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.
He got down closer, shifted his alignment—perhaps it was the wind. “Move in here, Jay. Give me some shelter.”
Jay came reluctantly beside him and they squatted together and the quartz clicked like bones. Shirley said, “You look like figures in a cave painting.”
Finally a pinprick ember glowed in the tinder. Smoke began to curl. Mackenzie fanned it with his open hands. The ember went black.
Jay said, “Oh.”
Mackenzie picked up the stones again.
Jay said, “It’s no use, is it.”
“If you’ve got something better to do with your time—” He snapped it waspishly and regretted it; there was no point feeding Jay’s despondency with sarcasms.
Then it well and truly caught: he fanned it and watched the infant flame grow. And Shirley said, “Behold the invention of fire.”
Once it caught it went high and ravenous: the consumption of brittle twigs was ferocious and Jay started heaving armloads of brush on it until Mackenzie stayed him. Mackenzie rammed four long manzanita branches into it end-first so that they could be shoved steadily into the center and reduce the speed of consumption; they’d gathered a good supply but there was no point wasting it.
He’d had to position the fire on the rabbit trail rather than for Earle’s convenience; it meant they had to move Earle and this aroused half-coherent mutterings. They set him down close to the fire and Earle smiled in childish gratitude and sank quickly back into sleep.
The light flickered against their pale bodies. Jay, his spine hunched, brooded bleakly into the flames; his thick pelt of body hair emphasized an aspect of the scene and caused Mackenzie to realize what had put the caveman image in Shirley’s head.
She lay close by the fire half on her side, breasts askew, legs scissored; ruddy patches grew on her face. The fire brought the night closer around them and exacerbated the sense of malevolent isolation.
Then they heard the distant growl of the truck.
At first Mackenzie thought it was imagination. It was very far off—hardly audible. But he saw the others respond. He could hear the juddering whine of the transmission. After a few moments it stopped abruptly, switched off. Jay’s face, at first expectant and hopeful, collapsed. “Duggai. He’s coming for us. To finish us.”
“Not yet,” Mackenzie said. “He’s not sick of the game yet.”
It worked on their nerves. For a while no one spoke again. Shirley’s eyes had a vacant glaze. Jay picked sunburnt skin shreds from his nose. Earle’s breath began to raise frightened puffs of dust from the ground—like a fallen horse. Shirley put a hand to his forehead to gauge Earle’s fever and Earle uttered a thin startled little cry. His eyes opened to the fire: he looked over his shoulder into the darkness and winced from it like a galley slave.
Shirley said, “Duggai did that on purpose. To remind us he’s there.”
At least it confirmed Duggai’s presence; it was no longer a paranoid supposition.
Mackenzie saw something wink from the darkness—an animal attracted by the fire. Its motionless eyes gleamed. Mackenzie’s hand gripped the knife. There was nothing out here big enough to attack a man—nothing but Duggai—but Mackenzie’s hand grew slippery on the knife. We’d make good targets for him against this fire.
But he knew Duggai this welclass="underline" Duggai couldn’t kill them yet. There were reasons that would make no sense to anyone but a Navajo; but they were binding. Duggai would not attack—not yet.
Shirley ventured toward the fire; she began to hum a tune—her voice small but true. Perhaps she wasn’t aware she was doing it. She used to do that, he remembered—she used to sing to herself when there was trouble she couldn’t handle.
Jay watched, his chin tucked in with disapproval.
Mackenzie watched the disembodied glowing eyes out on the edge of the night. His father had taken such things as signs. His father’s spirits and demons had not been the sort of gods Mackenzie had ever understood very well; they were vain, whimsical, crafty, corrupt, easily bored and frequently inconsistent. But his father had been comfortable with them.
Earle startled him—not by speaking but by what he said, because it lapped across the drift of Mackenzie’s thoughts:
“Are you religious, any of you?”
None of them answered right away and Earle turned his plea on Shirley: “Are you?”
“I was,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“We’re still alive, aren’t we? God’s looking after us.” Jay snorted audibly.
“Jay, you may not believe in God but He believes in you. Yesterday I heard you praying. The Lord’s Prayer.”
“An aberration.”
“You’ve got no faith?”
“Faith? Crap. Faith is accepting something without evidence. No. What good’s that? You can’t eat faith. You can’t drink it.”
“God is keeping us alive. I don’t know why.”
“If you want to talk let’s talk about something else.”
“There’s nothing else to talk about.”
“Then shut up.”
Shirley said, “Jay,” with quiet reproach. Mackenzie caught a sour whiff of Jay’s sweat.
Jay said, “I’ve always resented living in a society that requires me to profess a belief in a nonexistent God in whose name people can justify any heinous crime they choose to commit. Now we’re out here away from all that—a whisker away from dying and this idiot’s trying to lay that crap on me. It’s something I damn well don’t need right now.”
Earle withered a little.
Mackenzie discovered a second animal out along another vector from the fire—he saw the pink reflections of its eyes.
Shirley had seen them; now Jay turned to watch.
A kit fox came in plain sight and sat fascinated by the fire twenty yards from them.
Opposite the fox the pink-eyed one moved into view more cautiously, materializing tentatively: an antelope jackrabbit, huge ears erect, nose twitching. It sat up like a kangaroo and emitted a series of faint guttural barks. Its big feet drummed a fast tattoo: Mackenzie could feel the vibration.