Balance demanded muscle strain. Sometimes the angle was too steep and he had to walk alongside the bike, engine throttled low, the bike half-pulling him up, he half-wrestling it to keep it from toppling over backward.
Thickets were broader and denser than they first appeared and he had to stop and bull back the way he'd come. The rugged ground jolted the butt of his spine, put sudden, painful strains on the muscles of his back and shoulders; his kidneys began to ache. Draws narrowed into crevices too steep to climb and had to be backtracked. Sheer cliff faces caused long circling. Leaf-filled holes dropped his front wheel without warning. Once he was pitched over the bars and landed hard on his back, the air rushing from his lungs. A pile of stones skittered from beneath the tires and threw the bike sideways on him, pinning his leg. Nothing broke, but his thigh was badly bruised and the leg stiffened in the next hour and was painful to move. He reached the summit as the sun came to rest on the peak of a mountain to the west.
He was sweaty, grimed, and tired.
Shadows seemed to leap across the ground. The sun disappeared. He had an hour of deepening twilight before night was full. Out of the warmth of the sun, and no longer expending energy, the sweat began to dry chillingly on his skin. He changed his damp shirt for a dry one. He took the.270 from its scabbard, made sure the safety was on, and propped the rifle against the fork of a tree branch. He swung out the cylinder of the revolver to check that the chamber beneath the hammer was empty. Hurrying in the thickening darkness, he cut spruce branches to lay beneath his sleeping bag and gathered firewood.
He fixed food when the fire burned down to cooking embers, then boiled water for coffee.
The partial moon was unremarkable. Intermittent clouds obscured the moon and stars. The blackness was dense. He built the fire up, creating a small capsule of light in which he sheltered from the black void that surrounded him, that lay over the earth and mountains as far as he could see, deeper than the sky, a smothering blanket pierced with uncertain temerity by occasional house and cabin lights in the thin valleys that spread like spokes far below him.
He tried to think, but specific inquiry seemed hollow and broader reflection was not possible alone, in the night, atop such a colossus.
The mountain's philosophy was mass, its existence stone. All else was fragile and transient.
Somewhere, Orph was on the mountain with him. He knew that. He felt the animal. Rationality would have called that a phantom construct of his desire. But the mountain dwarfed rationality into the meaningless frenzy of a sporing lichen. Orph was with him. They were drawing nearer.
It was time to sleep.
Orph dozed fitfully, ears erect and turning toward creaks and snaps, rustles and little scurries across the leaves, nostrils a-twitch. He opened his eyes frequently and rose to walk about in search of the flesh of the menace that stalked the night. The black and spotted raised their heads to watch him.
Orph stood on a bluff from which the mountain swooped long and unevenly down to the valley. Far, far below he saw a thin ribbon circling off to either side to disappear behind the shoulders of the mountain. Now and then little dots of greater brightness moved slowly along the ribbon. Once or twice he heard a tiny blare of sound that was a horn, and the muffled, indistinct whisper of something like a human voice that was a bullhorn.
Rising from the valley on occasional drafts was a great, nearly solid cloud of human scent, streaked round and through with the fire of savagery, of blood hunt It was not to be fought; it was to be fled.
Colonel Mulcahey's tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up. His cheeks were stub bled and they itched. His eyes were bloodshot. He'd drunk too much coffee and his stomach was sour. But he'd done it, the big map tacked to the wall of the communications trailer, his command center, was flagged the way he wanted it. The disparate and initially disorganized elements had been welded into a single coordinated force, liaison was smooth and fast, the mobile commissaries had got hot coffee and cold breakfast to everyone, the ammunition had been issued, and platoon leaders were standing by their walkie-talkies. He'd caught his second wind, and now he felt better. It was an hour after dawn.
A trooper opened the door. "Choppers coming, Colonel."
Mulcahey went outside, blinking in the fresh air. He hadn't realized how smoke-filled the trailer had become through the night. He ordered it ventilated.
Three helicopters were floating toward them through the deep notch between a pair of mountains to the south. The sound of their rotors became audible-whackatawhackatawhackata-then filled his ears, and the helicopters were hovering over the treetops across the road, downdrafts whipping branches about and billowing clouds of dust and stinging pieces of grit.
The men around the trailer put their hands over their faces and turned their backs.
Mulcahey went back in and spoke to the pilots over the radio. He went to the window and watched a helicopter soar off to either flank and disappear around the mountain. The one remaining passed directly overhead and moved 300 yards up the slope in front of the waiting police and guard line.
The radioman waited in his chair.
"All right," Mulcahey said, "move them out."
"Command to all units. Signal green. I repeat. Command to all units.
Signal green."
Around the base of the mountain, like a noose being tightened up a cone, Mulcahey's forces stepped forward and began to climb.
The scent broke over them in heightening waves. The black and the spotted trembled, watching Orph move back and forth across the bluff.
At last he spun, unable to resist the jangling alarms of his cells any longer, and they rushed to meet him with sweeping tails.
Orph leapt over the poles of the scrambled deadfall and thrust his head into the small mouth of the burrow. He roared at the two pups. They cowered back and mewled.
He struck into the woods with the black and the spotted.
They ran with their heads high and tails flowing back, circling to gain the far slope, where there would be the hard bulk of the mountain between them and the men, where they could flee down the side to the valley, and up other mountains, until the air was cleansed of men and their slaughter.
But the scent, which was nearly palpable now, stayed always at their side, edging them higher, and it channeled across their path, and they were unable to plunge through it, it was there, always, in front of them, and grudgingly Orph gave way to its relentlessness and turned higher, to find and top the thickness and come down its other side.
Several times, as the morning passed, a strident thing in the air approached them, and Orph led them to cover and they crouched looking upward even though they could not see and waited until the racket thinned to nothingness, and then they ran again.
By midday, Mulcahey's forces were halfway up. The ring was shrinking and thickening. Soon he'd begin ordering units to drop out at staggered intervals, so he wouldn't lose efficiency to density.
Clearing logistics problems along the way had taxed him and finally begun to drain his reserve strength, but he knew he could keep his mind clear and stay on his feet until sunset, when the circle would be closed. Not one sighting had been reported, and he couldn't prevent an infiltration of unease, but his conviction and confidence remained firm.
In the early afternoon he consented to see the reporters, consented in the service of his own morale.
The sun was falling down meridian. Bauer didn't have his watch. He guessed it to be around three-thirty, four o'clock.
Standing on a high jut of rock and looking down through the rifle's scope at its highest magnification, he could see small figures beating their way slowly upward. He reckoned they'd reach the top in two hours.