Fear in a Handful of Dust

20

The descent went faster because the north slope was a gentler one and there wasn’t the clutter of boulders he’d had before; because of the angle of the spine he was in the lee of the prevailing winds here and the erosive forces had been less pronounced on this side. Winds in this corner of the world tended to come up from the Gulf of California and from the Pacific Ocean off San Diego: they were westerlies and southwesterlies. When they carried low clouds the ridgetop would break them and therefore on this slope there was more vegetation. It was the same in kind but it grew more densely and some of the manzanitas had substantial limbs. It meant more forage for bigger animals and that was why Jay had found a game trail back here.

He kept looking over his left shoulder as he progressed down the hillsides: he didn’t want to blunder into the open where Duggai might spot him. But there was a mass of heavy rock up there and it looked as if Duggai would have to come across the divide before he’d be able to see anything out this way.

Mackenzie made good progress. In the foothills he made his left turn and followed the flank of a narrow little valley toward the northwest. After half an hour he began to search the ground ahead of him for an indication that Jay might have passed this way.

A shallow wash crossed his path. He looked up to the left before he entered it. The wash penetrated the range and made a bend out of sight, its walls growing higher and steeper.

Down in the sand he found tracks. Not Jay’s tracks. Tire tracks.

He bent low and crossed slowly with his attention welded to the canyon into which the wash disappeared.

Duggai almost certainly was up there-the truck parked somewhere in the canyon, Duggai camped on a mountain-top above it. Could he command a view in this direction? There was no way to tell from here-the odds were blind odds but Duggai should have no reason to be looking back this way. On the other hand Duggai was wise to the wilderness and could be expected to spare occasional surveillance for his flanks and rear.

No choice but to take the risk.

He went straight across and holed up briefly in the manzanita along the bank.

If anything was moving toward him he detected no sign of it. After a moment he moved on, eyes to the ground.

It wasn’t likely Jay had crossed the range this far to the south-if he picked up Jay’s track it would probably be at least another quarter-mile north of here-but there was no purpose in carelessness; he couldn’t afford to miss the trail and have to make a second sweep. There wasn’t time.

He wasn’t likely to find Jay anyhow: it was drawing too close to morning. How much darkness left? Two hours at a guess. Tracking in hardpan wasn’t a job for nighttime but he had an advantage in the fact that Jay wasn’t a woodsman and had no desire or ability to conceal his tracks. If you knew what to look for you might spot signs of his passage-it didn’t need anything as specific as footprints. Mainly what Mackenzie had was Jay’s reference to the game trail he’d picked up. Find the game trail and it would lead him to Jay.

But two hours probably wouldn’t be enough.

He hurried along, making the best time he could: if he didn’t find Jay before dawn it would have to wait for nightfall but that could make the difference between Jay’s living and dying if he were injured-or even if he weren’t: he hadn’t carried water with him and he’d already been gone too long.

Mackenzie passed a long toe of earth that grew out of the hills like the exposed root of a giant tree. Once past it he stopped in a thicket of creosote and had a look uphill.

As you moved around the compass it was natural that configurations of terrain had to change. But the hill with the boulder slope that had reminded him of a hogan village was beginning to come in sight around the edge of the stone ridge; it was behind him by now-he’d come past it by going around behind it.

That meant the other peak had to be ahead of him and off to the left. From this angle it would no longer resemble a human foot but he thought he’d still recognize it if it were in sight. It was not; nothing up there was high enough-the nearer hills blocked off that part of the range. In any case he’d already crossed the camper’s tire tracks. It meant Duggai probably was behind him on the boulder-studded peak.

From here Mackenzie saw its slope; the top remained invisible behind an intervening ridge. He wasn’t going to be able to advance much farther in the open before he would emerge into Duggai’s sightlines.

He decided to cross the foothills to the north in order to interpose them between him and Duggai; then he would proceed along the edge of the range in search of Jay’s game trail.

He turned to the right and walked between the two low hills. A startled jackrabbit flashed away and Mackenzie froze bolt still in a shadow of catclaw because the jack’s sudden movement might draw Duggai’s attention if Duggai were positioned to see it.

Mackenzie gave it five minutes before impatience boosted him forward again.

He walked from bush to bush, trying to blend into shadows when he could; he kept hunched low to the ground. The knife in his waistband was beginning to slip through and he repositioned it.

He thought about taking a drink but decided against it; no knowing how long the water was going to have to last. He’d been moving for about three hours; it was quite cool and he hadn’t worked up too much of a sweat; the system didn’t require water yet.

He walked out between the hills and bent his course to the left, striking out along the flanks of the foothills. Above him he could no longer see the range itself and that meant Duggai couldn’t see him. He moved along quickly until he brushed a cholla and a segment attached itself to his calf. The needles immediately worked their way into the flesh and he had to stop to knock it off with his knife; then he had to pick a dozen spines out of the skin before he moved on-if they worked their way in they’d fester.

He passed a notch between hills and searched for any sign that Jay might have come this way but there was nothing like a game track and nothing seemed to have been disturbed. He stopped to empty a pebble out of his moccasin and went on.

Somewhere in the course of the next half hour he found a well-beaten trail. Relief flooded him.

Animal hoofs had packed the earth along a single curvaceous rut. Scrub pincushions that tried to grow across it had been trampled; overhanging twigs of catclaw and man-zanita had been gnawed bare of leaves up to the level of Mackenzie’s thigh. It couldn’t be mistaken for anything but an animal path. Something a good deal heavier than jackrabbit. Probably a variety of animals used the trail.

It was not a path new to this season; it had been here many years because there were no seedling plants along its flanks-they’d sprouted but they’d been eaten immediately.

A perennial game trail meant one of three things: there was water, food or salt.

He couldn’t conceive of any food succulent enough to draw animals endlessly along this rutted path-there weren’t any cornfields or orchards out here to draw the constant attention of game herbivores. So it was water or salt or perhaps both.

Which way? The trail came out of the foothills and threaded the brush out along the flats.

Jay had said he’d followed it several hours but found nothing. Mackenzie wished he’d asked Jay whether he’d gone up into the hills or out on the plain.

Logic decided him. Jay probably had followed the trail first up into the hills because to the greenhorn there’d be nothing attractive on the flats: automatically he’d have concluded that if there were a water hole or a salt lick it ought to be up in the broken hill country rather than out along the featureless plains.

In his first night’s foraging Jay had intercepted the path somewhere around here and must have followed it up into the hills, where Mackenzie had no doubt it branched out into various tributaries and finally dwindled to nothing.

Because the animals that used this trail weren’t plains dwellers. They had to reside in the foothills in the narrow band of heavier vegetation along the slope where the occasional rain broke.

As he looked out on the flats he saw the vegetation grow steadily more sparse. Nothing bigger than jackrabbits out there.

The big animals lived in the hills but they came regularly down this trail and out into the plain-because there was something out there that drew them.

Jay had struck out that way on his second expedition. He hadn’t come back. It meant one of several things: he’d crippled himself or got sick or he’d followed the trail until daylight and holed up and continued the trail tonight. Or he’d gone out into the open to a point where Duggai had spotted him and Duggai had come after him and left him maimed or dead out there. Or-it was far-fetched-he’d run into a pack of pigs or coyotes and been jumped. Or maybe he’d been too tired to dig a pit at sunrise and had broiled in the deceptive shade of a bush.

It could be anything. But the odds were strong that Jay was out on those flats. Maybe fifty yards from here and maybe five miles.

Mackenzie set out along the game path. He hadn’t gone far before he got confirmation: a decapitated barrel cactus-Jay had cut its top off and drunk the pulp; and there was a little heap of fishhook spines that he’d carefully removed one by one before attacking the plant.

Mackenzie looked back toward the hills. You still couldn’t see the summit from here. Another quarter-mile out and he was certain it would rise into view.

He scanned the desert floor. His eyes stopped to examine everything that might be a human form. Each time he rejected the possibility and moved on to the next lump.

Nothing. He moved on along the trail.

Thirst was getting to him; he had a short drink from the bag, rolled the water around in little mouthfuls for quite a while before swallowing, put a pebble on his tongue and sucked it to keep the membranes moist.

One thing was certain. Out at the end of this trail was a water hole or a salt lick. Sometimes you found them together.

The population of these hills couldn’t be very great-it took a good many acres of this sort of scrub to support much life-but there’d been enough traffic along this path to groove it deep and hard. That meant almost constant travel. If it extended any distance at all then it had to exert a very strong lure. Water alone wouldn’t do it: there were always pockets in hills like these where a man might never find water but a coyote could easily smell it out and dig for it. On the other hand salt alone wouldn’t do it either; a pack might wander to a salt lick every week or two for a treat but it wouldn’t venture such a journey every night.

If animals were beating this track every night or two it meant a potently seductive attraction at the far end. He concluded there must be ground salt and fresh water quite close together.

If that was the case and Duggai knew about it then a lot of possibilities fell into place. Duggai might have picked the spot deliberately if he knew he’d have ample water for himself-all he had to do was make sure his victims never found the water hole. If Jay had headed out that way last night then naturally Duggai would have been keeping an intermittent eye on his water supply; he’d have spotted Jay; he’d have had to prevent Jay from returning to the others with the news.

How much darkness left? Half an hour? An hour?

He was several hundred yards away from the protection of the foothills. The desert plain receded away from him in all directions, its undulation so gentle there hardly seemed anywhere Jay could be hiding.

Mackenzie stopped and measured the hills behind him-trying to determine how much farther he could proceed before he walked into Duggai’s line of sight.

It was sheer guesswork because he wouldn’t see the peak until he was out where Duggai simultaneously would see him. But the contours of the slopes at either end gave him a hint to the altitude of the summit and he felt strongly that he was quite close to the limit of safety here. It might be fifty yards and it might be a hundred and fifty but certainly it was no more than that.

And if Duggai spotted him on this trail that would end it right here. Bullets in both kneecaps would do the job handily.

His feet were bruised and raw. The moccasins were beginning to shred but he resisted the thought of changing to fresh ones because of the fifty or eighty miles he’d have to cross to reach the highway-assuming he could get beyond range of Duggai’s eye.

He was having trouble walking: his breath came in short gasps and the muscles at calf and ankle felt spongy and his knees had developed a wobble. When he thought of the highway and the miles that lay between he didn’t think he’d have the strength for it.

He ate a string of jerky because it might perk him up; and moved on, scanning the brush to either side of the game run, searching the flats, looking back with each step to see whether Duggai’s summit had climbed in sight, ticking off the array of imponderables and obstacles that loomed before him, seeing not much hope at all.

A voice rocked him back in terror:

“Mackenzie.…”