He had only read about such things and the pit amazed him as the sun climbed. If anything, he felt chilled against the dark moist clay.
He knew it would be best to lie quiet until evening but there was too much that had to be done.
The brass was something he could do without leaving the trench.
The large rock served as his anvil. He stood one.30-caliber shell upright on its base. He upended the second shell and held it on top of the first one with the necks overlapping, slightly askew. He lifted the second rock and pounded it down.
The brass lips crumpled a bit. He hadn’t hit very hard; hadn’t wanted to chance ruining it.
He struck again. The lower rim crumpled more, bending in on itself, but the upper shell began to split and that was what he was after.
He pulled at the split with his fingernails but the metal was too hard for him. He placed the shells muzzle-to-muzzle again and hammered away, stopping after each blow to inspect the work. The split worked its way up the length of the shell, the second shell acting as a wedge driving deeper with each blow.
Each shell was about four inches long. When the split had traveled two-thirds the length of its casing he stopped hammering and tried to pull the two casings apart but they were wedged together and he had to think about that for a long sluggish time before he saw that he was going to need a third shell to finish the job.
He sat up slowly. The molten sun exploded in his face. What time? Nine o’clock? Couldn’t be much later than nine yet. Possibly only half past nine; hard to tell by the angle of the sun-his celestial navigation was rudimentary.
Worth a few minutes’ risk, he decided. He left the hole and went down the slope, remembering where he’d seen the other casings. He gathered three of them before he made his ginger way back onto the slope. In these few minutes the skin of his back had already begun to cook.
Approaching the trench he heard a groan higher along the slope. Earle.
Mackenzie went that way and crouched at the rim of Earle’s pit. The stench of excrement came up out of the hole. Earle was revolted by the fact that he had fouled himself; he wouldn’t look Mackenzie in the face.
Mackenzie climbed down, wedging himself into the narrow trench. “Roll over on your left side just a little, can you? I’ll get this out of here.”
Wordlessly Earle lifted himself on his right elbow until a wince of pain crossed his face.
“That’s high enough. Just hold it there a minute.”
He used the handful of shells as a digging tool to scrape around the moist pool of human manure. He dug in an arc and lifted the crumbling half-ball of earth, sliding it out from under Earle’s upraised knee, lifting it to the rim of the trench and setting it down there. It had taken several minutes and Earle sagged back in exhaustion.
“Take it easy now. We’ll get you splinted up tonight when it’s cool enough to move around. You’re going to be all right.”
“Any damn fool knows a man needs water to survive.” The clarity of Dana’s voice surprised him.
“We’ll get water. Where things grow there’s always water. Get some sleep.” And he left because he couldn’t stand talking to the man. He carried the earthen tray of excrement away and threw it up the slope and limped back to his trench and lay absolutely still until his pulse slowed and his breathing lengthened and the sweat cooled on his body.
He used one of the new shells to pry the split cartridge apart far enough to remove the case that had been wedged into it. Then he began to work with the split case. He hooked a new shell over it and worked it slowly back and forth. He lay back to do this work and expended his effort with miserly sloth. After a long time metal fatigue set in and the bent side broke off.
He laid the split shell on the anvil rock and began to hammer, using the second shell as a punch, flattening the long side of the split shell. He kept working until he was satisfied, not hurrying. In the end he had a knife.
Now he began to hone the blade against the rock.
He made three knives before he ran out of material-the fourth and fifth shells had been crumpled beyond repair in the workings. When he was satisfied with their sharpness he put them aside and looked up over the edge of the pit.
Far away to the north he saw the thin streamer of a high jet contrail. A small cactus wren flitted from shrub to shrub down on the flats. They would have to set out some sort of signals to attract aircraft. They could watch what the birds ate and eat it too; he knew of nothing in the desert that a bird could digest that would harm a man.
And the bird itself was food if you could catch it.
By the sun it was early afternoon. He lay back in his cool shelter and closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky; he tried to blank his mind because he needed to sleep but anxiety overcame him and he went pawing frantically around in his memories trying to find clues to survival.
He had camped out numerous times with his father on the reservation but it was nonsense to rely on atavistic mythology. He was no more a primitive wilderness-dweller than any of them. His last camping trip on the reservation had taken place thirty-six years ago when he was twelve years old; after that his father had gone into the army and two years after that had been killed by a Stuka in North Africa. His mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland who had run the church at Window Rock, had moved with Sam to Denver after the war and he had been back to the reservation only three or four times in all the years since, never for more than a day or two.
For all he knew there could be more survival knowledge in any of their heads than there was in his. Jay had done three years in the army in Korea; Earle Dana had been an air force chaplain; either of them might have been a Boy Scout. Even Shirley was something of an outdoor girl: her father had been a fanatical trout fisherman and the family had gone off far into Canada on angling expeditions that lasted weeks.
But I’m half Navajo by blood and I work in the forest nowadays and that’s supposed to endow me somehow with the powers of a Moses to lead them through this wilderness.
It was farce. The fall of a coin. He must have made some snappish remark, forgotten now, that had caught all of them-himself included in that crazy first moment-in the grip of the notion that Mackenzie had the answers. Mackenzie had the blood and the instincts. Mackenzie had been born in the desert. Mackenzie was invincible. Mackenzie would save their lives.
I’m older than any of them-a good twelve or thirteen years on Shirley, for God’s sake-it ought to be up to them to look after me, not the other way around.
But they’d abdicated. They’d embraced despair: it had been their first thought. Hopelessness. Surrender and die. He’d been the only one to fight it and that made him the leader.
For better or for worse until death do us part.
But what the hell do we do now?