He walked back off the jut and sat at the bottom of the thirty-foot spine of bald rock that was the crest of the mountain. The ground around him was stoney and what grass grew there was tough and rasp-edged and sere. In a semicircle, at a distance of a hundred yards or less, was the end of the treeline: twisted, water-starved trees, hideous and awesome in the frantic intensity of their survival.
Bauer sat with the rifle across his knees.
His body was still, but within, he convulsed and sickened under the chaotic turbulence that flung Orph back and forth across the mountain, drawing him ever nearer.
The racketing came upon them when they were clawing up a barren ridge.
Orph scrambled the last few feet and raced into cover, the black at his side.
The spotted dog fell and slid halfway down the ridge. It stopped against a boulder and lunged upward again.
"Contact! Contact!" the radioman shouted.
Mulcahey threw a switch that sent the signal through the general speaker. "-on the top, running now, into-"
"This is Mulcahey," the colonel interrupted. "Identify yourself." "-a stand of… This is Abel Bird, Colonel."
"Give me your coordinates." The pilot did. Mulcahey said, "Where is he now?"
"We're coming up on brush growth, maybe fifteen hundred square feet, he made it in there, he's out of sight now."
Mulcahey paused, then said, "Get right over the top. Go down as low as you can. Hold there. Jockey back and forth if you have to. Beat him out with your downdraft and take him when he breaks. If he won't break, keep your position until the ground forces reach you, and pour some fire in there."
The pilot moved his two-man open-doored craft over the brush. The trooper seat belted next to him carried a 12-gauge riot gun. The downdraft whipped the brush around.
Crouched in the black shadow of a layered rock ledge, Orph and the black watched the helicopter lash the brush around and raise a storm of dust and leaves. Orph pricked his ears and creased his brow. His teeth showed. The black hugged the ground, ears against his skull and eyes squinted.
The spotted dog trembled beneath the branches. Topping the ridge, it hadn't seen Orph and the black and it had run in panic from the swooping machine to a stand of brush and hurled itself within. Above it now was a deafening roar that hurt its ears and shook the organs in its belly. Branches whipped down at it. Twigs and small stones hailed into it. The world was being torn apart. It could endure no more. It sprang to its feet and bolted through the heaving brush and into the open.
"There he goesl" The gunner shouted. "Eleven o'clock!"
The spotted dog was streaking across a field of high grass and wildflowers.
The pilot swung the helicopter out and around in a tight loop and went after it, gaining fast. The gunner leaned out the door, shotgun to his shoulder.
The shadow and the screaming noise of the machine fell over the dog. It couldn't escape. It whirled and snarled up at the huge thing looming over it.
The pilot slowed and tilted the helicopter over on its side to give the gunner a clear shot.
The dog stretched up, teeth snapping.
Whammm!
The blast struck the dog in the hindquarters and slammed it against the earth. The helicopter's rotors flattened a wide circle of grass around the animal. The dog twisted and bit at its wound. It jerked its head back up toward the helicopter, tried to rise, and clashed its teeth on empty air.
Whammm!
The second charge drove it into the ground and nearly decapitated it.
The pilot clapped the gunner on the shoulder. Hovering at thirty feet, he radioed in his kill.
Mulcahey acknowledged. "Did you see the other two?"
"Negative. He was all alone."
"Can you land?"
The pilot studied the ground. "Affirmative."
"Then set down and pick up the carcass. Bring it down to command center.
We'll give the reporters something to photograph."
The pilot brought the helicopter to earth. The gunner unbuckled and jumped out, bent beneath the rotors and unconsciously shielding his head with an arm, he hauled the dog into the bubble and belted up with his feet on the body. The helicopter rose and went skimming down the mountain.
Orph and the black fled.
Orph was in a frenzy. He wanted to turn and charge into the human scent that beat upon him in wave after wave, into the dim shouts, and attack, plunge teeth into meat and destroy. But the primeval wisdom of his blood held him in check and forced him higher yet, away from the vast, many-headed predator whose killing-lust was acrid in his nostrils.
They circled half around the mountain again, stopping to rest with loud pants only minutes at a time, then forcing on again. This high, the mountain was greatly narrowed, and growing smaller.
A helicopter appeared in the distance while the black was collapsed on his side, eyes glassy, and came smoothly toward them. Orph rushed into a tree stand. The black groaned and struggled up. The helicopter was coming too fast for him to reach the trees. He veered and ran down a brushy ravine, squirmed beneath a fallen tree. The helicopter passed by. The black went over on his side with a groan.
He lay a long time, letting the pound of his heart subside, his vision clear. His muscles began to stiffen. He was desperately thirsty. He groaned and dragged himself out of the ravine. He didn't see Orph, he couldn't find Orph's scent.
He traveled until he found water. It was only damp earth, but he dug out a muddy pool and then he drank from it. He heard voices, the crackling of brush. He ran from the pool, his mind empty and his body functioning without his direction.
A guardsman blinked and said, "Christ." He brought his rifle up.
Eighty yards, he estimated, moving at a perfect transverse. Big and black. He'd only seen a flash. Might be a bear, but he didn't think so. Behind leaves now. Nothing to see. He swung the muzzle, matching what he guessed to be the animal's speed.
A gap. Dog! But not time enough to fire.
He flicked his eyes ahead. The dog would have to pass through an open space in ten yards. The guardsman swung his rifle, checked, waited.
The dog appeared. The guardsman tracked, and squeezed off a shot.
The dog was knocked over. The guardsman fired again and missed. The dog was up and running crookedly, then out of sight.
"Dog!" The guardsman shouted. "I hit him! Over here! Hurry!"
Guardsmen converged, crackling through the brush. "Right up there in that opening." The clustered guardsmen split into three groups. One went directly up, the other two climbed the flanks.
They found a blood spoor and went jogging along it. Over rocks and dead falls under a low arch formed by two boulders, past a pool of blood where the animal had fallen and been unable to rise for some moments. The spoor led into a tight growth of scrub laurel. Guardsmen split to either side and took up stands. Three went in to beat the laurel.
The woods were quiet save for the cracking and snapping within the laurel.
Then the black dog burst out in a staggering run, trailing a rope of bluish intestine. Six guardsmen opened fire. Their M-16s spun 5.56-caliber cartridge cases into the air. The black dog fell.
The hail of slugs splintered bones and shattered his jaw, ruptured organs and punched puffs of dust and gouts of blood from his flesh, tore pieces from him for half a minute after he was dead. The guardsmen swarmed up to the corpse.
Shadows were lengthening, the sunlight was a deep orangish gold.
There had been a fusillade of muffled shots a quarter hour ago. The drone of the circling helicopters was growing louder, and to his right Bauer could hear occasional indistinct sounds of men calling to one another, a crackle of static from a communications device. His hands sweated lightly on the rifle.
He rose and walked from the spine of rock to the center of the plateau.