The low hills were buckled into crazy involuted contours: the range looked like the surface of a brain. Whatever lay beyond it was concealed. Probably another bowl of flat scrub, foothills after that, mountains eventually-it was a guess but it conformed to the pattern of the district.
He kept prodding the image of the camper-pickup in his mind. Duggai would want to conceal it not only from the ground but also from the air. The camper was wide and high-bodied; a substantial bulk. You couldn’t simply camouflage it with brush-it would make an enormous heap out of proportion with the standard of shoulder-high scattered scrub. Anything that big would be spotted easily from the air; it would be conspicuous enough to draw attention even from twenty thousand feet.
How would I hide something that big?
It would require an excessive run of luck to find a spot under a rock overhang big enough to conceal the camper. The hills ran to patches of bare earth separated by strewn fields of giant boulders but there weren’t any dramatic cliffs or overhangs; it wasn’t that sort of terrain. You had to go pretty far east or north to find redrock mesa country. These were tan-gray boulders weathered round and smooth by erosion.
Well you could bury it, he thought, but he couldn’t see Duggai doing that amount of work or rendering the truck that inaccessible. In any case Duggai was undoubtedly living in the truck. The cab was air-conditioned. You couldn’t run it all day long but you could use it for temporary relief during the hottest stretches.
So it needed to be hidden but accessible. Probably in the shade. There were no trees big enough to cast worthwhile shade.
I think I know what I’d do. I’d back it up into a high-sided ravine. Wedge it close to the wall under the shadow of a big rock if I could find it. Sprinkle rocks across the roof. Plant a couple of bushes on the hood and the roof to break up the straight lines of it. Paint it with mud. Make it blend. But keep a clear track straight ahead so I could start the engine and bust right out of there full-speed if I had to.
It suggested the sort of place where Duggai probably had his camp.
It would be in a wash or gully-something big enough to serve as hiding place and road. It would be in the steep boulder-littered part of the range. And it would be near a point of high ground to which Duggai could walk: a point he could use for surveillance.
The range slanted away. The near end lay perhaps three-quarters of a mile distant. It sloped from there toward the north, slanting along a tangent-its sinuous spine ran roughly from northwest to southeast-and the far end where the range petered out into the flats lay due north of Mackenzie about three miles away. There were some high humps of ground up near that terminus but he ruled those out from Duggai’s point of view: too far away. Even with keen eyes and a good glass you couldn’t see much at three miles at night. Duggai would be closer than that so that he could keep close tabs on them.
By that reasoning he ruled out the left-hand half of the range and now he had narrowed Duggai’s probable location to a stretch of hills to the northeast in an arc measuring no more than a mile in width. He ticked off the criteria he’d previously postulated and concluded that there were only two summits in sight that could serve as Duggai’s observation posts. One was a flat-topped ridge with boulders scattered along its western slope like hogans in a Navajo compound. The other had the highest peak in the range; it had the shape of a human foot cut off jaggedly above the ankle-a very steep slope to the right where the heel would be and a much gentler slope to the left trailing off into an uneven tangle of toes. It stood perhaps a hundred feet higher than the hogan-village ridge but it was a quarter of a mile farther away; the ridge appeared to be not more than a mile from Mackenzie.
One of those two. But what if I’m wrong?
The sun dropped; it stood briefly balanced on a mountaintop, a great bloody disc against the pale sky. Mackenzie’s shadow lay far out along the earth like something in an El Greco and at the end of it Shirley’s head appeared, her cropped hair standing out in red tufts. She didn’t see Mackenzie against the sun until he stood up. His shadow covered her. She came down for water.
They ate a meager supper in twilight. Mackenzie built up a new fire. When it was burning he piled logs high on it. Earle said, “I thought we were leaving. What’s the fire for?”
“To give Duggai something to look at. And give Jay something to home on.”
“I don’t understand. If we’re leaving-”
“I think we can intercept him. The only way he’s going to find his way back here is to follow the tracks he made when he left. When he comes in sight of the fire he’ll walk straight toward it. We’ll spot him.”
“Seems to me we could pass each other in the dark.”
Mackenzie shook his head. There were no clouds; there’d be light enough to see movement against the open ground. He said to Shirley, “Take a look at those hills. Just to my right you’ll see a flat-top ridge with big boulders down the left side. Got it?”
“I see it, but what-?”
“Now off to the left a bit there’s a peak that looks like a man’s foot. See that?”
“Yes.”
“I believe Duggai’s watching us from one of those two peaks. They’re the most likely places.”
“Good Lord, then that means Jay-”
“Probably walked right past him last night, yes.” Mackenzie went right on without allowing her time to think about it. “I want you both to memorize the shapes of those two peaks. When we clear out we’ll keep to low ground and try to keep things between us and those peaks. If you can see the peak it means Duggai can see you. Keep them out of your line of sight when we move.” He took a drink and passed the bowl to Earle. “Well start in the ravine where we’ve got the raincoat pit. We’ll bag the rest of the water and take it with us. We go up the ravine-it seems to notch itself right up to the top of this slope and it’ll give us concealment that far. We worm our way across the top and down the back of this little ridge. That’ll put us out of Duggai’s sight. We’ll cut northeast until the ridge flattens out and see where we go from there. If Jay turns up we’ll be able to see him out on the flats.”
“Won’t we be heading straight toward Duggai?”
“It can’t be helped as long as Jay’s out there. Once we’ve linked up with him we can divert away from Duggai.”
“But he’ll know we’re gone.”
“If we do it right he won’t know till morning. That may give us enough of a jump on him. If he has to wear himself out searching for us it’ll give us an advantage we didn’t have before.”
He saw Shirley’s troubled gaze move from point to point along the slope above him. She was visualizing the path. She turned slowly and looked out across the mile of flats between here and the hills. “Sam-what happens if Jay doesn’t come?”
“Then we go to him.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“We know where he disappeared into the hills. It was roughly midway between those two peaks. If he doesn’t turn up in the next few hours we’ll have to get around behind Duggai and pick up Jay’s tracks there. Follow them to wherever he is.”
“Won’t Duggai think of that too?”
“He will-but he may not think of it fast enough. The idea is to convince him that we’re still here. If he doesn’t get suspicious until morning we’ve got a good chance.”
“How do we do that?”
“We put on an act for him,” Mackenzie said.
18
First he made a show of setting his traplines along the jackrabbit run. What he actually did was to gather up the snares and loop them securely around the belt of his breechclout. From any distance it would look as if he were stringing new traps.
Shirley walked a hundred yards out onto the flats and peered out toward the hills: it was an act contrived to persuade Duggai that they were alarmed about Jay but in fact there was no fraud in it. After a while she returned to camp with a physical show of worried dejection.