She got up, pulling her abused clothing about her. "That was wrong," she said calmly. "I don't know what you destroyed, but you did destroy."
After several moments he said, "I'm sorry."
"I don't want to see you again," she said.
There was no indication he'd heard. "I'm going to find Orph," he said.
"You can't."
He nodded.
He went to the door. "I'm sorry," he said, and this time he meant it for her.
He left. She sat in a chair and hugged herself.
The pups' eyes opened on the tenth day. The bitch grew lean with their greedy suckling, but she held her strength and didn't go hungry, enough food was brought her. The pups lengthened and put on weight. They bustled one another and wobbled when they stood. Their tiny pinpointed teeth made her nipples raw. The bitch spent a few minutes in the sunshine when she emerged to relieve herself and drink from the stream, then five minutes, then ten, a quarter hour. She lay on her side relishing her respite. She came close to playing with the males.
Though they sniffed at the den mouth and stared into it, they made no attempt to enter, and she loosened into trust again and was no longer as harsh with them as she had been. The largest pup gained its legs.
It explored the burrow in bold adventures of inches. The bitch grew sure enough to ignore for a while the small whines and squeaks they sent up the burrow mouth when, after a vague, uncomprehending search for her warmth and succor, they could not find her. One afternoon she went recklessly off on a run with the spotted dog, returning half an hour later, exhilarated. The pups were voicing their unhappiness. She went down to them in contentment, and lay on her side. They clambered over each other to jerk at her dugs. A few days later she carried them one by one in her mouth out of the burrow and deposited them in the sunlight on the warm earth. With proud wariness she watched Orph and the other males nose, and sniff, and turn the pups over. The pups quailed and squirted urine. They tried to scramble back down into the burrow, but she blocked them. The black dog walked into the forest to sulk. Orph wandered several paces away and dropped down to enjoy his comprehension, and the surety that they would not have to remain an endless time in this place, which offered shelter and water and adequate food, but where the occasional trace of human scent reached his nostrils, without overt threat, but still a danger simply because it was human. The spotted dog lay down close to the bitch and her brood. He stretched his neck to lick the pups. The biggest pup mastered its terror long enough to stand the licking a few moments.
Then it clawed back to its mother and tried to squeeze beneath her. The bitch moved to let them at the burrow, they scrambled to its edge and went tumbling down inside. She followed, in copious happiness.
Chapter 10
HIS intelligence, had he inquired of it, would have told him he had no chance of finding Orph. But H it was a matter of knowledge, not intelligence: whatever streams of existence and time he and Orph tumbled through, they were moving toward confluence.
He felt this in every fiber, knew it without question. It was a matter of harmony. Belief was irrelevant; he perceived the necessity.
He took a leave of absence from the school. Sometimes he camped with Mike and Jeff, and he had most of the equipment he'd need. He bought the rest, and a stock of freeze-dried food. He didn't own a gun. Ben Nichols was a young history professor who lived half a mile up the road. He wore his long hair tied back and dressed in jeans and sandals, but he was a mountain boy at heart. Bauer knew him well enough to ask him for a weapon. He told him why he wanted it.
"You haven't got a chance in hell," Nichols said.
Bauer shrugged. Nichols didn't press it, as Bauer had known he wouldn't.
Nichols didn't let anyone tell him what to do with his life; in exchange, he never hassled anyone else.
"Do you have gear, have you ever camped?"
"Enough."
"How familiar are you with guns?"
"I'm not a buff, but I did some hunting when I was a kid, I classed "Expert' in the Army."
Nichols took him into his study where there was a glass-fronted gun case.
Nichols unlocked it, slid a panel back, and took out a rifle with a shoulder sling and telescopic sight. The checkered stock gleamed, there was a film of oil on the metal.
"See how this feels."
Bauer slid back the bolt to check that the weapon was unloaded.
"That's good," Nichols said. "I don't worry about putting one in your hands now."
Bauer butted the rifle against his shoulder and aimed it out a window to a tree. The scope's lenses were covered with leather caps. Bauer lowered the gun, then snapped it to shoulder. Lowered again, shouldered, and this time tracked smoothly across the wall.
"It fits me," he said. "And it has good balance." He read the stamp in the metal. It was a Winchester, Caliber.270.
"I don't know the cartridge," he said.
"It's hot and flat. 2900 feet per second, 1900 foot pounds at impact.
These mountains are mostly carbine terrain. You don't ordinarily get a clear field of more than fifty or sixty yards, but sometimes you do-a ridge, a spine, an open cliff." He took the caps off the sight. "The gun is accurate up to five hundred yards, but I've never had an open shot like that around here. It's sighted for two hundred. At one hundred you have an inch-and-ahalf rise, at three hundred you get a two-inch drop. They don't make 'em any tighter. Anything over three hundred yards, don't shoot, you're on a highway. Have you ever used a scope?" Bauer said no and Nichols explained.
Nichols set the rifle aside and opened a drawer at the base of the cabinet.
There were four handguns. He picked out the smallest, and a holster that fit it.
"You need a belt gun, too."
Bauer looked doubtful.
"Around camp you're not always going to have your rifle in hand. And close in, like it was with that guy Stokes, the rifle wouldn't be worth much anyway, too clumsy and slow. This is light. You won't even know you're carrying it. It's chambered for a.38 Special, not a cannon but punchy enough. You know pistols?"
"Not beyond.45s in the Army."
"Doesn't matter. You'd he using it at ten feet or less, and I can teach you in an hour."
They drove to a friend of Ben's, who had acreage and a target range.
Bauer ran thirty rounds through the.270. The first five were scattered, but he hadn't lost the basic feel; each would have been some kind of hit. By the end he grouped three near perfectly at 200 yards, three in an area the size of a silver dollar, half an inch high at 100, and three in a two-inch circle around the bull at 300 yards.
"Those were all kills," Nichols said.
"It's a good gun."
Nichols worked with him on the Colt until he had it well enough.
They went back. Nichols persuaded him to borrow his trail bike too.
"You can get up a mountain in an hour that would take you five or six of hard climb, and you don't have to carry your gear on your back. It spooks everything for a mile around, but they settle down pretty fast.
You can cover ten, twenty times as much territory with it. You're going to fall flat, but you might as well give yourself all the help you can."
The machine was a front and rear wheel drive brute whose cleated low pressure tires could haul it over rocks and dead falls like the treads of a tank. Nichols said it could climb right up the trunk of a tree.