With the shelters blocking the fire light, the darkness in this area made it difficult to see the animals’ hulked forms as they sat or lay on the ground, dozing. Carter activated the red LED mode of the headlamp he wore in order to give them some light without sacrificing their night vision or alerting others to their presence with a bright light. In the red cast they could see there were a total of three camels, although only one was outfitted as a riding camel. It was a dromedary, the single-humped variety, and was outfitted with a saddle behind the hump.
“You good at riding these things?” Jayden whispered.
Carter shook his head. “Same as you, basically. Camel novice.”
“Now camel toes, that’s another—”
“Jayden, come on!” Carter whispered sharply. Was there ever a time his friend could be serious?
“Okay, so I guess one of us gets the saddle and the other the hump.” Although outfitted with only one saddle, the camel was a large one and appeared to be able to support the weight of two men. The other camels, they had noticed, were smaller in size and yet draped with hundreds of pounds of goods.
“You take the saddle, I’ll get up front. But let me get up front first. Keep watch.” Carter stepped up to the camel, which had its eyes closed while snoring lightly, its lips flapping with each breath. “Okay buddy,” he whispered. Time for a ride.” He pushed off the ground and swung a leg over the animal’s neck, glad he had improvised a new strap for his backpack, which stayed firmly in place as he mounted the beast. The dromedary stirred slightly and made a loud snorting sound, but that was the extent of its reaction.
“Okay, get on before it stands up,” Carter told Jayden, who moved next to the saddle. He jumped up on to the beast, grabbing hold of a leather handle on the saddle to secure his position atop the beast of burden. He tapped Carter on the shoulder in front of him. “Ready. How do we get it to stand up?”
“Kick it in the sides.”
“Why do I have to kick it? You want it to be mad at me?”
“Just do it, you’re over the part where they kick it.”
Jayden dug both booted heels into the animal’s ribs at once and braced himself for a lurch. No reaction. He tried again. “He doesn’t seem to care.”
“Harder!”
“I don’t want to break his ribs!”
“You won’t. C’mon, before somebody wakes up.”
“Okay, gonna kick him hard. Here goes…” Jayden slammed both heels into the camel’s sides, and this time it brayed loudly, an ugly sound, sort of a cross between a cow and a horse. But it didn’t get up.
Carter jumped off the camel. “Stay put. Let me try something else.” He’d seen camel drivers walk behind the dromedary before and swat them, so he tried that, wary of being kicked.
He looked around for a switch and found one hanging from the saddle assembly. He grabbed it and used it to swat the camel’s hindquarters hard, with a clicking sound from his tongue. That did it, and the camel lurched to its feet.
“Carter we never untied it!” The animals were tied to a packing crate of some sort that had been set in the sand. Carter found the end of the rope lead and untethered it. He pulled the camel by the lead to the crate, which he was able to stand on to raise his height enough to be able to jump onto its neck.
Suddenly they heard a shout followed by pounding footsteps. “They see us, let’s go!” Jayden kicked the camel again while Carter made the clicking sound as he yanked on the lead. The dromedary finally started to move forward. Not at a trot, though, but at least it was walking.
“Carter, we can run faster than this, maybe we should just—”
“No, this will be faster over the long haul. Here, you shoot if you have to, I’ll steer.” Carter handed him the pistol, but right at that moment the camel decided to break into a trot, and the resulting jolts caused Jayden to drop the gun. He flailed for it but saw it cartwheel across the desert floor until it was lost in their quadruped’s wake.
“Sorry, I lost the gun.”
“What!” Carter called back as he tried to read the compass in his headlamp’s red glow while bouncing up and down.
“Should I take us back for it?”
But that question was answered for them by the sound of a gunshot from the nomad camp. Carter saw a patch of sand kick up about twenty feet off to their left. “No! Keep going, we only had six rounds left for it, anyway.”
Carter switched off his headlamp so as not to provide a shining beacon in the night to target shoot at. Then he began zig-zagging the camel, jerking the reins right and then right again before going back left, in an attempt to make for a more difficult moving target.
Another shot was fired but he didn’t see — or feel, luckily — where it ended up. He kept up the zig-zagging, with the camel cooperating and keeping up a good trot. It was not as fast as a horse, but Carter thought the ride was somehow smoother, which was a good thing, because now he needed to pass the compass back to Jayden, and that was something they could afford to lose even less than the gun.
“Jayden, put your hand out in front of you and I’m going to hand you the compass.”
“What?”
Carter repeated himself, yelling loudly since they were now out of hearing range of the campsite.
“Okay.” Jayden stuck his hand out by Carter’s right side, palm outstretched.
“Hurry up, I need two hands to hold onto this ship of the desert!”
Carter pressed the compass into Jayden’s palm and held it there until he felt his fingers curl around it. “Got it?”
“Got it.” Jayden withdrew his hand and held onto the saddle to steady himself.
They heard another gunshot and this time Carter turned around to look. What he saw shook him to his core. Another camel and rider silhouetted in the darkness behind them, but not all that far. He had no doubt that the nomads were expert riders and would catch up to them in short order. Deciding that all the zig-zagging was making it easier for the wanderers to catch up to them, Carter clicked his tongue at the camel and kicked it once with his feet to spur it on. It did, galloping a little faster across the cracked dirt.
“We going the right way?” Carter called back. He gave him a heading.
“I need the light to read the compass.”
“Here.” Carter swiped the headlamp from his forehead and held his hand behind him until he felt Jayden take the lamp from it. Another gun blast punctuated the desert night. Jayden slipped the headlamp over his forehead and aimed the beam at the compass held flat in his hand. It took a while to get a confident reading while bouncing around on the dromedary, but after a bit he tapped Carter’s shoulder and pointed at about a forty-five degree angle off to their right.
Carter immediately corrected their steed’s course, pulling the reins to the right and letting go once its head was pointed in the indicated direction. They rode on at full gallop, and after a while it dawned on Carter that no more shots had been fired. He glanced behind them and saw the solitary camel rider, but farther back now. Maybe they had given up, Carter thought, or run out of ammo.
They had made reasonably good progress during the camel chase, too, Carter thought, now able to see real detail of Mount Ararat once again. Turkey lay ahead; they were getting there. Still, he knew the nomads were a crafty people and that they might be trying to lull them into a sense of complacency, so he deliberately kept the pack animal running along at full trot for longer than he wanted to. He didn’t know how long camels could keep up this pace, if they would keep running until they had a heart attack, or would just stop and lay down when they had had enough, but he hoped the latter.