by Robb White
If I can find enough water to fill this can, he thought with rising excitement, I can forget Madec and just head for home. If I can get water he’s not smart enough to stop me.
Feeling satisfaction at the heft of the can he swung it up.
Madec had smashed the bottom out of it, breaking the welded seam so that the piece of metal that had formed the bottom was bent up inside the can.
Ben put it down very gently, as though not to hurt the bottom any more. Then he sat down on it, his feet bleeding again, staining the moonlight on the stones.
Gradually, just sitting there, he began to feel smaller, helpless, a naked child threatened not only by the desert but by a grown man intent on killing him.
There was no way to outwit this man Madec.
What can I do? Ben thought. I can walk on down this hill and across the desert and over to the Jeep where the Coleman lantern is burning and food is cooking and there are gallons of fresh water. I can tell Madec that at the trial I will say anything he wants me to say, leave out anything he wants me to leave out. That we had no conversation about not shooting before he saw the horns. That I, too, was sure his target was one of the bighorn we had just seen there. I can promise him on my honor that I will convince any jury that the death of the old man was an accident, complete and total and unavoidable.
It wouldn’t work. Madec was not the kind of man who could trust another man to keep his word.
Ben leaned back and stared up at the stars. Even they seemed to have withdrawn from him. On the ridge the stars had seemed so close, so friendly. But now, with the moonlight suffusing the black sky, the stars had moved millions and millions of miles away from him. And were not concerned with this threat to his life.
Not wanting to look any more at the hostile stars, he lowered his head and in so doing saw something alien, something that did not belong where it was.
For a moment his eyes couldn’t find the place again, but as he searched where he had been looking he saw it.
Perhaps, Ben thought as he got to his feet, the old man had used this same water can to stand on, for the ledge in the cliff was at least eight feet above the ground and Ben, who was six feet tall, could not reach beyond the base of the ledge and had to take the can to stand on.
On the ledge there was an ordinary little tin box with a bright metal handle. His uncle kept one much like it in the office of the filling station to stow the credit card slips in.
It was locked, and Ben couldn’t force it open with his bare hands.
As he looked around for a rock to break it open, his pleasure at finding the box began to fade. Madec had searched that old man, looking for some identification. He must have found the key to this box in the old man’s pocket or on a string around his neck. Wherever he had it Madec had found it.
Ben set the box on edge and began hammering it with the rock.
There’s going to be nothing inside this box. There’s no use going to all this effort to break it open. Madec would have looked for what that key fitted. He would have found this box and now it would be empty.
Or perhaps Madec had left him a little token inside, something to let Ben know that he had been outwitted again.
The lock at last broke apart and he pried the bent lid open.
Something alive sprang out of the box and Ben threw the thing away from him, leaping back from it as the box clanked against the stone cliff and rattled down to the ground, the thing inside writhing in coils around it.
Ben moved farther away from it, unable to see in the shadow, but guessing that it was some sort of snake Madec had found, a sidewinder or a small diamondback.
Without taking his eyes off the ground between him and the box, he stooped and picked up a stone. Holding it ready, he studied the ground, watching for any movement.
The snake didn’t come out of the shadow so Ben went carefully back toward it, very conscious of his bare feet and ankles.
Nothing moved and there was no sound of rattling or hissing but now he could see the coils of the snake, part of it apparently still in the box.
Ben watched it for a long time, wondering why it did not move again.
At last, not taking his eyes off the snake, he stooped and felt around on the ground until he found some small pebbles.
Straightening, he selected one and tossed it over at the snake. It struck the box with a little tinkling sound.
The snake did not move.
Ben threw the handful of pebbles at it.
Nothing moved.
Going back to where the old man’s campfire had been, he found a charred piece of mesquite about two feet long. Using that as a sort of rake, he drew the box out of the shadow into the full moonlight.
The snake was rubber. Rubber tubing, Ben found when he picked it up. It was attached to a metal framework of some sort which, until he held it up in the moonlight, he couldn’t identify.
The thing was a slingshot but like none he had ever seen before. This one not only had the grip you held in your hand, but also a metal extension with a curved flat piece of aluminum on the end. When he finally figured it out, he found that the extension formed an arm brace.
A formidable machine, the rubber not in bands but stout, round tubes. Drawing the leather cup back, he was surprised by the strength of the thing.
A good shot could probably kill something as big as a jackrabbit, and that was what the old man had probably used it for.
It had a nice, solid feel, and he stood, flexing the rubber tubes, the frame solidly braced in his hand and along his arm.
It’s a weapon, he realized suddenly. Not a gun, not even a bow and arrow, but at least a weapon.
A small, round stone thrown by this thing and hitting a man in the head could do some damage.
Putting the slingshot aside he went back to the box.
There was a little transistor radio in it but he had broken it smashing open the box. There were some spare batteries for the locator and a leather tobacco pouch. In that were a couple of dozen double-O buckshot; big, round lead pellets. Ammo for the slingshot.
In the bottom of the box was a plastic billfold. Ben took it out and went through it. In a pocket with a snap on it was 85 cents in coins; in the money slot there were two one-dollar bills and one twenty-dollar bill, very limp and old.
In another compartment there was a snapshot of a young man and woman sitting on the steps of a porch. The man was wearing a suit and tie. Lower on the steps were two little children, a boy and a girl. There was nothing written on the picture.
There was nothing else in the box.
Ben replaced everything except the slingshot and tobacco pouch and put the box beside the water can where it would be found if anyone ever came here again.
Picking up the slingshot, he fitted it back into his hand and along his arm and tested its power again.
I’ll have to practice, he decided. When I get time I’ll have to learn to use this thing.
But first I’ll have to find water. If I don’t do that soon I won’t need to practice shooting a slingshot. I won’t have time enough.
5
BEN HAD GIVEN UP hope of finding water. He stood on the edge of the cliff and thought bitterly that even the bighorn were against him. The big sheep had left a well-worn trail along the ridge of the mountains which he had been able to follow even in the predawn light, and such a trail should have led to water. Instead, it came to this cliff and ended, sign of bighorn going off in all directions.
It was a trick, Ben thought. Like Madec, they were playing with him; killing him.
Without water there was no contest. All Madec had to do was wait out the few remaining hours.
For the first time Ben felt a deep, almost paralyzing fear. It was not the sharp, mouth-drying fear he’d felt walking away from Madec and expecting the bullet to slam into him. This fear was deep inside him, a huge, dark fear; a foreboding.
And then when the first light of the sun touched the ground at the base of the cliff he saw the ca
tch basin. A small one, a hollowed area in the rock perhaps ten feet across and, he guessed, not more than three or four feet deep. Bighorn tracks were all around it. To get to the water, they had pawed the sand out of the hollow so that it formed a sort of fan around the basin.
As he looked down, the dark fear inside him seemed to shrink a little, to withdraw a little. Not fifty feet from him there was water. Not much, the hollow was small and shallow and the bighorn had been working it, but the sand showed some dampness.
And he had better implements than the bighorn; his hands were more efficient than their hooves and could do a better job. With his hands he could scoop the sand out of the natural bowl which slow erosion had formed in the rock. He would have to squeeze the dampness out of each handful of sand until, when all the sand was scooped out, there would be a little bitter-tasting muddy water collected there from the rains of a month or so ago.
To reach the basin he had a choice of getting down the cliff, which was about twelve feet high, or walking along it until it merged again into the mass of the mountain, descending in an easier slope. Ordinarily this would have been a simple decision. Now he stood for a long time, measuring distances with his eyes and gauging the pain in his body.
Looking over the edge of the vertical cliff, he could see a rubble of sharp, broken stones at the foot of it with fresh sand scattered on them by the bighorn. To hang by his hands and drop the last four or five feet onto those stones was going to hurt and probably add new cuts to his already lacerated feet.
On the other hand it was a long and painful walk along the cliff and down and then back to the basin. A time-consuming walk and, with the sun already above the eastern mountains, he didn’t have much time before the real heat hit him.
From the top of the cliff he could see the Jeep parked at the base of the mountains. Madec had made a neat camp there, putting up the tent and stretching the canvas awning. There was no sign of him, but he could easily be sitting comfortably in the canvas folding chair in the deep shade under the awning, watching him.
Ben got down on his hands and knees and eased his body over the edge of the cliff, slowing the swing downward with his legs and knees rather than with his sore feet.
Even when he was hanging by his hands from the cliff edge, he hesitated, the idea of the impact of his feet on the stones below holding him plastered against the cliff face.
Whatever it was smacked into the cliff with a hard, dry sound. A little cloud of dust, the rock particles big enough to see, leaped out from the flat stone face, hung a second, and then dropped away.
Ben knew that he had been hit even as he let go and dropped. It seemed to him as he fell that he had been hit even before he heard the sound and saw the dust, although he knew that it had not been that way.
Something had hit him high on the cheek, hard enough to push his head to one side but not with the force of a bullet.
Falling, he realized that it had been either a chip of rock from the face of the cliff, broken off by the bullet, or a part of the bullet itself, shattered and ricocheting.
Then, still falling, he heard the sound of the rifle.
Madec was shooting at him with the Hornet, not the .358. In a box in the Jeep he had a hundred rounds for the Hornet. Madec had started with twenty-five rounds for the big gun and had about a dozen left.
At the first contact with the ground, Ben made his legs and knees go limp so that he landed almost collapsed, his hands taking some of the weight.
The pain made him grunt out loud.
Blood running down his chest suddenly made him aware of the pain in his cheek. He felt it lightly with his fingertips but could only tell that there was an open cut about an inch long just below his eye.
There were new cuts on his feet also; one of them near his ankle was bleeding rather badly.
Even squatting there he had a view of the camp below, and now saw that Madec was kneeling in the back of the Jeep, the Hornet lying across the canvas top.
Ben felt a wave of defeat as he pushed himself up with his hands and at last stood straight. He could not tell from here whether the catch basin was in view of the Hornet’s scope, but as he started toward it he had a strange feeling of inevitability. The basin would be in easy range and clear view. Ben just knew that.
This time he heard the bullet go past him. It was so close that he heard not only the sharp little click noise it made in flight but the actual sound on the stone beyond him.
Then the crack of the rifle rolled lazily up to him.
Would Madec deliberately shoot him, he wondered.
Ben decided that he had to find out.
Ignoring the pain in his feet, he leapt forward, running as hard as he could toward the catch basin.
Little noisy explosions on the cliff face went ahead of him all the way, the bullets missing him by inches.
The man was a good shot, leading his target very accurately.
Ben threw himself forward on his stomach. The catch basin was at the bottom of a small depression and when he lay flat down this way perhaps Madec could not see him.
There was silence from the desert as Ben inched forward, using his bare elbows against the stones.
The bullet struck just in front of his face, filling his eyes with sharp, dry dust which smelled of ozone.
Ben pushed on, reaching out to the edge of the basin.
The bullet knocked rocks out from under his fingers.
Madec was now standing on the hood of the Jeep, his arm in the rifle sling.
That was not as good as having the rifle barrel resting across the top of the Jeep. Not as steady. A little gust of wind, a little tremor from a heartbeat and, whether Madec wanted it to or not, the bullet would hit him.
A piece of quartz just in front of his eyes suddenly split open, showering him with bright crystals.
Even if he was not hit directly by a bullet these sharp slivers of rock flying around could take his eyes out.
Ben rolled over on his back and sat up, waving his arms around. Then he pushed himself up to his feet.
Ben made a helpless gesture with his arms and turned away from the basin, walking slowly, picking his way.
As he went back to the top of the range he studied the bighorn sign, hoping to find another trail that would lead him to another water hole but, except for the trail he had followed there was only sign of aimless wanderings.
Near the summit he sat down in the shade on the western side of an outcrop of stone.
He found with his fingers that his face had stopped bleeding. The flesh around the cut was painful now, and he could tell that it was swelling.
His feet were in bad shape, old cuts broken open, new cuts still bleeding.
The slow, small irritating desert flies arrived and swirled around him. They were so stupid, so suicidal, but killing them only seemed to make them increase in number. They wandered in and out of his wounds or sat and preened their wings or even bred, flitting in his blood, and there was very little he could do. They had made a home on him.
The Jeep was moving. To Ben it seemed as though the cloud of light brown dust was pushing the white body of the Jeep forward, bouncing it along on the desert.
About a mile from the mountains where he was, an old eroded butte rose at an angle from a low cut terrace. Ben watched Madec force the Jeep up the sloping wall of the terrace and, once on it, turn the Jeep so that it was facing him. Madec got out and although Ben could not see exactly what he was doing, it appeared that he was slowly scanning the area ahead of him.
Ben had studied that butte and cut terrace in the moonlight, realizing that its location made it a serious threat to anything he might want to do. He had hoped that Madec, without the panorama he had, would not recognize the advantage the terrace would give him.
It depressed Ben to see the Jeep parked there; Madec now back under the shelter of the roof, invisible in the heavy shadow.
From the terrace Madec could see the entire south side of Ben’s little mountain range
, from the eastern to the western end. He could also see the wide stretch of open desert between Ben’s small range and the high ranges in the distance which surrounded this egg-shaped bowl of desert.
From Madec’s vantage point the only area he could not see was to the north of the mountain range.
A man with sufficient water and food, with clothing to protect him from the sun, with good boots on uninjured feet and sunglasses to keep his eyes from burning out, could escape from Madec by simply going down the north side of the mountains and hiking out across the desert, heading due north so as to keep the mountains between him and Madec.
An injured man, almost naked, with no water and no food, could not venture into that northern area. For at least a hundred miles there was nothing but open desert, worn and gently rolling, the surface of the ground littered with small rocks and stones with, here and there, the sprouts of the tenacious and enduring desert plants.
There would be no catch basins of water out there. There were not even any barrel cactus, the water-soaked flesh of which could keep a man alive—provided he could somehow cut through the leather-tough skin of the plant.
To the north was the only route he could take and not be seen by Madec, but as things stood now with almost twenty-four of his forty-eight hours of life already gone, he could not survive ten of those hundred long miles.
Ben realized that Madec must have come to the same conclusion, and so he sat watching through the binoculars, knowing that Ben had only three choices:
To stay where he was, some water near him but made unavailable to him by the Hornet.
To come down from the mountains and start walking across the desert to the east. (Madec would not even have to move the Jeep but could just sit up there on the cut terrace and watch Ben die somewhere out in those empty sixty-five miles.)
Or to come down and walk to the west. (Naked and with no water there was small difference between sixty-five miles one way and thirty-five the other.)
Almost numb to the aggravation of these flies walking around on his face, Ben looked across through the heat-shimmering air at the white Jeep. It seemed poised and ready to go—to follow him, grinding along slowly in four-wheel drive.