Mackenzie brandished the tomahawk and slithered for footing.
The pig was clattering along the base of the cliff like a crab on a rock jetty: pushing itself along the face of the cliff, crippled, sliding its shoulder along the wall.
He went after it and felt a stab of squeezing fright that maybe the other peccaries were after him from behind but he leaped at the struggling javelina. He gripped the ax in both hands and brought it down with all the might in his shoulders.
He felt it jar his hands when it broke. The light was poor; he wasn’t sure whether it had hit clean.
There wasn’t time to examine it. Mackenzie whirled in a crouch, knife in his left hand and broken stick in his right to meet the assault of the pack.
But the pack was making a run for it: Jay across the trail hurled rocks at them with mighty overhand heaves that flew in wild directions and clattered like enfilading fire. The commotion spooked the mob into a brief terrorized gallop that soon became a disorganized trot. Mackenzie watched the pack dwindle up the run until the night absorbed it. He dropped the stick and examined the stricken peccary and saw that he’d broken its neck with his blow.
A neat kill after alclass="underline" a blaze of crafty preternatural pride made him lightheaded and he looked at Jay with fierce excitement. “Old-fashioned redskin ingenuity does it every time. Stick with me, son.”
Jay gave him a strange frightened glance and Mackenzie laughed to show he’d been joshing him.
He laid out the carcass on its side. Let’s see now: you cut slits down the hind legs between the bones and the strong tendons. Then you jam the front legs through the slits. Break the forelegs and turn them sideways like cross-pins: you’ve made a sling of the animal—put your arms through and carry it on your back like a knapsack. Leaves your hands free.
Then he brought himself back from fantasy. No need to sling the pig for a long carry: they’d be skinning it out right here.
He remembered how his father had carried deer that way. The silversmith’s teachings were close to the surface now: he realized what was happening to him—more and more he was finding the capacity to make the right moves without having to stop and think them out first. It pleased him. “—but you can’t take the desert out of the Navajo.”
“What?”
He realized he’d spoken aloud, dismissed it with a gesture and went in search of a stone flat enough to hone the knife. He moved off the trail and began to skin the javelina and dress it out. Jay said, “How about the water hole?”
“No point risking our necks trying to get down there before dawn.”
The meat was tough and the knife too flimsy; in the end they had to tear the meat. They ripped it into strips as thin as possible so that the sun would dry it quickly. Mackenzie pegged out the hide fifty yards beyond the game trail—they didn’t need to be trampled. They scraped the hide, working with knives and rocks, and it consumed muscle and time because they had to be certain they left no traces of fat or meat on the skin: anything that went rancid could spoil the water or rot a hole through the bag.
At random intervals an animal or a small group would enter the tanque for a while and then emerge from the cliff shadows and return toward the hills. Two coyotes came; later a fox and finally something that moved with quick dark stealth—Mackenzie thought it might be a bobcat.
After three o’clock they dug their pits to survive the coming day. Mackenzie placed them some distance north of the cliff where they wouldn’t be affected by its reflections of heat. He selected positions where they were screened by the cliff from Duggai; but by crawling a few feet Mackenzie would be able to peer through the base of a catclaw bush and keep a periodic eye on Duggai’s summit.
He saw no need to dig a still and cover it with the plastic—not with a source of fresh water at arm’s length. He left the plastic folded inside the food pouch. They strung the pork on cactus spines and then with the first predawn hint of color they went to examine the tanque.
It lay in a forty-foot bowl of streaked black-red rock. The sloping walls had been smoothed to a mottled gloss. Animal hoofs over an incalculable span of time had worn a grooved trail that curved back on itself twice in sharp switchbacks on its way to the bottom and he was glad they hadn’t attempted it at night.
The little pool at the bottom was obsidian-black, an indication of depth—probably it had never gone dry: artesian pressures far underground kept it forever at a level.
The worn hoof trail circled the narrow pool and went down to the water along the shallowest gradient. Along the slope was a wide fault in the rock where mud and brown clay had flowed down like a paste from the desert floor above, after every rainfall; the mud slope was crosshatched with white scratches that had been left by animals in search of ground salt. The tongues of generations had worn the salt lick down until it had assumed the shape of a trough.
Above it the cliff was a dramatic monument of crags—from this perspective it loomed alarmingly although it was of no real size—and Mackenzie saw how if you came at it from the north you’d spot it from quite a distance.
Likely that was how Duggai had found the water hole in the first place. The brass-scavenging expedition in California that had led to Duggai’s arrest hadn’t been his first such adventure. He’d explored most of the gunnery ranges by then. Certainly he knew this one; that had been apparent all along—Duggai wouldn’t have dragged his prisoners out here if he hadn’t known where he was going.
The water was startlingly cold. Its minerals had stained the rocks around the edge of the hole; the taste was faintly metallic. Mackenzie drank his fill out of cupped hands. When he looked up there was a small scorpion in the crevice above him, tail-stinger curled over its back. He made a sudden motion and the scorpion fled back into the crevice.
Mackenzie said, “These rocks will be full of those. Keep an eye open—don’t step on a scorpion, you could die from it.”
“Listen, Sam—”
But Jay didn’t resume immediately; his eyes wandered in bashful irresolution. Then finally: “I’m not such a shit, you know. I’m really not such a total loss.”
“No.”
“Listen, I was the best student in my class and the most maladroit oaf you ever saw. Stereotyped bookworm. You get older, you learn how to camouflage insecurities—you compensate for the inferiority complex, you learn how things work, you grow up to be a mediocre psychiatrist and you think you know all your own weaknesses. Well at least I think I know some of mine. But knowing how emotional aberrations work isn’t necessarily a cure for them. I know I’m unreasonable about things. I even know why. But a lot of the time I can’t seem to do much about it except just live with myself. I’m talking about Shirley now. Maybe it’s all a long way in the past—unreasoning jealousy. I can’t help it. It’s the way I am. I’m trying to be honest with you.”
Mackenzie went up to the salt lick and began to dig with the knife. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything. Just try to see my side of it, that’s all.” Jay followed him up, started digging, searched his face with inquiring intensity. “Maybe I’m asking you a favor, come to think of it. You’re so much stronger than I am. I used to hate you because you were always so sure of yourself.”
“Did you really think I was?”
“Come off it, Sam, I’ve never seen a hint of self-doubt in you. You exude self-confidence like musk. You’ve got the composure of a sphinx. All right, for all I know maybe it’s compensation for all kinds of turmoil inside—but that’s not the image you project.”