Relentless

2

Quarter past two. Watchman stopped and looked out across the ascending boulder field. The tracks went straight up and into the trees beyond. A good place to get whipsawed. He turned right and circled the boulder patch and came back along the upper timberline until he intersected the tracks. He studied them long enough to see what had happened here. Hargit had stopped and the horses had milled a little. Watching the backtrail. One of the horses had dropped a pile of manure marshmallows and Watchman got down to touch it. Still green and a little warmer than the frozen ground: forty-five minutes old, perhaps, no more.

From here he looked back to see what Hargit had been able to see. He measured the distances with his eye and decided Hargit had watched him cross that saddle two and a half miles above this place. So Hargit knew how much of a lead he had and knew he was being followed by a solitary horseman.

When Watchman put his horse into the trees he knew Hargit would be setting up the ambush somewhere very near and very soon.

He began to think about how Hargit would set it up.

A grenade, tied to a tree with a tripwire running across the trail. A likely possibility: and so instead of riding in Hargit’s tracks he rode parallel to them, a dozen feet to the right of them.

The thing about this snow was that nobody could hide tracks in it and so what Hargit had to do was tie up his horses and backtrack on foot, either using rocks for stepping stones or trying to walk in the horse tracks to conceal his own passage. Then set up the ambush in a place where it looked as if he had merely ridden on through.

Watchman had heard somewhere that in Vietnam the favorite mantrap was an elephant pit with pungi stakes, a big pit dug in the trail and covered over with a thin lattice of jungle twigs and vines, made to look like a regular part of the earth. When you trod on it the lattice gave way and you were plunged into the pit and impaled on the upthrust poisoned stakes. Well Hargit wasn’t going to try that kind of thing; no time for all that digging. That was no help.

The tripwire idea was attractive but that had a weakness too: if the pursuer took the precaution Watchman was taking now, it would fail.

Of course Hargit could simply be waiting alongside the trail to shoot him. But Hargit’s mind didn’t seem to work that way. He always set a boobytrap first and then waited to see who walked into it. If the boobytrap didn’t finish you the rifle would.

A grenade didn’t make a positive trap, not against a man on horseback. The shrapnel might wound the man but the horse might absorb most of it and branches might deflect it too. A grenade was an intimate weapon designed for close quarters and indiscriminate mass targets; if you wanted to kill one man with a grenade you had to explode it very close to him. Hargit wouldn’t just sit up in a tree somewhere and throw a grenade at him; too much chance he’d miss.

Stalking, Watchman moved slowly, constantly turning his head to catch sounds on the flats of his eardrums. A search for shadows: he keened every tree trunk before he passed. At frequent intervals he stopped the horse and listened to the night.

The thin coat of frozen snow treacherously concealed an underlayer of loose granulations and it was hard to spot pits and gullies in the forest floor; once or twice the horse went in stirrup-high and floundered for footing.

It was the old Mexican shell game: under which shell was the pea? And of what did the pea consist?

He was on a downslope now, so steep it was almost sheer. Hargit’s horses had bucked the drifts hard, leaving great wallows. The track ran down to the sloping-off bottom and penetrated a district of ten-foot boulders and broken slabs of rock that stood upended and sometimes weirdly balanced on top of one another. From this elevation Watchman saw that the tracks went straight on through the boulder field and into the timber beyond.

The air was still now, but earlier winds had blown most of the rocks clear of snow. You could walk around in there, jumping from rock to rock, and not leave a trace.

If Hargit was waiting for him it was probably in there.

He stopped in the trees and considered the alternatives. The slopes on either side of the canyon, going past the sides of the boulder field, were too steep to travel. If you wanted to get across to the far side you had to go through, or over the tops of, the boulders. Either that or go all the way back over the mountain and go around. That might take three hours. No, this was the place. Maybe Hargit could see him right now. Three hundred yards, uphill, the moon going down behind the mountains; it would be a tricky rifle shot and Hargit would want to wait for a better one.

All right, assume he’s in there. Now how do I get at him?