“I don’t know how you can assume that but I don’t feel like arguing with you. Go on.”
“Another supposition—he’s not right on top of that peak.”
“Why?”
“Too windy. It gets cold up there at night. He’d be down in some sheltered spot where he can keep an eye on the campfire. That puts him on the opposite side of the hill from us. That’s why he comes out and makes those periodic surveillances in this direction. If he could see these flats from where he’s camped he wouldn’t have to walk the ridge.”
“You’ve got something there.”
“We’ve got to risk it. Otherwise he’s got us pinned down here.”
Last night Mackenzie had told him the outline of the plan to reach the highway. It occurred to him now that Jay hadn’t once asked about Shirley.
He watched the summits as the last of the twilight died. We probably could go now, he thought. But it wasn’t worth taking that much of a chance. He said, “Once we’re out of Duggai’s sight we can make ten, fifteen miles a night. We’ll hit badlands here and there, can’t be helped, and we’ll have to go the long way around some mountains. I’d guess five days to the highway with a little luck.”
“Be nice if we don’t shove an ankle down a gopher hole on the way.”
Duggai came with the moonrise. They watched him stalk the ridgeline. He seemed to pick random vantage points from which to survey the desert; he didn’t stop at the same places where he’d stopped during the day.
The moon wasn’t perceptibly stronger than it had been in the previous night’s sky. There was a scatter of light clouds against which Duggai’s silhouette disappeared two or three times as he walked the summit. Finally he went back toward his camp and when he was gone Mackenzie stood up. “Come on.”
22
The game run carried them briefly northward, turned past a low pile of rocks, lifted them over a swell of ground and dipped into an arroyo with steep banks and a wide desolate bed. Mackenzie thought they’d found the trails destination but then he saw where it emerged on the far side through a notch in the bank and continued out across the flats.
He picked up the rumor of movement—perhaps through his ears, perhaps through the soles of his feet. He touched Jay’s elbow and made a quick silent gesture: they dropped low and crab-walked off the game trail, fled along the wash, squatted against the cutbank wall. He heard the rapid shallow breathing of Jay’s fear.
The sound grew with approach: a crisp fast rataplan. Mackenzie loosened up. Small hoofs on short legs moving fast—several animals. His ears told him that much; his brain sorted possibilities and told him the rest: javelina. Peccaries—wild pigs. Couldn’t be anything else.
The leader came into the arroyo and looked suspiciously to both sides and ran on across; the others followed in convoy and Mackenzie counted seven animals in the pack. The miniature boars of the desert: they stood no higher than a man’s knee. He caught the faint glimmer of starlight on exposed tusks. They ran with little sonorous grunts.
It was a fast determined trot and they were gone quickly. Jay expelled an explosive breath. “Mean little bastards. What do they weigh?”
“Thirty, forty pounds.” You heard yarns about javelina ganging up on humans. Macho hunters laughed at greenhorns who tried to hunt peccaries with small-caliber rifles—in legend the pigs had armor-plate hide that deflected bullets. Mackenzie didn’t put much stock in tall tales: peccaries were grass eaters—leaves and succulents—their ferocity was no greater than it needed to be for protection against coyotes.
Just the same I’d rather not tangle with them.
They moved on warily in the pigs’ wake. Dust hung where the sharp hoofs had kicked it into the air. Mackenzie kept looking at the skyline behind him. He might too easily have reached the wrong conclusion about Duggai’s routine: it fit his own needs, therefore it was an attractive supposition; but it was based on random fragments of evidence.
Mackenzie walked past the high stalk of maguey and stopped short.
“What?”
He stared back along the trail. “We should have filled in the damn holes.”
“Oh Christ.”
“If he comes down off the mountain he’ll know we came this way.”
“We’d better go back and fill them in.”
They’d come nearly a mile. “No. It would cost us half the night and then we’d have to wait for him to do his next reconnaissance.”
It put a driving urgency in him and he forced the pace until Jay began to limp on his bad foot; Jay spoke no complaint but Mackenzie dropped back to an easier gait and in that manner they went on.
A low pile of hills bubbled to the left and the track circled behind them and when Mackenzie followed the turn he saw that the wind had cut the backs off the hills and left a vertical cliff thirty feet high and perhaps seventy yards long.
The track arrowed along the base of the cliff and Mackenzie was persuaded to a certainty that the game run would end here.
Now he heard the snuffle and grunt and hoof-thud of javelina. How far ahead? Fifty feet? A hundred?
It was full black under the cliff and they moved ahead in isolated paces, fingertips trailing the wall. It was a slab of granular stone. Some seismic contortion had tipped it on end. Around to the southwest the winds had drifted piles of earth against it to make hills. But here in the lee of the weather the rock stood nude. The cliff was a barrier between them and Duggai; they were safe from discovery as long as they remained in its shadow.
Mackenzie moved cautiously past a jutting angle of rock. He could see the plains but the immediate foreground was opaque.
He stopped and lifted one arm to bar Jay’s advance.
He didn’t know what had made him halt.
He heard a snout disturb the silence of water: a pig nuzzling—there was a snort and a lapping of tongues.
Artesian, he judged; it couldn’t be a rain trap—it would have dried out since the last storms.
Hoofs kicked at the ground; he heard scrapes and thuds that had to be pigs rooting for salt with hoof and tusk. The aural sensations reached him with extraordinary clarity but it wasn’t an alarm of proximity—he wasn’t that close to the pigs: the sounds were crisp on the still air but there was a forty- or fifty-foot distance. It was something else that had stayed him. What? He had to know before he could advance.
The fear with which he lived had revived fundamental instincts. On a therapeutic couch he’d have diagnosed his condition as atavistic regression: an abnormal mental imbalance the symptom of which was hyperacuity. Under some circumstances it was an unhealthy condition; under others it was not. The organism had a responsibility to react in environmental danger. Adaptive compensation: the deaf man learns to hear with his flesh; the blind man to see with his ears. The endangered man learns to take nothing for granted. Sensory information that can be ignored by the unafraid must be examined from all aspects before it can be dismissed or acted upon.
Some undefined sensation had gone through the nervous system and the data system had analyzed it and the analysis had been fired into the decision-making executive. The neocortex without thinking had reacted instantly in self-protection: the motor muscles were stopped, warning signals were flashed to the cerebrum, the conscious thinking apparatus followed along in its clumsy way and tried to catch up.
A quick tally to rule out alternatives: Scent? No—his olfactory talents were not particularly keen; he smelled nothing unusual. Sight? No—nothing. Tactile information? No—nothing remarkable except perhaps the hint of dampness in the air.
Therefore it must be something audible.
He listened again; heard nothing he hadn’t heard before.