a lot in the Before Time stories, and the singing-circle girls talked
about them; but I seldom sa