“Maybe certain kinds of bones,” said Sara. “The skeleton of something they are afraid of, even dead.”
Somewhere in the fastness of the badlands a band of honkers were talking back and forth, breaking forth at times into flurries of insane gobblings. The fire flared as a new piece of the oily wood took flame and the wind that came flowing down the draw had an edge to it.
And here we were, I thought. Marooned in the center of a howling wilderness, not even sure where we had been heading, the winding trail our only orientation and the only place to flee to, if we could flee, back to that great white city, which in its way was as much of a howling wilderness as this.
But this, I sensed, was not the time to bring the matter up. In the morning, at the beginning of a brand new day, we’d have a look at it and then decide the best course for us to take.
Hoot waved a tentacle at the pile of blankets.
“I greedy,” he said. “I take too much of him. He have less than I imagine.”
“He’ll be all right,” said Sara. “He is sleeping now. He drank a bowl of broth.”
“But why?” I demanded. “Why did the damn fool do it? I was ready and willing. I was the one Hoot asked. It should have been me. After all, Hoot and I...”
“Captain,” Sara said, “have you considered that this was the first chance Tuck had to make a contribution? He must have felt a fairly useless member of this expedition. You have done your best to make him feel that way.”
“Let us face it,” I said. “Up until he did this job for Hoot, he had been fairly useless.”
“And you begrudge him this chance?”
“No,” I said. “No, of course I don’t. What bothers me is what he said. I have life to give, he said. What did he mean by that?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Sara. “There is no point now in worrying about what he might have meant. The thing we have to worry about is what we do now. We have been put afoot. Whatever we do we’ll have to leave supplies behind. Water is the problem. Most of what we can carry will have to be water. Unless the hobbies should come back.”
“They won’t come back.” I told her. “They’ve been waiting for this chance ever since we left the city. They would have deserted in a minute if it hadn’t been for Hoot. He kept them in line.”
“Surprise they catch me by,” said Hoot. “I was ready for them. I bop them time and yet again and it did no good.”
“The horrible thought occurs to me,” said Sara, “that this may be standard operating procedure. Take a group of visitors out here somewhere and leave them stranded, with little chance of getting back. Not, perhaps, that it would do much good if they did get back...”
“Not us,” I said. “Other people, maybe, but not these particular people. Not us, around this fire.”
She glanced sharply at me and not approvingly-but that was not peculiar. By and large, she did not approve of me.
“I can’t quite be sure,” she said, “if you are trying to make fun of me or are whistling in the dark.”
“Whistling in the dark,” I said. “You have no idea how much a little inspired and determined whistling will achieve.”
“I suppose you knew exactly what to do,” she said. “You have it all in mind. You’ll disclose it to us in a sudden flash of genius. You’ve been in jams before and you never panic and...”
“Oh,” I said, “lay off it. Let’s talk in the morning.”
And the terrible thing about it was that I really meant let us wait till morning. It was the first time in my life that I had ever put off decision-making. It was the first time in my life that I found myself reluctant to face what I was up against.
It was these badlands, I told myself-these barren, desolate stretches of tortured land and twisted trees. They took the heart out of a man, they ground him down, they made him as desolate and no-account as the tangled, forsaken land itself. One could almost feel himself melting into the landscape, becoming a part of it, as uncaring and as hopeless.
“In the morning,” Sara said, “we’ll go and’ see Hoot’s bones.”
THIRTEEN
We found the bones about a half mile down the gully. It made a sharp turn to the left and when we rounded the turn, there they were. I had expected that we would find a few bones scattered about, gleaming against the mudlike brownness of the soil, but instead of that there was a heap of bones, a great windrow of them that stretched from one wall of the gully to the other.
They were large bones, many of them a foot in diameter or more, and a grinning skull that was so located in the heap that it appeared to be peeking out at us, was elephant-size or bigger. They were yellowed and crumbling, porous where exposure to the sun and weather had leached out the calcium. While heaped mostly in a windrow, some were scattered about the edges of the windrow, probably hauled there by scavengers which in some long-gone day must have swarmed to feasting.
Beyond the bones the gully ended abruptly. The walls of earth, with rocks from fist-size to boulders, sticking out of them like raisins in a cake, swept around in a semicircle to close off the depression. The bones lay fifty feet or so from the end of the gully and at the foot of the earthen wall which marked its end lay a great jumble of rocks which in ages past had fallen from the cliff.
The gully itself was depressing enough, with its earthy barrenness, lonely beyond all concept of loneliness. One would have said that as it stood the place could not have been made more lonely or more barren, but that would have been wrong, for the bones added that one further factor or dimension which pushed it to a point of awesome loneliness that seemed to be more than the human mind could bear.
I felt uneasy, almost ill-and it takes a lot to make me ill. There was a feeling that one should turn from this place and flee, that something which had happened here long ago had cast upon this place an aura of evil and of awfulness to which no one should subject himself.
And out of this awfulness a voice came to us.
“Gracious sirs or mesdames,” it piped, loud and cheerfully, “or whatever you may chance to be, pity please upon me, hauling me hence from this awkward and embarrassing position in which I have been long since.”
I could not have stirred if I had been paid a million. The voice nailed me into place and held me stupefied.
The voice spoke again. “Against the wall,” it said. “Behind the jumbled rocks which, forsooth, proved so poor a fortress as to get all killed but I.”
“It could be a trap,” said Sara in a hard metallic voice that sounded strange from her. “The hobbies might have sensed the trap. That’s maybe why they ran.”
“Please,” pleaded the piping voice. “Please away you do not go. There been others and they did turn away. There is nothing here to fright you.”
I moved forward a step or two.
“Captain, don’t!” cried Sara.
‘We can’t walk away,” I said. “We would always wonder.”
It wasn’t what I meant to say or what I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was turn around and run. It was as if another person, some sort of second person, a surrogate of me, had spoken.
But all the time I was walking forward and when I came to the pile of bones I began to scramble over them. They made unsteady footing and they crumbled under me and shifted, but I made it over them and was on the other side.
“Oh, most noble creature,” cried the piping voice, “you come to sympathetic rescue of my unworthy self.”
I raced across the space between the bones and boulders and went swarming up the pile of rocks from which the voice seemed to come. They were good-sized boulders, better than man-high, and when I scrambled to the top of them and looked down behind them I saw what had been piping at us.
It was a hobby, its milk-glass whiteness gleaming in the shadow, flat upon its back with its rockers sticking straight up in the air. One side of it lay against the boulder that I stood upon, wedged tightly against it by another smaller boulder which had been dislodged from the pile. Pinned between these two masses of rock, the hobby was held completely helpless.