Jay laughed dispiritedly. “What difference does it make. I’m sorry, Earle-I’m taking it all out on you. Forgive me.”
“I don’t mind, Jay. It’s circumstantial influence.”
“What?”
“The Pavlov experiments.” Earle’s eyes were shut; his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “Present an animal with an insoluble problem-put a rat in a maze that’s got no exit. He’ll hallucinate eventually. Isn’t that what Duggai’s doing to us?”
“How the hell do you ever reconcile religious nonsense with that behaviorist nonsense? Seems to me the two are mutually exclusive.”
“Never mind.” Earle’s head rolled back. “I’m too tired.”
Mackenzie heard the frightened squeal when something hit one of the noose snares.
Jay gathered his legs.
“Keep quiet,” Mackenzie murmured.
The squeal from the darkness had agitated the fox; it backed away to the very rim of darkness so that the bright dots of its eyes were surrounded by nothing more than shadows suggestive of its outline. The jackrabbit sat up alert, ears twisting.
Mackenzie kept his face averted from the fire and his eyes squinted down to slits: he didn’t want night blindness. What had the snare trapped? Rabbit-or only a mouse?
He pushed two small logs deeper into the fire. There was the distinct hoot of an owl not far away. He watched the jackrabbit. It carried its forepaws high and limp-wris-ted; the nostrils and ears kept wiggling. Irrationally Mackenzie kept listening for the truck again.
Shirley murmured, “We ought to be telling ghost stories.”
Silence again and then it was broken when the jackrabbit made its heel-and-toe tattoo. It made Mackenzie think of the ceremonial dances: the repetitive hypnotic chant, shuffling horny feet stamping the beaten earth, heads jerking, arms pumping, outcries to the knee-high gods of the pantheistic world.
For Mackenzie’s paternal grandfather, whom he’d never known, it had been a twenty-five-mile walk to the trading post; the old folks had to carry water in buckets from a well half a mile away from the hogan. And their son, Mackenzie’s father, the silversmith, had never been a citizen: in Arizona Indians only got the vote in 1948. Tsosi was dead by then.
Why am I thinking about all that?
He heard the swoop of movement in the air, a brief falsetto squeak; the labored beating of wings. The owl had nailed something.
The night was alive all around them: things grunted and moved through the brush. Through hooded eyes he watched the lone jackrabbit. It hadn’t moved from its hypnotized place.
Then there was the definite smash of something big enough to make a racket in the bush: a sudden scrabbling-something had been hooked. It scratched to get loose. Not far away.
The racket was enough to break the jack’s spelclass="underline" it bolted away into the night.
Mackenzie gripped the knife and walked away from the fire.
14
One of the snares had been torn away, nothing left but a broken branch. Perhaps the owl had taken the catch. But there was a half-strangled jackrabbit twenty yards down the trail and there was a bonus nearby: another noose had trapped a half-grown one. He killed them both with the knife and carefully removed the loops and reset his snares. Then he heard something struggling and he went down the path to search out the source of the noise.
He couldn’t identify it at first. Its struggle with the snare had sent it into the thicket of the manzanita’s center and Mackenzie was reluctant to reach blindly through the tangle. He moved around the bush until starlight picked up the scaly shine-a lizard, a very big one, as big as his forearm. If it was a Gila Monster he wanted no part of its poisons. He spread branches apart carefully to get a better look and the lizard thrashed until its face came into the light.
Chuckwalla-eight or nine pounds in weight. Mackenzie’s hand shot in through the spiny twigs; he killed the lizard with the blade and untangled the snare with precise caution because one of them had already been ripped away and he had no more string.
He carried the three carcasses to the fire. Earle was awake again. The three of them looked upon his booty; he caught a telltale dart of Shirley’s tongue, a twitch of Earle’s cheek muscle. Jay only watched empty-eyed.
Mackenzie skinned the lizard and cut chunks of meat, skewered them on green twigs and passed them out. “Make sure it’s cooked before you eat it.”
Shirley regarded it with revulsion.
“And forget your prejudices,” Mackenzie added mildly. He attended to the two hares: he lined a little pit with the lizard skin and drained the blood into it; then he disemboweled the jackrabbits and skinned them with slow care to retain the hide. He took the meat off the bones carefully and sliced it into strips; he cut seams in the ears and opened the skins out flat; he broke leg bones and ribs off and threw them directly on the fire.
He gathered up the lizard skin cupped in his hands. “Drink.” Nothing in the world was more nourishing than fresh blood.
He sent them foraging and they returned with a harvest of salad makings: grass tips and saltbush-they would need a great deal of that; until they found an animal lick it would be their only source of salt-and maguey greens mashed to pulp on rocks.
Savaged by hunger they consumed the three pounds or so of meat on the chuckwalla in the course of an hour, cooking it spitted over the fire a bite at a time.
Mackenzie poked around in the fire with a stick, found the burnt rabbit bones, scraped them out into a maguey leaf. “We eat these bone ashes. Dysentery preventive.”
“All that rabbit meat-it’ll spoil, won’t it?”
“We’ll hang it dry.”
“Don’t you need salt to cure meat?”
“The sun does the job.”
They stripped the spines off an arm of Senita and quenched their thirsts on its pulp.
Earle ruminated on a mouthful of chuckwalla. “Tastes like curried chicken. You set a good table, Sam.”
He felt mildly pleased with himself.
His belly churned: unaccustomed food, unaccustomed fullness after long hunger. The satisfaction of simple bodily needs made room for an awareness of other hurts and it was his feet that concerned him most. With the edge of one of the splintered quartz fire-rocks he scraped the rabbit hides as clean as he could; then while they were still pliably soft he sliced narrow strips off them lengthwise to use for lacings later on. He showed Shirley and Jay how to hang the meat where the sun would dry it; he was back at work on the skins while they did that job and gathered more firewood; then he heard again the twang of a tripped snare, the angered lungings of something in the brush, and he lurched out of the fire’s circle to retrieve the catch.
Another jackrabbit: a small one no more than a few months old. It told him he’d made a mistake and he set all the snares a few inches higher so that the loops hung nine or ten inches above the ground; possibly he’d missed catching several full-grown jacks because his snares had been set too low.
Before he skinned out the new catch he had to sharpen the knives again. The brass alloy took a fairly good edge but wouldn’t hold it long. He’d bent one of them doing something; he didn’t straighten it-a bent knife was preferable to a weak one.
Tidbits of memory kept drawing him along the path of knowledge like crumbs scattered before a pecking bird: he visualized his father’s moccasin-work and the beaded rabbit-skin jackets they’d made forty years ago and this time he remembered to remove the hare’s sinews intact and to clean out the insides of the ears without slitting them open; once the flesh was removed it was possible to turn them inside out, scrape them clean, hang them for a sun cure. It was the most rudimentary curing system and would leave them with unsatisfactorily hard leathers but these would be far better than bare-ass nakedness-it was a matter of protection, not prudery. If they could keep the snares working for a few more nights they’d accumulate enough skins for essential clothing. It would be stiff and it would stink but if they were to have a chance of outwitting Duggai they needed to have mobility and that meant shoes, hats to keep the glare off, clothes to protect their privates from injury and their skins from the sun: there were things you simply couldn’t do at night, you had to be able to move about in daylight more than they’d done today-otherwise this might take months and none of them was going to survive that long on rabbit meat and cactus: if nothing else they’d die on account of the simple lack of salt. You could eat saltbush until you were stuffed and it would do about as much good as a pinch of table salt.