Fear in a Handful of Dust

22

The game run carried them briefly northward, turned past a low pile of rocks, lifted them over a swell of ground and dipped into an arroyo with steep banks and a wide desolate bed. Mackenzie thought they’d found the trails destination but then he saw where it emerged on the far side through a notch in the bank and continued out across the flats.

He picked up the rumor of movement-perhaps through his ears, perhaps through the soles of his feet. He touched Jay’s elbow and made a quick silent gesture: they dropped low and crab-walked off the game trail, fled along the wash, squatted against the cutbank wall. He heard the rapid shallow breathing of Jay’s fear.

The sound grew with approach: a crisp fast rataplan. Mackenzie loosened up. Small hoofs on short legs moving fast-several animals. His ears told him that much; his brain sorted possibilities and told him the rest: javelina. Peccaries-wild pigs. Couldn’t be anything else.

The leader came into the arroyo and looked suspiciously to both sides and ran on across; the others followed in convoy and Mackenzie counted seven animals in the pack. The miniature boars of the desert: they stood no higher than a man’s knee. He caught the faint glimmer of starlight on exposed tusks. They ran with little sonorous grunts.

It was a fast determined trot and they were gone quickly. Jay expelled an explosive breath. “Mean little bastards. What do they weigh?”

“Thirty, forty pounds.” You heard yarns about javelina ganging up on humans. Macho hunters laughed at greenhorns who tried to hunt peccaries with small-caliber rifles-in legend the pigs had armor-plate hide that deflected bullets. Mackenzie didn’t put much stock in tall tales: peccaries were grass eaters-leaves and succulents-their ferocity was no greater than it needed to be for protection against coyotes.

Just the same I’d rather not tangle with them.

They moved on warily in the pigs’ wake. Dust hung where the sharp hoofs had kicked it into the air. Mackenzie kept looking at the skyline behind him. He might too easily have reached the wrong conclusion about Duggai’s routine: it fit his own needs, therefore it was an attractive supposition; but it was based on random fragments of evidence.

Mackenzie walked past the high stalk of maguey and stopped short.

“What?”

He stared back along the trail. “We should have filled in the damn holes.”

“Oh Christ.”

“If he comes down off the mountain he’ll know we came this way.”

“We’d better go back and fill them in.”

They’d come nearly a mile. “No. It would cost us half the night and then we’d have to wait for him to do his next reconnaissance.”

It put a driving urgency in him and he forced the pace until Jay began to limp on his bad foot; Jay spoke no complaint but Mackenzie dropped back to an easier gait and in that manner they went on.

A low pile of hills bubbled to the left and the track circled behind them and when Mackenzie followed the turn he saw that the wind had cut the backs off the hills and left a vertical cliff thirty feet high and perhaps seventy yards long.

The track arrowed along the base of the cliff and Mackenzie was persuaded to a certainty that the game run would end here.

Now he heard the snuffle and grunt and hoof-thud of javelina. How far ahead? Fifty feet? A hundred?

It was full black under the cliff and they moved ahead in isolated paces, fingertips trailing the wall. It was a slab of granular stone. Some seismic contortion had tipped it on end. Around to the southwest the winds had drifted piles of earth against it to make hills. But here in the lee of the weather the rock stood nude. The cliff was a barrier between them and Duggai; they were safe from discovery as long as they remained in its shadow.

Mackenzie moved cautiously past a jutting angle of rock. He could see the plains but the immediate foreground was opaque.

He stopped and lifted one arm to bar Jay’s advance.

He didn’t know what had made him halt.

He heard a snout disturb the silence of water: a pig nuzzling-there was a snort and a lapping of tongues.

Artesian, he judged; it couldn’t be a rain trap-it would have dried out since the last storms.

Hoofs kicked at the ground; he heard scrapes and thuds that had to be pigs rooting for salt with hoof and tusk. The aural sensations reached him with extraordinary clarity but it wasn’t an alarm of proximity-he wasn’t that close to the pigs: the sounds were crisp on the still air but there was a forty- or fifty-foot distance. It was something else that had stayed him. What? He had to know before he could advance.

The fear with which he lived had revived fundamental instincts. On a therapeutic couch he’d have diagnosed his condition as atavistic regression: an abnormal mental imbalance the symptom of which was hyperacuity. Under some circumstances it was an unhealthy condition; under others it was not. The organism had a responsibility to react in environmental danger. Adaptive compensation: the deaf man learns to hear with his flesh; the blind man to see with his ears. The endangered man learns to take nothing for granted. Sensory information that can be ignored by the unafraid must be examined from all aspects before it can be dismissed or acted upon.

Some undefined sensation had gone through the nervous system and the data system had analyzed it and the analysis had been fired into the decision-making executive. The neocortex without thinking had reacted instantly in self-protection: the motor muscles were stopped, warning signals were flashed to the cerebrum, the conscious thinking apparatus followed along in its clumsy way and tried to catch up.

A quick tally to rule out alternatives: Scent? No-his olfactory talents were not particularly keen; he smelled nothing unusual. Sight? No-nothing. Tactile information? No-nothing remarkable except perhaps the hint of dampness in the air.

Therefore it must be something audible.

He listened again; heard nothing he hadn’t heard before.

Then the slow conscious mind informed him.

It was a shift in direction. The rooting noise was coming up to reach him-up from a level beneath him. The water was in a depression.

He put his foot forward and lowered it without taking his balance off the other leg.

Nothing there.

If he’d kept walking he’d have pitched right over. Maybe not much of a fall-ten feet-but it could have broken a bone. His ears had told him the pigs were ten feet lower than he was.

Therefore I am not yet dead.

They withdrew along the trail and emerged into marginally better light. He made out the strain on Jay’s drawn features.

“They’re digging salt down there-we’ll need it. And I’d like to try and kill one of those pigs. It’ll give us enough food for the rest of the hike. If we lose a day here we’ll make it up-we can bag quite a bit of water and stretch our marching hours. What do you say?”

“You mean lay over here all day?”

“We’d have to. To dry the meat.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Keep going. We might get beyond Duggai’s sight by daylight.”

“You think we’d be better off if we stayed here until tomorrow night, don’t you.”

“I’m still kicking it around,” Mackenzie said, “but we’ve got to make up our minds.”

“My foot’s starting to give me hell. Another day’s rest would help a lot. But you decide. You know best.”

“Allright. We’ll stay.”

“How the hell can you kill one of those things?”

“Ambush it out here where we’ve got enough light to see by. We know the route they’re going to take.”

Mackenzie set it up as best he could and while he worked on it Jay sat nursing his foot and watching Mackenzie’s every move, waiting with doglike patience for any morsel of attention Mackenzie might toss at him: Jay’s mind hadn’t gone soft but he seemed to have settled into the new role he was trying out as devoted sidekick. Mackenzie had a feeling it would last only as long as he didn’t make a serious mistake. As soon as he damaged Jay’s desperate faith in him that would end it: Jay would feel betrayed. He might sulk or he might explode but either way he’d be hard to deal with after that. It surprised Mackenzie that Jay hadn’t already started to rail about the open pits they’d left.

To herd the pigs closer to his chosen ambush Mackenzie rolled a rock across the trail, narrowing the opening. The cliff started here, rising out of the earth; it was no more than five feet high. They would be more likely to look for danger in their path and on their flanks; less likely to look up-and the wind should carry his scent right over their heads.

He didn’t know how long it would be before they came out. He had two minutes or he had the rest of the night.

He instructed Jay and posted him across the trail in the brush; they assembled a pile of throwing rocks.

It would have been simpler to set a snare but they had no rope capable of restraining a strong forty-pound animal nor would they be able to lift a rock that would be heavy enough to stun or kill a pig from a triggered deadfall trap. Mackenzie was going to have to get close enough to kill the pig by hand.

His only weapon was the trivial brass-cartridge knife and he didn’t think that would do the job. Their hides would resist the soft metal and he couldn’t count on getting an eye.

The nearest manzanita was a good distance off the trail. He sent Jay to break off a branch; Mackenzie remained on the cliff with his knife and a stone in case the peccaries came. He kept his eye on the trail where it disappeared under the opaque shadow of the cliff and heard the rending crackle of twisting wood on the plain behind him. The stuff was not easy to break.

Jay brought him the prize. “I hope it’s all right.”

“It’ll do fine.”

Jay beamed at him and retreated to his post and Mackenzie hefted the branch: it was a strong stick with a crook in it, a little shorter than a baseball bat and considerably lighter in weight; not heavy enough to do service as a club. A twisted strand of flexible bark hung from its end where Jay had had to rip it loose. Mackenzie wondered if the bark had enough tensile strength to make a thong. Then he rejected it; he couldn’t afford to experiment and have it fail. Instead he set the food pouch beside him on top of the ledge and pulled the hide drawstring out of it. Pouch, string, breechclout and moccasins all were stiffening to an uncomfortable hardness and his shoulder was badly welted where the tough strap had chafed it. He foresaw no improvement in that situation; they’d just have to make the best of it. Even if they did manage to kill a javelina its hide would be far stiffer than the jackrabbit skins and in any case they’d need the pig hide for a water bag; it would harden up to the consistency of wood but that wouldn’t affect its usefulness as a vessel.

He pulled his mind back to the immediate problem and focused on the attempt to solve it. There was no point speculating about the use of javelina skin until you had a javelina.

Jay’s efforts to tear the club off the bush had left one end of the stick split clear through. The split ran down into the wood a few inches and one side of it had curled back. Mackenzie took the split ends in both hands and pulled with steady pressure. The split ran farther along the wood and he pulled the ends apart carefully with continuing effort until he judged it deep enough.

As an interim weapon he’d been clutching a stone; he’d picked it up from the foot of the cliff. It was a shale slab with the shape of a wedge-butt end as thick as his wrist, blade considerably thinner. It was irregular and not quite as heavy as he’d have preferred but he didn’t want to waste time hunting for a better one. He rammed it down into the split stick and used the rawhide thong to tie the wood tight around it. If he struck a bad blow the rock probably would fly right out of the wood but in the meantime it made for a rudimentary ax-stone blade, wood handle. Not as effective as his ancestors’ tomahawks but then he hadn’t had weeks to craft it.

He gripped it in his right fist and clutched the knife in his left and lay along the cliff above the game trail waiting for the pigs to finish their pleasure.