Which way now? He couldn’t get this close and then lose Joe again; it was too much to ask.
Uphill. That would be the instinct: uphill, west, back toward the Reservation. Get off Rand’s property, get back to the sanctuary of the White Mountains.
He went up, angling left because that was west. The curve of the ground took him over a little hump and he keened the dripping forest all the way, looking for sign that Joe had passed this way. But the matted floor of needles retained nearly nothing by way of impressions.
The music of water ahead. He crossed the slope and it became a little louder and he kept moving west, drawn by the sound.
The water came down from the higher reaches; it plunged along like a thick dark tongue, probing its way into cracks and gullies, dividing around tree-trunks and cascading through the creases in the land. As Watchman moved toward it the earth became treacherous with slime because all the run off was sliding down beneath his boots to join the rain-swollen stream.
There was a distinct line of twigs and debris that ran along parallel to the torrent two or three feet higher than the surface of the water and this meant the level had dropped significantly in the past several minutes. Half an hour ago this had been a flash flood. Now it was subsiding but there was still power in it, a tremendous volume of water cascading down onto the plains somewhere out in the middle of Rand’s acres.
It meant something important: it meant Joe hadn’t crossed, couldn’t have crossed. Joe was still somewhere on this side of the river.
And he wouldn’t have gone downstream. Not back into Rand property.
He was above here. Either running or standing to fight; but he was above here.
Watchman clawed his way up from the flooding, up to the spine of the razorback, up the slope of the spine through the lodgepole forest. He heard himself wheezing as if he needed oiling: but Joe was in bad shape too, worse shape probably. Watchman pumped the air in and out and ran on up into the rain, not blinking as drops splashed his face.
He wanted to get to Joe before Joe got beyond the trees because here in the confinement of the pines the range of the big rifle was meaningless; out in the open there’d be no way to get near him.
He ran past the edge of the storm and then it wasn’t raining any more; an aftermist hung in the air and the smell was thick and strong, the pine resin carrying on the mist.
A scar of rocks ran across the slope from north to south, clear of trees in a belt a hundred feet wide. It was boulders and loose broken shale and Joe could be staked out behind any rock. Watchman looked both ways but it went on forever, he couldn’t go around it.
He moved along the fringe of the trees. The water pelted down through the rocks to his left; he moved to the right.
And found Joe’s spoor: the heel of Joe’s boot had left its impression in the earth.
It was an indentation that had been made after the rain because its lips weren’t washed in. Within the past fifteen minutes Joe had come this way and the heel-print pointed straight into the rocks, or across them.
He took it slow and listened to the beat of his pulse. Boulder to boulder; lie up, run, lie up again. Here the shale had been disturbed, the pale dry sides of chips had been overturned. Here the groundwater was still seeping into a depression which therefore couldn’t have been made long ago. Here the side of a boulder had been scraped white, perhaps by the inadvertent scratch of a rifle’s steel buttplate or the buckle of a belt.
The trail of little signs led him straight across the belt of rocks and into the stunted timber above it. Watchman discarded the rain-slicker and Rand’s hat and jacket. He glanced at the sky: an hour’s light left, and things were clearing up ahead of him, ribbons of blue beginning to show through as the clouds broke apart. Sundown soon.
The thin high air chilled him through his soaked shirt. He winced now when the trees dislodged moisture onto him; he moved along quickly, watching the ground, watching the forest shadows ahead of him. Joe had passed here, and here, and again here: his track was becoming easier to read because the trees were thinning out and the ground was softer and there was rain to wash away the spoor.
It kept turning from side to side. Once Joe’s knees had made dents in the earth at the crest of a rise where he had paused to survey his own back trail. How long ago? Had he seen Watchman coming?
Angling farther to the right the trail went briefly into thicker scrub pine and then the trees became clumps with wide slopes of mud separating them; he could have followed Joe’s track here on a moonless midnight. He had discarded caution; the trail led uphill at an angle across the slope on an almost steadily exact course, west-northwest; these weren’t the splashed-out prints of a man in panic. Joe was making the best time he could and that meant he now had a specific destination in mind.
Pulse thundered in Watchman’s eyes and breathing was painful. The shirt lay matted against his back and the wet Levi’s rubbed his thighs. The climb got steadily more sheer. At the end he was using his hands as well as his feet and when he reached the top at last he squatted on elbows and knees, just puffing.
The plateau ran west away from him, spotted here and there with growth. Up here the wind blasted the flats constantly and allowed no forests to take root.
The figure was out ahead of him, small, maybe a mile ahead, bobbing along at a steady run. When Watchman’s eyes cleared of pressure he could make out the rifle strapped diagonally across the running man’s back, the easy rise and fall of arms and legs.
Watchman gathered himself and climbed onto the table and put himself into the agony of the run.
6.
A Hereford steer was half-decomposed and the passage of the running man disturbed the buzzards from it. Watchman’s passage eight minutes later disturbed them again and they flapped around, talking, circling the eyeless corpse.
His muscles worked only in spasms. He was running into the setting sun and he missed it when Joe Threepersons stopped.
By the time the angle widened enough for him to see Joe he had gained a quarter of a mile, which put him something like nine hundred yards away.
Joe was down on one knee, sighting through the Bushnell ’scope.
Watchman kept going. Nine hundred yards was a possible shot with that rifle from a benchrest but the wind was gusty and Joe was out of breath and weak and that one-knee position wasn’t the steadiest.
Half the sun burned, perched on top of the horizon. Joe’s silhouette crouched to the right of it, shimmering against the red-banded sky. Watchman began to tack. Eight strides on a northerly quarter, six on a westerly quarter, seven to the right again. He counted them because he wanted a random pattern to the changes and if he didn’t count he’d fall into a regular rhythm; the body always chose symmetry and you had to reject it consciously.
Eight hundred yards. He was angling across the line now to put Joe farther to the right of the sun. At this angle of incidence he could almost see the sun’s movement; another fifty strides and it would be down.
Seven hundred and fifty. He began to zigzag more violently but he didn’t drop the pace. His shoulders were lifted to give him more lung space and sharp pains laced across the collar muscles. He hadn’t much feeling left below the hips. He didn’t credit Joe with a decent shot at more than six hundred yards under Joe’s present circumstances; at that point he’d start ducking from scrub to scrub but in the meantime Joe was giving him a good chance to close up some of the distance and Watchman was taking it.
Seven hundred. Joe fired.
Watchman heard the crack. It was startlingly loud for the distance but the wind was at Joe’s back and carried the sound. It was all Watchman heard of the bullet—there was no nearby sonic bang; either the slug had rammed into the earth ahead of him or it had gone far wide of him. He suspected the latter: Joe had fired a warning shot.
Tack right, tack left. Six hundred and fifty. Joe fired another.