Relentless

8

When he jammed the levers into four-wheel drive the transmission made a harsh whining growl. Watchman flicked on the high beams and they stabbed the hills, swinging wildly like searchlight beacons. Jouncing along high up in the cab of the old power wagon he had no trouble following the tracks of the eight horses: nobody could conceal evidence of that much traffic on this soft clay.

“Kemo sabe, maybe I’m a wet blanket but what if they look back and see our lights?”

“I hope they do.”

“You do.”

“Can’t hurt to keep them nervous.”

The borrowed jacket was tight across his shoulders. He cracked a window against the heater’s stuffy warmth. The hoofprints angled up into higher foothills and the truck engine strained on the grade against the weight of the horse trailer. Half-past three in the morning: it would be dawn soon, if the blizzard held. Along the hilltops here the wind was bending the scrub and an occasional snowflake drifted against the windshield but the edge of the storm was holding still, circling, a visible black-on-black wall eight or ten miles to the west. He had known storms to sit still like that until they blew themselves out. He had also known them to sit still like that until they had gathered maximum centrifugal strength and then burst forward like nuclear explosions, ripping out trees, peeling roofs off houses, overturning trucks, shoveling livestock into steep canyons by the ton. Two years ago they’d had an early fall blizzard in the high country that had stranded ten thousand Navajos and wiped out half their sheep; and the other half had been saved only by massive air drops of feed.

It was the kind of night on which you wanted to be home snug in bed. In bed with a healthy firm-haunched young Lisa lying warmly against you, idle talk or long easy silences until she felt stirred to make love again. The nerve-ends of his hands and lips remembered the textures of her. Right now she would be asleep but in a few hours, getting up and going downtown to open the shop, she would be ripping off a few choice words about his absence. Lisa was not your average housewife worrying about stubborn kitchen sink stains. Nor likely ever to become one.

Thinking about her unsettled him. In fact he was unsettled merely by the fact that he was thinking about her at all. Not the time and place for it.

He bestirred himself. “You put the stuff in the truck?”

“You betchum. But you sure as hell don’t plan to travel light. Snowshoes, Sterno, blankets, axes, ropes-I didn’t know we were outfitting a Polar expedition.”

“Just minding the Boy Scout motto.”