You’re going to die, he thought.
There was nothing here but the sameness of jungle, its merciless face. And there’d be men in it too, soon enough, hunting him.
You’re back where you started, only you’re older and weaker.
He stumbled a few feet, went to his knees. When was the last time he’d eaten? Must have been yesterday, breakfast. He’d been shot twice, used his last drop of adrenaline in getting out of there, and floated in the sullen river for eighteen horrible hours, slung upside down under the goddamn log, only his nostrils flaring above the water.
So there it was: eat or die.
Didn’t matter if the wound was infected or not; if he didn’t eat he’d wear down fast, and the jungle would feed off him in a matter of hours.
Been in tougher fixes, yes I have, I do believe.
But he hadn’t. There was no chopper waiting to air-evac him if he could just make the LZ. There was nothing but this jungle and outside it a whole world set to do him in.
It must have been a bit after dawn. The air was very crisp and clean and smelled fresh as baby breath. The sun was still weak. It was feeding time, he knew it soon enough.
Then Bob happened to feel something hard against his leg, and realized the hardness had been there all night. He slid the pistol from his jeans pocket. It was a big stainless Smith & Wesson.45 automatic, their new Model 4506. No. No, by God, it wasn’t, it was that fancy new 10mm the FBI had started using. He wondered about the round. He’d trust his life to a.45, having fired a hundred thousand.45 cartridges in his time through a variety of Colts. But this new thing, a 10-mil? He didn’t know.
Man without a gun has got no chance, Bob thought. Man has a gun, he has a chance.
With a thumb as big as a brick, he pawed the magazine release. The mag fell out and he saw the agent had it loaded brimful with hollowpoints, like little brass Easter eggs down there. He sneaked a look to see if the man had the chamber stoked, and the gleam of brass from the seated cartridge answered him. Would they stand up under a soaking? Only one way to find out. He slid the magazine back, felt it lock and with a same brick thumb got the hammer back and locked.
He sat back, wishing he had more strength to find a position, or a trail, some place to hunt from, a good place to shoot from, a brace, anything. He had none of it. Only the gun. Overhead, the sun filtered through the dense tree cover, thin, not yet eight he reckoned. The shadows were blurry. Or was it his eyes going? Was he sliding off into nothingness, bled out like a deer shot quickly and not well.
He was hallucinating again. Strange, at this time he thought of Donny Fenn and all the scary moments in the boonies, and how at the real crazy-ass seconds, Donny’d begin to laugh a little, a hysterical giggle.
Donny, boy, you’d be laughing today if you could see old Bob and what’s become of him, sitting on his wet ass in some bog waiting on death or a creature.
But Bob couldn’t laugh. He tried to settle back. Seemed like there was a dim memory of sitting in the rain a while back a whole night through, waiting on Tim, the whitetail buck with the twelve-point spread. That was a long wet wait, wasn’t it? Oh, that was a hunt! He remembered the way Tim came blasting out of the foliage, like a ghost or a miracle, and how the rifle came up to him and he fired and knew how well he’d fired. That was a night, wasn’t it? Hit Tim above the spine with a bullet cast from epoxy; must have weighed less than 25 grains, atomized when it hit the flank but the shock knocked the sense out of Tim for a good five minutes.
He remembered sawing the antlers off.
Nobody going to kill you to hang your head on a wall, he thought.
Go on, boy. Git.
He remembered the creature leaping away when it came out of its coma, full of juice, crackly with life.
He laughed crazily.
They sure tried to hang my head on a wall.
Then Bob looked up and there it was. Late, it was drinking late. Maybe so deep here in the swamp there were no men and so there was no fear. Bob didn’t know. He just heard the rustle of twigs snapping, saw a flash of color.
It was some sort of ugly spotted pig. Bob watched it emerge from the dapples of the trees maybe seventy-five yards out. It was ugly as an outhouse on a hot day, and yet when Bob saw it he almost cried for the second time in his life, the first being when he was alone at nine and had gone off onto the hill after Major Benson had come to tell them his daddy was dead out near Fort Smith.
But Bob didn’t cry. He made ready to shoot.
The damned gun was new; suddenly it felt different than his old Colt automatic, as if it were fighting him. Squeezing his left hand around the right, printing down on his right thumbnail with his left, his elbows locked between his pressing knees as he sat in a modified isosceles, fighting the tremors of exhaustion that nuzzled through his wrists and tried to betray him in their treacherous way.
Front sight. Front sight. Front sight.
That was it. That was the key, the rock upon which the church was built. You had to see the front sight with a pistol, and let the target be a kind of hazy blur in the far distance. Otherwise, nothing good happened at all.
Front sight, front sight, front sight.
In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, he saw the huge red wall of the front. There was only front, rock steady, big as Gibraltar or Mars, Bob bending into it with every last thing, and the pig a kind of soupy blur, its details lost in the distance, just a splotch of movement against the stability of the greenery.
He hoped that damn cop had zeroed it well. He hoped the water hadn’t deadened the primers or ruined the powder in the case.
Bob was so poured into the shot he didn’t hear the noise at all or feel the recoil, as the big pistol whacked back. What he saw was the pig speared through the spine by the lead, which, entering its tough hide, ruptured; it hit and broke the spine.
The animal squealed as death closed it down, then a spasm of fury rocketed through it. It tried to climb to its now stunted and shaky legs but, having a broken spine, was unable to direct the last part of its body to obey. Then, with a last quiver, it went quiet.
Bob got himself up. Still woozy, still soaked, he felt death in his own limbs, stalking through his body, hunting him. But he walked onward, dazed, kept sane only by the smell of the burned powder that his nose picked up in the riotous odors of the swamp, a familiar thing onto which he could lock. He wobbled to the pig, then collapsed as he reached it.
It weighed about forty pounds. It was about three feet long. It smelled of manure and offal. Its snout was curiously delicate, as if designed by an angel; its lashes, fleecy at the closed slots of its eyes, were also delicate, like a child’s.
The bullet hole was an ugly blister over the shoulder, but there wasn’t a lot of blood seepage. It hadn’t come out, unlike the bullet Payne had put into him, which is why he had lived and the pig had not. Served Payne right for using something tiny like a nine. Payne had broken the one true moral law of hunting: use enough gun.
Some day, I’ll use enough gun on you, Payne.
Swiftly he got out his Case XX, still secure in the watch pocket of his Levi’s, thanking God for a good Case knife that would hold an edge all down the many years and thanking God also for his own stubborn ways that made a small knife as much a part of daily dressing as boots and socks.
Turning the dead animal so that its soft belly was finally exposed, he had a moment of crisis. Felt as if he’d fallen out of his own body there for a second. A wave of hallucination crashed over him. He forgot everything. But then it came back and he found himself with the knife and the dead animal and he butchered it swiftly.