And the bird itself was food if you could catch it.
By the sun it was early afternoon. He lay back in his cool shelter and closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky; he tried to blank his mind because he needed to sleep but anxiety overcame him and he went pawing frantically around in his memories trying to find clues to survival.
He had camped out numerous times with his father on the reservation but it was nonsense to rely on atavistic mythology. He was no more a primitive wilderness-dweller than any of them. His last camping trip on the reservation had taken place thirty-six years ago when he was twelve years old; after that his father had gone into the army and two years after that had been killed by a Stuka in North Africa. His mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland who had run the church at Window Rock, had moved with Sam to Denver after the war and he had been back to the reservation only three or four times in all the years since, never for more than a day or two.
For all he knew there could be more survival knowledge in any of their heads than there was in his. Jay had done three years in the army in Korea; Earle Dana had been an air force chaplain; either of them might have been a Boy Scout. Even Shirley was something of an outdoor girclass="underline" her father had been a fanatical trout fisherman and the family had gone off far into Canada on angling expeditions that lasted weeks.
But I’m half Navajo by blood and I work in the forest nowadays and that’s supposed to endow me somehow with the powers of a Moses to lead them through this wilderness.
It was farce. The fall of a coin. He must have made some snappish remark, forgotten now, that had caught all of them-himself included in that crazy first moment-in the grip of the notion that Mackenzie had the answers. Mackenzie had the blood and the instincts. Mackenzie had been born in the desert. Mackenzie was invincible. Mackenzie would save their lives.
I’m older than any of them-a good twelve or thirteen years on Shirley, for God’s sake-it ought to be up to them to look after me, not the other way around.
But they’d abdicated. They’d embraced despair: it had been their first thought. Hopelessness. Surrender and die. He’d been the only one to fight it and that made him the leader.
For better or for worse until death do us part.
But what the hell do we do now?
10
He didn’t hallucinate but his mind jumped the straight track and he frittered hours away on meaningless calculations.
A hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit was what, fifty-one degrees centigrade?
They were in Arizona certainly-but where in Arizona? The state was nearly as big as all of New England.
Brass shells meant aerial gunnery practice but there’d been innumerable training bases in the desert during the Second World War and after. Davis Monthan outside Tucson. Fort Huachuca test range near Tombstone. Another one outside Phoenix-he kept trying to recall the name. A marine air station near Yuma. Another air force thing of some kind near Kingman. Another at Marana. Luke Air Force Gunnery Range. The Kofa Proving Ground. Florence Military Reservation. The Army Proving Ground at Yuma. Williams-that was it, the one near Phoenix: Williams Air Force Base.
Quit wasting time now-you haven’t got it to spare.
There was no saliva in his mouth to be drawn by the rolling pebble. He took it off his tongue and lay back breathing through his nose and tried to push away the tentacles of panic.
Time was so short. It was possible to die very quickly in the desert. The ancient rule of thumb was that a man could live at least three days without water but that was not true in the desert, where the sun and the sand-dry air and the furnace plains leached the body of its moisture. You could die in twenty-four hours. Duggai’s companions five years ago had died in less time than that. Because they’d been overcome by panic: they’d tried to hike, perhaps even tried to run. The desert had consumed them as fire consumes kindling. But even without exertion they’d have died by the second morning.
The ground pit might add an additional twenty-four hours to their lives now but the clock had started running early last evening when Duggai had given them their last drink from the canteen.
We’ll make it through tonight. But if we don’t get water we’ll die tomorrow before the sun goes down.
An early effect of fasting was urinary cleansing. That was a medical fact with which he was familiar. During the day he’d left the trench at least half a dozen times to urinate. He’d heard the others doing the same. By now Earle Dana’s trench probably stank of ammonia because Earle didn’t have the luxury of mobility.
It was tempting to hold it in as long as possible under the delusion that by retaining fluid the body held its grip on life that much longer but he knew that wasn’t the case at all-once the fluid had gone through the organs it was of no further use and the body only damaged itself by locking acid into the tract. So when the impulse overcame him he obeyed it.
But it would strike with ever increasing frequency until in the strong-stinking trickle of their final discharges there would be gritty little green crystals of pure uric acid.
By that time they would be too dehydrated to notice the pain.
If we get that far we’ll never come back from it.
He suspected it was self-delusion to hope they could sustain themselves for more than a few hours on cactus. It contained moisture to be sure. But not much. And it would contain enzymes and bacteria that could produce dysentery-cathartic and dehydrating reactions. Cactus might prolong life but certainly couldn’t improve it. To cheat Duggai’s hell they needed more than survivaclass="underline" they needed strength.
There was something. It caromed through shadows in his mind. Elusive. Maddeningly it shied from the light.
There was something and if he could remember it they might have water, they might live, they might win.
And he couldn’t remember it.
Reviewing the recalcitrance of Jay Painter’s despair, he fanned himself into new anger. Mackenzie had a terrible strong temper which he held under tight control whenever he could and as long as he could: once lost it was hard to regain. He had always envied Shirley the ability to get hot and quickly get over it. She and Jay squabbled all the time.
Audrey had been a woman of moods. In depressed hours she might snap at Mackenzie but it was a keep-away snap, not a preamble to a fight.
Sudden memory kicked in him. The five of them-and Duggai.
Audrey had not always been a somber girl but there’d been shadows here and there. They’d been married nearly ten years by the time he first met Shirley and Jay. By then it had led to the inevitable disenchantment but not beyond it-they’d still liked each other.
Audrey thought she had some Indian blood too: a great-great-grandfather or something. Once they’d gone to a cowboys and Indians movie and she’d winked at him afterward: Well we pret’ near won that one. She’d had a job then as factotum to a producer of TV commercials in San Francisco; Mackenzie had been stationed at Fort Ord. A base chaplain had married them and six months later he’d been transferred to West Germany and she’d had to quit the job. That had been the first obvious wedge.
After that he’d done tours in all parts of the world: Walter Reed and Fitzsimmons; the racketing madness of Tokyo; the shabby drear of Fort Bliss. By the time he came back from Indochina to the Presidio in San Francisco-1970-they weren’t yet estranged but they were like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and had lost touch. It wasn’t so much that they inhabited different worlds-they inhabited the same world but different aspects of it. The view from beneath was a view in the dark: his last tour in Saigon had been an exercise in hopeless idiocy and he’d lost some of his capacity to enjoy things. They’d gone on trying to behave as if nothing had happened but there was a constraint between them that hadn’t been there before. Mackenzie had changed: his soul viewed things with repugnance, the laughter had gone out of him.