“You might have to kill a man,” I said angrily. “How would you like that?”
“I could do it if I had to,” he said, but he looked doubtful. “Anyway, maybe they’re just trailing us out of curiosity. Probably they just want to go through our garbage for some worn-out clothes or tools or something. Or maybe they’re looking for a chance to steal our gear while we’re away from camp, fishing or hunting.”
“Look,” I said, “you don’t know this country, and I don’t know it that well either. I haven’t been up this far in more than twelve years—since before you were born. Conditions change. These people have always been quick to kill—an ambush is safer than sneaking into a camp. They want our guns and our knives, our axes, our fishhooks and frying pans, our belt buckles and our boots. And even if we gave them all of those things without a fight, they’d probably still kill us just to see us die. For entertainment. They haven’t got any television up here.”
We both laughed at that, and then there was a clattering sound up ahead. It came from a brushy draw leading off the vervex run. I drew the Luger and flicked up the safety; my son checked the seating of the bolt on his crossbow. We spread out and walked quietly up into the mouth of the draw. The wind was downhill, strong and gusty in our faces. The clattering continued from time to time, and as we came closer we could hear a throaty grunting sound through the wind, and the clatter of dwarf birch. I caught a whiff of something rank, something warm and musty and sour.
“There’s your bear,” I whispered as we came together again behind a mossy boulder.
The bear was ripping apart a rockpile, searching for marmots. It was a full-grown gray bear, easily ten feet long from its scoopfaced snout to its burr-clotted tail. It slapped the rocks around as if they were Styrofoam, and it chortled at its work with a kind of rumbling abandon. Its frayed claws, as brown as rusty sabers, rattled as they worked the rock.
“How is he for size?” my son asked.
“Not a record trophy,” I said, “but perfectly respectable.”
“What do you make the range?”
“About two hundred yards. You’ll have to work in a lot closer.”
We studied the draw ahead of us. A lip of fractured granite, from which our boulder had splintered, angled to the left up the draw, terminating in a pocket grown with birch. Beyond that, a sheer granite face mottled with lichens. But the birch pocket was still a good fifty yards from the bear—too far to risk a shot with the crossbow. To the right, across a game trail that originated somewhere up the draw, nothing but dense brush and a few scattered boulders. Assuming that we could cross the trail without the bear catching sound, sight, or scent of us (the wind was eddying, and it would be only minutes before our scent pool spread enough to grant him that warning), we would still have a full fifty yards and ten minutes (at best) of stalking through heavy, noisy brush before my son would be within range.
“The left,” my son whispered. “It has to be the left.”
“What do you do when you get there?”
“Stand up and charge him. Run up as close as I can and put a bolt through his noggin. Or up his ass if he takes off, which he probably will. The old Texas brain shot—right up the dirt track.”
“What if he comes at you rather than run?”
“You’ve got the Luger.”
We slipped out of our backpacks and began the stalk on our bellies under cover of the granite lip, up the left side of the draw. There was no need to raise our heads to check the bear’s actions or position: the grunts and clattering kept us informed. When we reached the birch pocket and caught sight of the bear, he had his head well down into the marmot den. My son smiled quickly and rose, checked the crossbow again, and pussyfooted toward the bear. I followed, angling to his right to keep a clear lane of fire.
When we were within ten yards of the bear, my son raised the crossbow and sighted. The bear was starting to back out of the hole, its chest and shoulders red with the raw dirt of its diggings. Before the huge head could emerge, the crossbow snapped—a single, crisp splat of released tension—and the bolt disappeared behind the bear’s shoulder.
The bear convulsed—a huge quaking thrust that bent its back like that of a cat stretching, and a muffled whuff sent red dust spewing from the marmot hole. Then the bear’s head exploded from the hole, its eyes blinking away the dirt. It looked like a great pig rising from the mud, shaking the red into a halo. One great, red paw swiped at the wound and the bear moaned, then galloped lumpily up the draw. I followed it out of sight with the barrel of the Luger.
“Nice shot,” I told my son.
“Oh, Christ, were we lucky!” he said, grinning. “To have him head down like that, and get in that close! I’m sure I hit him in the heart, and if not, at least in the lungs. It hadda be a heart shot! How long will it take him to die?”
‘We’ll wait a few minutes and follow him up,” I said. “I think you got him dead to rights.”
Farther up the draw, we found lung blood—bright in the lemon light, almost incandescent, great ropes of it on the heather—and at the top of the draw, the bear lay dead against the lichens, its claws hooked over a boulder. The eyes were still wet and bright, the fangs blunt and yellow. We sat a few minutes more, watching, and then poked the bear with a stick. It was finished.
When we dressed it out, we found the crossbow bolt embedded in a far rib. It had pierced both lungs and the heart. We took care with the hide, then wrapped the backstraps and the hams in that warm, limp, slippery blanket and dragged the meat down to our boulder.
Our packs were gone. A few yards from the boulder, a heap of horse manure steamed in the chilly air.
22
IT SNOWED THAT NIGHT, but the bear kept us alive. We slept under its heavy hide—crinkly with dried blood, but still retaining some of the warmth of the living creature. A fire would be too dangerous, so we ate raw bear meat seasoned with gunpowder. We drank our water cold from a rivulet in the gully where we slept. In the morning, our backs against the wet, black walls and our mouths puckered with the taste of smokeless, we tallied our possessions. The Luger and four magazines of 9mm Remington Soft Points. The tiny Svea gas stove, three-quarters full of fuel. The crossbow and three quarrels. A half dozen bronze arrowheads. Two Puma belt knives and two Swiss Army pocketknives. A packet of Mustad fishhooks, ranging in size from 2,’ o to No. 14. A nail clipper. Approximately two hundred yards of eight-pound Trilene monofilament fishing line. Six Band-Aid Sheerstrips. A packet of Kleenex (for toilet paper). A six-by- six-foot square of oilskin tarpaulin. Two match safes holding a total of eighty-three Bluetip phosphorus matches, sometimes known as Lucifers. The clothes on our backs. Outrage.
“Enough fire for nearly three months, if we play it conservatively,” I said.
“One fire a day?”
“Conservatively.”
“It’s a good thing we killed the bear. How long will the meat last?”
“If we can get down into good cover tonight and smoke it, we can get back home.”
“We’re going home?”
“Did you figure on sticking around? On short rations?”
“Well, I’d like to get some of our stuff back from those crooks. The guns for example, and my fly rod—you only bought it for me last April when the trout season opened. And my Bedford dump truck. I’ve had that truck since I was a kid.”
I knew he liked to keep the toy truck under the head of his sleeping bag at night, the way the Japanese use wooden blocks under their mats, or for some more basic supportive purpose.
“It’ll be hard to track them,” I said. “They’re moving fast, on horseback. They’re better armed than we are, now that they have our gear. If we do catch up with them, we’ll have to ambush them, and even at that they may kill us.”
“I’d really like to get that truck back.”
“Look,” I said, “we ought to figure that we’re damned lucky they didn’t just kill us out of hand and then steal our gear. We ought to leave well enough alone.
If we cut out of here right now, we’ll be home in two weeks, none the worse for wear. We can build a raft and catch enough fish . . .”
“How many days could we track them before we’d use up our reserve?” he asked. I could see that the truck was important to him; he was angry at the thieves.
“Maybe three days,” I said, “depending on the weather and the direction they take. If they cut away from the river, we’re screwed. We can’t live off the land out there”—I gestured, a bit melodramatically, toward the brazen hills to the east and west. “And if I were them, I’d cut away from the river right now.”
“We ought to track them anyway, just to make sure.” He looked up the river to the northwest. Mandiggers were circling in the mist, fluting mournfully in the weak light. The river wound ahead in grand, erratic swoops, up into the crooked heights of the Altyn Tagh.
We tracked them for three days. The added weight of our possessions, along with melting snow, which softened the trail, made their horses’ hoofprints much easier to spot. The thieves kept to the river, apparently trusting to their speed and our fear as a safety factor. On the second day, my son shot a mandigger out of a tree along the bank. It was a fair-sized representative of its species—fully twelve feet from nose to tail, with a wingspread even greater. The crossbow bolt had taken it through the chest, clipping the spine, and the creature fell flapping but voiceless, its red eyes flickering out of focus. It lay in the mud of the riverbank, bearded and trembling, clashing its triple rows of teeth like a gutted shark.
“I didn’t realize they looked so much like us,” said my son, awed by his shot. The mandigger’s face was quite human: a turned-up nose; a supple, sensitive mouth; tears in its large red eyes.
“The locals claim that they’re man-eaters,” I told him, “but Myerson couldn’t find any proof of it. He claims that they’re the Manticora of legend. I think they probably eat human corpses, and they may take a dying man or a baby now and then, but basically they’re harmless. They aren’t worth the ammo for eating, though. They have a lot of bones floating free along the spine—too much trouble spitting them out. My grandfather said that if you soaked the backstraps in milk after filleting them and then fried them fast in boiling fat, the bones dissolved, but I never tried it.”
“Well, I’ll dress him out anyway. We need the meat.” My son flopped the mandigger on its back and cut up from the anus to the sternum, then worked his knife into the windpipe and cut it free from the inside. He slashed the fascia along the lung cavity and worked the intestines loose.
“Should I keep the liver?”
“Probably not. It may be poisonous.”
He dumped the mandigger on its side, and the innards spilled out onto the dwarf shrubbery. Steam and a sweet odor rose in the cold air. We hacked through the wing bones with our belt knives and then peeled off the thin, scabby hide.
“Let’s get rid of the head,” my son said. “It’s not only heavy, it’s scary.”
Dressed out and quartered, the mandigger came to about sixty pounds apiece. We finally peeled off the backstraps and kept one haunch, reducing our load by half. As we walked away from the heap of guts and hide and crumpled wings, other mandiggers were already gathering in the sky overhead. Their pipy voices sounded contrapuntal, Bach-like against the rumble of the nearby river. The dead mandigger’s eyes glared at us from beneath the pile of offal, its own dismembered body.
23
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, it began to rain. We walked awhile through the drizzle, looking for a ridge that might protect us against the weather. The sky to the northwest was growing darker through the trees, the wind peeling the skin of the sky from gray to gunmetal to black, rimmed around with that dirty white that threatens lightning. We saw the first flashes just as we reached a likely outcropping—ancient sediments of red sandstone, hollowed by oceans long ago sucked up by the sky.
The little gas stove hissed at the wind, and our tea was hotter than the wind was cold; the first pellets of sleet bounced against the brazen belly of the stove like spent bird shot. It was at this moment that we once again understood the delight of wool. Small balls of sleet caught in the wool of my son’s sweater, grew in the kinky fibers, melted and evaporated in the heat of the pile. Sleet clotted like burrs in my eyebrows; my woolcapped forehead melted it into sour rivulets.
The water running into my eyes, each bead frozen in the glare of the distant lightning, each runnel pronounced aloud like a prayer to the Belly-god Thunder, washed away the dirt of the day’s hike.
We rigged the bearskin against the sleet and fried two small trout over the stove. They tasted as spicy as the weather. Then we rolled into the fur and sipped rose-hip tea while the sleet rattled off the rocks overhead and shivered the willows across the Hassayampa. We dozed off, finally, warm . . .
Just before dawn, I awoke to an unaccustomed silence. The sleet had moved on beyond us. A waning moon, slim and callipygous, danced its light on the crusted ground. The trees were caked with sleet and frozen rain, sheaths of silver in the moonlight. Then the first blue line of approaching sunlight eased up over the hills to the east, and the silver turned to steel, and then to copper, finally to gold. I watched the light snow through dozing eyes, listening at the same time to the rising moan and crackle of icy branches as the dawn breeze pushed its way into the willows along the river. . . .
Maybe Ratnose was down there in the bush. Maybe it wasn’t just the wind. Maybe he was walking in time with the wind and the rising sun, shaking the branches and peeling the rotten sleet from the razor-sharp blades of the frozen bear grass. Dragging a thumbnail across the shadowed boulders. The hair began to rise on the nape of my neck; my eyes strained at the shadows. I slid the Luger out of its holster and lay there under the tent of bearskin, whiffing the sour hot stink of my fear. I aimed the pistol into the willows, but there was no target, only sound and light. How easy, I thought, to kill in this mood—but what? I tensed the trigger, brought its sear up to the cracking point, fanning the tall blade of the sight through the black-and-gold web- work of willows, searching for flesh, any flesh. The sleet melted from the branches and fell in clumsy, sibilant splatters. The moon grinned sideways, going down. Madmen, all of us.
Something grumbled in the last of the shadows and splashed noisily across the ford immediately below our campsite. It might have been a moose, or it might have been Ratnose. I couldn’t be sure, so I never took the shot.
24
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, we began to close on the thieves. By now I could distinguish clearly among the three horses, by the depths of their hoofprints: one horse carried all the gear and walked in short, dainty, probably sore-footed steps; another horse carried a light, human load but stayed just ahead of the packhorse, its rider probably holding the lead line; the third horse carried a slightly heavier human load and ranged out from the bunch every few hundred yards, probably so that its rider could scout the country ahead. Study of the thieves’ campsites revealed further probabilities: One of the two thieves pissed standing up, the other squatting; ergo one was a man, one a woman, or else one was a man and the other a small Mao Mao, male or female. Judging by the heavy molar action on a frayed dragon wing we found among the garbage at one campsite, the smaller of the thieves had no front teeth; alternatively, his or her front teeth had been filed down to points, a dental fashion favored by some of the Mao Mao, especially the witchmen.
“What’s a witchman?” my son asked as we studied the wing bone.
“It’s a shaman—a sham-man,” I said. “A man who has been turned into a witch and who does all the magic for the Mao Mao. They take a young kid who seems to have a bent for mystical stuff—a kid who swoons a lot, and goes off into transports when he sees a particularly beautiful sunset or a particularly scary cloud formation. They stone him on dragon’s-tooth, ground up with dried bat blood and the singed beard of a female mandigger. They mix that with peyote pollen, catfish whiskers, the powdered cunt hair of a recently deceased shaman, and then they add j
ust a drop of venom from the spines of a stonefish. They boil all of that in the fat from the thighs of a young girl, sacrificed for the occasion. Then they roll a pill out of the mess as big as a golf ball. The kid drinks it down in a gourdful of mother’s milk spiked with brandy, if they have any, or else with white lightning.”
“What happens then?”
“The kid falls into a stupor. In fact, he’s damn lucky if he ever wakes up—or unlucky, when you consider what they do to him next.”
“Like what?”
“They do a sex-change operation on him. The other Mao Mao are chanting madly through all of this, quotations from the Chairman mixed up with phrases from local folk songs—’Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty . . .’ Like that. Then they break out the straight razors. They file the kid’s teeth down to points with an old iron file, like we use to sharpen our crossbow bolts with. When the kid wakes up a few days later, he has to eat his own remains—what they cut off of him during the operation. Then everyone in the camp balls him to break in his new cunt. Even the women ball him. They use dildoes cut from old mop handles.”
“And then?”
“Well, then he’s a witchman, a sham-man, a he-she. He learns everything they can teach him about magic, what yarbs to pick, how to mix them with whatever else they use. Chants and curses and necromantic incantations. He has power now, but he must always remain submissive as an individual, use his power only for the group, and be used by the group whenever it needs him.”
“Let’s go kill the bastards.”
“Why?”
“They stole my dump truck.”
We caught up to the thieves with an hour of light left in the sky—a dilute light, like watered-down blood from the rainy sandstone cliffs along this stretch of the Hassayampa. We slid up on our bellies over a rise in the standstone, grit in our teeth, and saw the horses drinking daintily at the edge of the stream. Out in the middle, the Hassayampa was boiling, pellucid and pelagic, a great chain of rolling ocean fish—whales perhaps, or broadbill swordfish—rumbling over its groaning load of rocks. “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea!” as Yeats put it.
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