"I figured a hundred," said Rick. "If we make twenty miles a day, we'll get there in four more days."
"Do you think we covered twenty miles today?" asked Joe.
"It's hard to say," admitted Rick. "I decided to be pessi-mistic and divide our rations for six more days of travel."
"You think like an engineer," said Joe. "It's good to have a safety factor."
"It'll make for skimpy meals, unless we find some game."
"Let's split everything four ways," said Joe. "Con gets half and you and I get a quarter each."
"That sounds like a good plan," said Rick. "I hope Con goes along with it."
"We'll make her," said Joe.
"She can be real hard headed."
"She'll eat," said Joe. "She has to."
Joe and Rick returned to find the tent set up. Con had brushed the snow from its interior and spread the conifer boughs for bedding. She was in the process of packing snow around the outside edges of the tent as they arrived.
Rick made one of his calculations and decided to make a fire. That way, they could have warm broth with dinner, and there would be a lighter load to carry the next day. He ra-tioned out the wood, which was almost as precious as the food, to start a blaze. He cleared the snow from a patch of ground close to the tent and set nightstalker down next to some tinder. By the time he had a fire going, it was pitch-dark. While the small fire was cheerful, it also emphasized the totality of the blackness surrounding them. The flames quickly died down to embers, and they barely had enough time to cook their broth. As Rick expected, Con protested the division of the rations, but, in the end, he and Joe pre-vailed. They finished their meal in near-total darkness, with the dull red embers providing more of an impression of light than its actuality. Afterward, they huddled together in the tent and went to sleep.
CON AWOKE TO cold and hunger. Both had become con-stants in her life, waxing and waning in intensity, but never leaving entirely. Usually, the hunger manifested itself as a dull ache and the cold as a wearing discomfort. She had learned to ignore both, and they did not wake her. The sound did. A soft, distant scratching noise dis-turbed the black quiet of the world. Con instantly thought of the meat cache.
"Rick! Joe!" she cried. "Something's stealing our food." Instantly, the feeble yellow light of a flashlight broke the darkness inside the tent. It was enough light for Joe to find the gun. He switched it on, and he and Rick burst from the tent. Cold air flowed in as Con stared into the dark. The flashlight's pale beam stabbed into the night, but petered out before reaching the stone cache. Con could not tell if the scratching had stopped or was drowned out by Rick and Joe's noise. She watched the yellow light advance into the darkness until it illuminated a pile of snow-covered stones. When the light stopped moving, Con heard Joe curse and confirm her fears. "God damn thieving bastards!"
Guided by the light, Con walked over to the food cache. The circle of stones and the heavy stone lid were intact. They had been too heavy for the nightstalkers to move. Instead, they had tunneled beneath them in two places. The tracks in the snow told the story of the raid.
"There were two of them," said Rick after a moment's study. "They're traveling together."
"Our friends from back at the ledge?" asked Joe.
"Maybe," said Rick. "Who can tell?"
"I bet it was them," said Joe. "They were smart enough to stay out of sight all day, then go straight to the meat."
Rick said nothing, but began to pull away the stones that lay atop the cache's lid. "Let's see how much they got."
The batteries in the flashlight were almost dead, mak-ing it maddeningly difficult to determine the extent of the damage. Like anxious misers, they counted their remain-ing food. The skills the nightstalkers used to invade mammal's burrows had served them well in this case also. The tunnels were small, but obviously sufficient. Half the food was gone.
Con had a sick feeling in her stomach. She felt as-saulted in a fundamental way. She needed that food to live, and these creatures had taken it. Rage and despair fought within her.
"We'll get them!" said Joe with murderous intensity. "Tonight, we'll wait for them like we did before. They'll repay us for what they stole. They'll pay with their own damned flesh!" They left the plundered cache and returned with the food sack to the tent. They did not need the flashlight to guide them, for a hint of light had returned to the sky, and they could discern the tent against the snow.
"They're able to see in dimmer light than we can," said Rick, "and they've taken advantage of it, but I suspect they're as blind as we are in the middle of these black nights."
"So far," said Joe, "most of your theories about night-stalkers have not panned out."
"You're right," said Rick, "but we should be extra careful right after dusk and just before dawn."
"I'm going to be careful every damn minute until those two are dead!" said Joe. Rick built a tiny fire to boil some dried meat in an attempt to extend it by making broth. By the time the pot boiled, the fire had reduced to embers. Rick, Joe, and Con huddled around them, passing the pot to drink. After-ward, they shared the gray, soggy meat. It was a meager breakfast and a melancholy one. Rick was starting to pack up when he heard Con say "Oh, great!" and saw her head for the bag of clothes. She began to rummage through it with a frustrated and upset look on her face.
"What's wrong, Con?" he asked.
Con did not answer. Instead she muttered to herself. "Of all times, why now?" She pulled a faded tee shirt from the bag. It had a dinosaur skull printed on it, along with the words "Hell Creek Dig—2056." She turned to Rick, and asked, "Can I have this?"
Rick looked at his favorite shirt, one that evoked mem-ories of a special summer with Tom. Nevertheless, he said, "Sure."
"You won't get it back," said Con.
"That's okay."
Con read the puzzled look on Rick's face. She red-dened a bit, and said, "It's that time of the month. Can I borrow your knife? I'll need to cut this up."
Rick handed Con his knife, and she retreated to the tent. She emerged after fifteen minutes, looking grumpy and uncomfortable.
"Will you be all right today?" he asked.
Con sighed. "I'll be fine, but this is going to be a real pain. I'll have to stop every once in a while, and I'll have to wash these damned things out each night. God knows how I'll dry them." Con looked' so miserable, Rick gave her a kiss, and said, "I'm sorry."
"Just be glad you're not a woman."
They finished breaking camp and followed the river through the cold, desolate landscape. Rick assumed they were traveling over an upland plain like the one where they had found the ceratopsid herds. Only a trace of car-bonized vegetation hinted he was correct. He had seen the aftermath of a wildfire once, but it was nothing com-pared to this. He imagined a hurricane of fire passing over the plain, incinerating everything to ash. The land it left behind appeared devoid of life, sterilized by flame and scoured by flood. If there were any creatures about, they were hidden.
Joe, for one, was absolutely sure there were at least two creatures about. He stared into the gloom, hoping to spot the two nightstalkers. The gun was slung in front of him, ready at an instant's notice. Yet Joe was almost cer-tain his adversaries would not reveal themselves. They would wait until dark. The three slowly trudged mile after mile. Twice, they had to ford streams. Both were shallow, merely requiring that they remove their shoes and roll up their pants. De-spite that, the brief crossings were torture. The streams' edges were lined with ice, and the near-freezing water left their feet stinging long after they had crossed. Later, they encountered a thirty-foot meteor crater, filled with floodwater. A scum of slushy ice covered the water's sur-face. They halted there for lunch. Rick handed out extra rations, for in his careful arith-metic of calories, he had decided to gamble on catching the two nightstalkers. He looked at the extra food they ate at the meal as an investment that could be recouped, even multiplied, through a successful hunt. Success would require they be alert and rested. They would stop early today, build a fire, and eat well. He made these decisions without consulting Joe or Con. The burden of leadership had become his alone. When he rationed out extra meat, they accepted it without questioning. Like-wise, they accepted his other decisions—even those that risked their lives.