Fear in a Handful of Dust

19

When he got near the crest he saw there was an open stretch he’d have to cross. It lay twenty yards long in plain sight of the hills across the valley. That was no good; Duggai might be looking this way. Mackenzie slid back down the ravine to consider his options.

On the eastward horizon a thin first-sliver of moon stood low and pale. It did nothing to brighten the desert; it would be four or five days before there’d be sufficient moonlight to make a difference. The stars made enough illumination to pick out the silvery span of the desert, the darker clumps of growth, the shadow outlines of hills and mountains. You wouldn’t see a man out there unless he moved but you’d see movement quickly enough.

The air had cooled down rapidly since sundown; it was comfortable against his skin now. Another four hours and he’d be chilly.

He rubbed his stubble-bearded chin against the skin of his shoulder and searched the slope to either side. Nothing looked useful by way of concealment.

You never see an animal out here unless it moves, he thought, and it became clear there was only one way to do it. He fought down his impatience and made his start.

He emerged very slowly from the ravine and lay flat against the earth. The back of his hand before him was hardly visible-the starlight failed to distinguish among colors and the shade of his skin blended well with that of the earth. His head of dark hair would be visible as a dot against the earth-visible perhaps; but noticeable only if it were seen to move.

He went up the slope an inch at a time, crawling with toes and fingers and caterpillar humps of belly and chest musculature. It was distressingly time-consuming but it was the only answer: he was out in plain sight and his only invisibility was his motionlessness. From a mile away his movement was no faster than that of the moon: imperceptible but deliberate.

He was thinking about Duggai’s possible arsenal of equipment. It was remotely possible Duggai had a heat-seeking infrared scope but Mackenzie found it highly doubtful. Duggai would have had to raid a military armory for that. All the equipment Mackenzie had seen in the camper appeared to be the sort of things you could steal from a private dwelling. The rifle-he hadn’t taken too close a look but he was sure it hadn’t been a military weapon. It was some sort of big-game rifle, a civilian arm, scope-sighted and expensive.

Assume Duggai had a five- or six-power scope on the rifle. Assume-for safety-that he had binoculars as well. Ten-power? Certainly not more than twelve magnifications. The nearer of the two possible lookout positions stood a mile away by Mackenzie’s rough naked-eye measurement. A twelve-power glass would bring that down to about 150 yards-but a twelve-power glass had to be tripod-mounted or rested because no human hand could hold it steady enough for practical use. Even so: how much could Duggai see, given a twelve-power lens with good night-resolution, at an effective distance of 150 yards?

Mackenzie looked to his left, turning his head with infinite slowness. He picked out a maguey that he judged to be 150 yards from him.

If a man was lying beside that century plant would I see him?

He decided he could not.

Heartened, he continued his crawl.

When he was over the top he slid down the back of the ridge and had a look around. Nothing he saw surprised him. A flat pan of earth stretched away to the south and west; mountains stood around in small ranges and there seemed to be a fairly high sierra along the far southern horizon but that might be clouds. From this bit of elevation he probably was surveying distances of thirty miles or more; there was not a single light.

The air was so dry that the stars did not twinkle they were steady incandescent chips. Mackenzie set off along the back of the ridge and followed its curve around toward the north keeping an eye on the horizon because he didn’t want to blunder out in plain sight of Duggai.

His passage disturbed a few lizards and exploded an owl out of a bush. There was a patch of broken country-cut-bank gullies and sand washes: he had to do a bit of scrambling and he abraded one knee climbing out of an arroyo. It was impossible to move swiftly because the ground was dotted with pincushions of miniature cactus and you didn’t see them until you’d nearly trod on them. He moved as fast as he could but it was a stroller’s pace. In the hours of darkness that remained he might be able to cover six or seven miles at this rate but that calculation was immaterial because soon he would have to start doubling in order to stay out of Duggai’s range of vision.

The ridge petered out toward the flats and he went right down to its bottom. Soon he was bent double and then there was no cover at all.

He crouched behind a greasewood bush. To his left he could make out winking reflections of Shirley’s fire against bits of growth on the slope.

It was going to use up time but he saw no alternative to a long sweeping circuit that would bring him around the flats and up into the main range of hills south of the higher peaks. It meant he’d be going behind Duggai’s position but that was all right: his chances were better there-Duggai wouldn’t be looking for anything behind him.

He had to retrace a hundred yards; then he struck out along a shallow arroyo that meandered into the plain. Half-dead brush lined its banks-it had been a long time since the last rain. The slow rise to his immediate left was enough to block out any view of the hills beyond; he moved quickly up the arroyo-if he couldn’t see the peaks then Duggai couldn’t see him.

Sun had cracked the hardpan arroyo floor and pulverized it into fine soft dust but there were rocks hidden in it and he had to set his feet with care: the jackrabbit moccasins were too thin.

The arroyo made a wide bend and cut its way south. He climbed out and went along the flats with high ground to his left obscuring view of the peaks. He’d gone a mile out of his way but it kept him out of Duggai’s purview.

Then there was a dip in the ground on his left and he found himself facing fifty yards of exposed plain.

He sculled along the floor of a ravine and this took him half the distance but then the ravine doubled back on itself and there was nothing to do but cross the open. He did it as he’d done it before-an inch at a time on his elbows.

He had a clear view of the silhouette of the boulder-strewn peak. The peak was hardly half a mile away and at that distance Duggai might spot him even if he wasn’t moving. But the alternatives were to quit or to waste the rest of the night making a far circle across the boundary of the plain. If he did that he’d get caught in the open by daylight. This was a risk but it would put him safely into the hills with at least three hours’ darkness left in which to search for Jay. Mackenzie banked on the fact that Duggai had no reason to look in this direction.

Nevertheless at the back of his neck the short hairs prickled.

He fought down a cough and slithered behind the dead-black shadow of a rock. It was the size of a small car and gave him safety and breathing time but he listened cautiously for the scrape of scales that might indicate snake.

He peered around the far end of the rock. A shoulder of rising ground to the left blocked the peak from sight. Mackenzie dodged into the foothills.

The plan was to circle behind Duggai’s position and try to intercept the line of Jay’s tracks. He’d go northeast until he judged he’d crossed the better part of a mile and then he’d make a ninety-degree left turn which should take him behind Duggai and bring him toward the point where Jay had gone through the range. With luck-assuming Jay hadn’t doubled back-he’d have to cross Jay’s tracks somewhere back in there.

The foothills began to squash in against themselves and heave more violently. He had no trouble keeping land masses interposed between himself and the peaks but the ground was covered with fist-sized rocks and he couldn’t move recklessly for fear of dislodging them and setting up a racket Duggai would hear.

He picked his way around boulders that weighed as much as battleships. In the boulder fields virtually nothing grew except trivial tufts of cactus that sprouted out of cracks in the rock. The surface of the earth was covered with layers of pulverized stone; it crunched softly underfoot but that wasn’t noisy enough to carry. What worried him was the likelihood of kicking something loose that might roll downslope and start a slide.

He crabbed his way along the side of a talus hill toward the groined head of a dry canyon. Stepped around a boulder and climbed toward the dip in a saddle that appeared to give access to the hills above. But when he reached it he found an open bowl in front of him as regularly spherical as an inverted helmet.

If he crossed it he’d expose himself to view from the nearer peak. There was no option but to go around. He spoke a silent oath and turned to the right.

The detour ate up half an hour but then he was in the center of the range with the spinal divide directly in front of him. He had to cross it. That was a matter of choosing a pass through to the far side.

Pick wrong and it would cost an hour in false movement. He considered the high divide with patient speculation.

The highest peaks probably stood about a thousand feet above the desert floor but he’d already climbed several hundred feet through the foothills and it wasn’t a mountain-climbing problem; it was simply a matter of avoiding box canyons. Most of the gullies that ran up toward the ridge didn’t go all the way to the top. The trick was to pick the one that did.

It wasn’t easy; the bends and humps of the earth made it difficult to determine whether the canyon that opened invitingly at the bottom was the same one that made a V at the top.

The thin rind of moon stood directly overhead. Mackenzie made his choice and struck out toward the divide.

The twisting canyon carried him up a dry-wash bed; he walked along one bank of it to avoid the litter of rocks that had been carried down in flash floods. At each bend the bank cut close to the wall and sometimes the floods had carved little cliffs and overhangs.

At times he had to make heroic little leaps from boulder to boulder-that or squander a good deal of energy and time on descents and detours.

The high shoulders of the canyon narrowed the sky and reduced what light there was; there were points where he had to feel his way through the shadows. It was good likely rattlesnake country and he moved respectfully with his ears straining to probe each faint signal the night had to offer.

He’d made the right choice; the climb brought him to an open pass through the divide. He posted himself briefly in the heavy shadow of a looming boulder and had a look down his backtrail.

The foothills stretched out beneath him in pale silver lumps. He was surprised to see how much distance he’d covered. The campfire out on the flats seemed quite far away-much too far, certainly, to see any human movement with the naked eye. He could see a vast distance beyond it from this elevation. The landscape seemed as dead as something on the moon.

A tumbled mass of rocks hoisted itself above him and cut off all view of anything to the west and northwest-Duggai had to be up that way somewhere. Across the pass a gentle slope of barren ground made its way up to a stone promontory from which the spinal ridge continued southeastward; this pass had been a weak point in the granite backbone and the winds had eroded it away.

Ahead of him to the north the land gave way gradually. He saw strings of brushy foothills and a stretch of broken badlands at the bottom perhaps half a mile from him; beyond that was more of the familiar desert and on the horizon the vague outlines of another range.

It was what he’d expected to find. He looked to his left along a slant down the backside of the range: more foothills followed by more flats. Somewhere down there Jay had gone foraging and not returned.

He began to pick his way down the north side of the range.