Jay cackled. “What do we start it with? Rub two Boy Scouts together?”
Now just use your head before you go charging off in all directions.
You’re not going to catch anything in your bare hands. Not even a lizard-they move like hell.
Now think.
He listened to Shirley and Jay snapping off branches-the sounds seemed curiously far away. Earle’s breathing was deep and slow: the exhausted sleep of invalid weakness.
Mackenzie salivated over memories of desert cookfires on the Window Rock Reservation-his father roasting coatimundi on a spit.
The thing to keep in mind before panic set in was that the desert teemed with an astonishing amount of life. In the past twenty-four hours he had seen only a few buzzards, a cactus wren, some other high-flying birds and one lizard; but desert animals were mainly nocturnal. This far from water the available species would be limited to those whose metabolism made it unnecessary for them to drink-they absorbed moisture from the vegetation they ate-but that still left room for peccaries, owls, mice, kangaroo and pack rats, jackrabbits, kit foxes and probably scores more. Of one species he was certain: he’d seen the run several times as he’d made his way back and forth along the slope. It was a well-worn jackrabbit trail and he’d known it all the time but the knowledge hadn’t registered until now. Forty years was a long time; it was damn near impossible to resurrect specific memories that old. But he had to milk the memory cells of every drop now.
In the cool night breeze it was possible to think calmly and without urgency. Mackenzie had to do his best thinking right now because if he went much longer without food the brain would begin to starve for nourishment and the ability to reason and recall would be the first to deteriorate. Right now the initial adrenaline alarms had worn off, the stultifying furnace heat had dissipated, panic had receded: the organism was functioning as well as it was ever going to function. He had the next few hours and no more because after that protein starvation would make its effect and everything would begin to disintegrate unless they made fast improvements in their physical situation.
He heard a coyote’s yapping, so far away it was barely audible. Sound carried here; that coyote might be five miles away or more. But it was vaguely encouraging: a coyote wouldn’t stray too terribly far from some source of water. Sooner or later they were going to have to move out of this spot; the move must be toward higher ground; somewhere up there, the coyote told him, there was water. A natural water source would mean big game.
He turned his head slowly and waited for the coyote to speak again. When it yipped he turned his head quickly. The coyote’s announcements broke off and the desert went silent again; but Mackenzie had time to narrow it to the northeastward quadrant.
When we go that’s the way we’ll go.
First they had to have shoes. They wouldn’t be able to make more than a few miles each night because they’d have to carry Earle or drag him on a litter and they’d have to stop early enough to dig pits for themselves and dig a new hole under the plastic raincoat.
But it would be better than staying here.
Lying on his side, he let his mind range loosely; it was the best way to recover information from the subconscious.
He put himself back inside his child’s skin, sat himself down beside his father’s campfire. In their hunting days they’d gone out sometimes by pickup and sometimes horseback; they’d explored hundreds of miles of reservation desert. His father had been a silversmith; the ostensible purpose for their expeditions had been prospecting for turquoise and agate and obsidian and the petrified wood that tourists paid dearly for; but it had been excuse more than purpose.
“Mackenzie” had been the missionary’s name. When the silversmith married the missionary’s daughter he took her surname. He was a full Navajo born and raised at Chinle in Canon de Chelly in the heart of the reservation; his tribal name was Tsosi Simalie but it was common for the Navajo to take a second name that would go easier on white men’s palates. When Mackenzie was born his grandfather baptized him Samuel Simalie Mackenzie and his father Tsosi gave him the name Kewanwyti, which had no particular translated meaning in English. His father called him by that name only when they were alone together.
His father felt that Sam’s white blood entitled him to the fruits of Anglo civilization; Mackenzie silver was the best Navajo jewelry of the 1930s and even in the Depression there was money to give the boy the best possible education. Sam saw his father only during the summer holidays-the rest of the time he was a white boy-and now his memory picked its way through the sparse weeks when they’d crossed the desert together and his father had tried to reinforce that other half of Sam’s heritage.
The legends of White Painted Woman and Coyote. The campfire stories of Navajo history-the wars with the rival Apaches and Hopi; the Kit Carson debacle at Canon de Chelly that had forever destroyed the tribe’s ability to make war; the Long March across New Mexico that had decimated the Navajo nation; the hunters and warriors and shamans and leaders who were the heroes of Navajo mythology.
His father showed him how to track bobcat, how to stalk the desert bighorn, how to keep downwind and move slowly so as to blend into the country. One year they ran a trapline along a stream but it snared only one old beaver. His father tried to teach him the ways of the Old People and the pleasures of the wilderness.
The silversmith was a contemplative man with a lyrical sense of awe. He would tell ancient stories about mesa formations and rock spires; he would speak poems about crows and snakes and mountains. He had a magic way of evoking in the small boy’s mind a long-vanished world of fantasy. He taught the boy the happiness of solitude, the astonishing fascinations to be found in a handful of desert sand or a single pitted crag. When he spoke to the boy he became luminous and reverent and filled with sly humor.
Now he remembered those lazy campfires, the talk late into the night, the glowing eyes of creatures that sat outside the circle of light and stared into the fire.…
The discovery pleased him; reverie was paying off Fire was the answer.
13
He plaited the fine strands of red hair into strings and made his way along the jackrabbit run to set his snares. They were beings of strange habit: for reasons that had no apparent connection to territorial urges or mating rituals or access to food they would run the same worn paths for years. The cause had never explained itself but from Saskatchewan to Sineloa the jackrabbit made his deep track across every patch and corner of desert as plain as signposted footpaths in a park.
The track ran in dogleg meanders from bush to bush. Wherever it ran under an overhanging limb of manzanita Mackenzie set his nooses-each snare an open oval loop a few inches above the ground anchored lightly to the earth with a forked twig hooked over it and the twig driven into the soil-to keep the snare from fouling in the wind.
By themselves the snares might do the job tonight or tomorrow night or sometime next week but Mackenzie couldn’t wait for chance: the traps had to be baited and fire was the bait.
They built the fire up-trail from the snares and Mackenzie made a little tinder pool and built a thatch of twigs on it and set the ocotillo branches close at hand. Then he settled down to the tedium of rock chipping.
The desert was littered with quartz. It wasn’t as sure as flint but it was hard enough to make sparks from the friction of collision. Mackenzie worked close against the tinder and shielded the work with his body against the steady southwesterly. The sparks were weak, ephemeral, mocking.
He blasted pale sparks into it for a long time and nothing caught. In the corner of his eye he saw Jay turn away with morose dejection. Mackenzie’s arms grew tired and his fingers began to cramp. He kept slamming the rocks together. The metered clicking was like the rattle of some primitive instrument: he saw Shirley’s head begin to sway. She was unaware of it.