Nevertheless at the back of his neck the short hairs prickled.
He fought down a cough and slithered behind the dead-black shadow of a rock. It was the size of a small car and gave him safety and breathing time but he listened cautiously for the scrape of scales that might indicate snake.
He peered around the far end of the rock. A shoulder of rising ground to the left blocked the peak from sight. Mackenzie dodged into the foothills.
The plan was to circle behind Duggai’s position and try to intercept the line of Jay’s tracks. He’d go northeast until he judged he’d crossed the better part of a mile and then he’d make a ninety-degree left turn which should take him behind Duggai and bring him toward the point where Jay had gone through the range. With luck-assuming Jay hadn’t doubled back-he’d have to cross Jay’s tracks somewhere back in there.
The foothills began to squash in against themselves and heave more violently. He had no trouble keeping land masses interposed between himself and the peaks but the ground was covered with fist-sized rocks and he couldn’t move recklessly for fear of dislodging them and setting up a racket Duggai would hear.
He picked his way around boulders that weighed as much as battleships. In the boulder fields virtually nothing grew except trivial tufts of cactus that sprouted out of cracks in the rock. The surface of the earth was covered with layers of pulverized stone; it crunched softly underfoot but that wasn’t noisy enough to carry. What worried him was the likelihood of kicking something loose that might roll downslope and start a slide.
He crabbed his way along the side of a talus hill toward the groined head of a dry canyon. Stepped around a boulder and climbed toward the dip in a saddle that appeared to give access to the hills above. But when he reached it he found an open bowl in front of him as regularly spherical as an inverted helmet.
If he crossed it he’d expose himself to view from the nearer peak. There was no option but to go around. He spoke a silent oath and turned to the right.
The detour ate up half an hour but then he was in the center of the range with the spinal divide directly in front of him. He had to cross it. That was a matter of choosing a pass through to the far side.
Pick wrong and it would cost an hour in false movement. He considered the high divide with patient speculation.
The highest peaks probably stood about a thousand feet above the desert floor but he’d already climbed several hundred feet through the foothills and it wasn’t a mountain-climbing problem; it was simply a matter of avoiding box canyons. Most of the gullies that ran up toward the ridge didn’t go all the way to the top. The trick was to pick the one that did.
It wasn’t easy; the bends and humps of the earth made it difficult to determine whether the canyon that opened invitingly at the bottom was the same one that made a V at the top.
The thin rind of moon stood directly overhead. Mackenzie made his choice and struck out toward the divide.
The twisting canyon carried him up a dry-wash bed; he walked along one bank of it to avoid the litter of rocks that had been carried down in flash floods. At each bend the bank cut close to the wall and sometimes the floods had carved little cliffs and overhangs.
At times he had to make heroic little leaps from boulder to boulder-that or squander a good deal of energy and time on descents and detours.
The high shoulders of the canyon narrowed the sky and reduced what light there was; there were points where he had to feel his way through the shadows. It was good likely rattlesnake country and he moved respectfully with his ears straining to probe each faint signal the night had to offer.
He’d made the right choice; the climb brought him to an open pass through the divide. He posted himself briefly in the heavy shadow of a looming boulder and had a look down his backtrail.
The foothills stretched out beneath him in pale silver lumps. He was surprised to see how much distance he’d covered. The campfire out on the flats seemed quite far away-much too far, certainly, to see any human movement with the naked eye. He could see a vast distance beyond it from this elevation. The landscape seemed as dead as something on the moon.
A tumbled mass of rocks hoisted itself above him and cut off all view of anything to the west and northwest-Duggai had to be up that way somewhere. Across the pass a gentle slope of barren ground made its way up to a stone promontory from which the spinal ridge continued southeastward; this pass had been a weak point in the granite backbone and the winds had eroded it away.
Ahead of him to the north the land gave way gradually. He saw strings of brushy foothills and a stretch of broken badlands at the bottom perhaps half a mile from him; beyond that was more of the familiar desert and on the horizon the vague outlines of another range.
It was what he’d expected to find. He looked to his left along a slant down the backside of the range: more foothills followed by more flats. Somewhere down there Jay had gone foraging and not returned.
He began to pick his way down the north side of the range.
20
The descent went faster because the north slope was a gentler one and there wasn’t the clutter of boulders he’d had before; because of the angle of the spine he was in the lee of the prevailing winds here and the erosive forces had been less pronounced on this side. Winds in this corner of the world tended to come up from the Gulf of California and from the Pacific Ocean off San Diego: they were westerlies and southwesterlies. When they carried low clouds the ridgetop would break them and therefore on this slope there was more vegetation. It was the same in kind but it grew more densely and some of the manzanitas had substantial limbs. It meant more forage for bigger animals and that was why Jay had found a game trail back here.
He kept looking over his left shoulder as he progressed down the hillsides: he didn’t want to blunder into the open where Duggai might spot him. But there was a mass of heavy rock up there and it looked as if Duggai would have to come across the divide before he’d be able to see anything out this way.
Mackenzie made good progress. In the foothills he made his left turn and followed the flank of a narrow little valley toward the northwest. After half an hour he began to search the ground ahead of him for an indication that Jay might have passed this way.
A shallow wash crossed his path. He looked up to the left before he entered it. The wash penetrated the range and made a bend out of sight, its walls growing higher and steeper.
Down in the sand he found tracks. Not Jay’s tracks. Tire tracks.
He bent low and crossed slowly with his attention welded to the canyon into which the wash disappeared.
Duggai almost certainly was up there-the truck parked somewhere in the canyon, Duggai camped on a mountain-top above it. Could he command a view in this direction? There was no way to tell from here-the odds were blind odds but Duggai should have no reason to be looking back this way. On the other hand Duggai was wise to the wilderness and could be expected to spare occasional surveillance for his flanks and rear.
No choice but to take the risk.
He went straight across and holed up briefly in the manzanita along the bank.
If anything was moving toward him he detected no sign of it. After a moment he moved on, eyes to the ground.
It wasn’t likely Jay had crossed the range this far to the south-if he picked up Jay’s track it would probably be at least another quarter-mile north of here-but there was no purpose in carelessness; he couldn’t afford to miss the trail and have to make a second sweep. There wasn’t time.
He wasn’t likely to find Jay anyhow: it was drawing too close to morning. How much darkness left? Two hours at a guess. Tracking in hardpan wasn’t a job for nighttime but he had an advantage in the fact that Jay wasn’t a woodsman and had no desire or ability to conceal his tracks. If you knew what to look for you might spot signs of his passage-it didn’t need anything as specific as footprints. Mainly what Mackenzie had was Jay’s reference to the game trail he’d picked up. Find the game trail and it would lead him to Jay.