The forest was mostly western hemlock and bigleaf maple with alder saplings growing like weeds in nearly every former open area. It was a far cry from the dry woodlands he had passed through on the east side of the Cascades, where he had been robbed under the sparse ponderosa pines. Here there was a scent of life richer than anything he remembered since before the Three-Year Winter.
Animal sounds had been scant until he stopped moving. But as he kept still, a flow of avian chatter and movement soon began to flow back into this patch of forest. Gray-feathered camp robbers flitted in small groups from spot to spot, playing guerrilla war with lesser jays for the best of the tiny, bug-rich glades. Smaller birds hopped from branch to branch, chirping and foraging.
Birds in this size range had no great love for man, but neither did they go to great lengths to avoid him, if he was quiet.
Then why am I nervous as a cat?
There was a brief snapping sound to his left, near one of the ubiquitous blackberry thickets, about twenty yards away. Gordon whirled, but there, too, there were birds.
Correction. A bird. A mockingbird.
The creature swooped up through the branches and landed in a bundle of twigs Gordon guessed to be its nest. It stood there, like a small lordling, haughty and proud, then it squawked and dove toward the thicket again. As it passed out of sight, there was another tiny rustle, then the mockingbird swooped into view again.
Gordon idly picked at the loam with his bow while loosening the loop on his revolver, trying hard to maintain a frozen expression of nonchalance. He whistled through fear-dry lips as he walked slowly, moving neither toward the thicket nor away from it, but in the direction of a large grand fir.
Something behind that thicket had set off the mockingbird’s nest defense response, and that something was trying hard to ignore the nuisance attacks — to stay silently hidden.
Alerted, Gordon recognized a hunting blind. He sauntered with exaggerated carelessness. But as soon as he passed behind the fir, he drew his revolver and ran into the forest at a sharp angle, crouching, trying to keep the bulk of the tree between himself and the blackberry bramble.
He remained in the tree’s umbra only a moment. Surprise protected him a moment longer. Then the cracking of three loud shots, all of different caliber, diffracted down the lattice of trees. Gordon sprinted to a fallen log at the top of a small rise. Three more bangs pealed out as he dove over the decaying trunk, and hit the ground on the other side to a sharp snapping sound and stabbing pain in his right arm.
He felt a moment’s blind panic as the hand holding his revolver cramped. If he had broken his arm …
Blood soaked the cuff of his U.S. Government Issue tunic. Dread exaggerated the pain until he pulled back his sleeve and saw a long, shallow gash, with slivers of wood hanging from the laceration. It was the bow that had broken, stabbing him as he fell on it.
Gordon threw the fragments aside and scrambled on hands and knees up a narrow gully to the right, keeping low to take advantage of the creekbed and underbrush. Behind him whoops of gleeful chase carried over the tiny hillock.
The following minutes were a blur of whipping branches and sudden zigzags. When he splashed into a narrow rivulet, Gordon whirled, then hurried against the flow.
Hunted men often will run downstream, he remembered, racing upslope, hoping his enemies knew that bit of trivia. He hopped from stone to stone, trying not to dislodge mud into the water. Then he jumped off into the forest again.
There were shouts behind him. Gordon’s own footfalls seemed loud enough to wake sleeping bears. Twice, he caught his breath behind boulders or clumps of foliage, thinking as well as practicing silence.
Finally, the shouts diminished with distance. Gordon sighed as he settled back against a large oak and pulled out his belt-pouch aid kit. The wound would be all right. There was no reason to expect infection from the polished wood of the bow. It hurt like hell but the tear was far from vessels or tendons. He bound it in boiled cloth and simply ignored the pain as he got up and looked around.
To his surprise, he recognized two landmarks at once… the towering, shattered sign of the Oakridge Motel, seen over the treetops, and a cattle grate across a worn asphalt path just to the east.
Gordon moved quickly to the place where he had cached his goods. They were exactly as he had left them. Apparently, the Fates were not so unsubtle as to deal him another blow just yet. He knew they didn’t operate that way. They always let you hope for a while longer, then strung it out before they really let you have it.
Now the stalked turned stalker. Cautiously, Gordon sought out the blackberry blind, with its irate resident mockingbird. As expected, it was empty now. He crept around behind to get the ambushers’ point of view, and sat there for a few minutes as the afternoon waned, looking and thinking.
They had had the drop on him, that was for certain. From this point of view it was hard to see how they had missed when the three men fired on him.
Were they so surprised by his sudden break for it? They must have had semi-automatic weapons, yet he only remembered six shots. Either they were being very stingy with ammo or …
He approached the grand fir across the clearing. Two fresh scars blemished the bark, ten feet up.
Ten feet. They couldn’t be such bad marksmen.
So. It all fit. They had never meant to kill him at all. They had aimed high on purpose, to give him a scare and drive him off. No wonder his pursuers never really came close to catching him during his escape into the forest.
Gordon’s lip curled. Ironically, this made his assailants easier to hate. Unthinking malice he had come to accept, as one must accept foul weather and savage beasts. So many former Americans had become little better than barbarians.
But calculated contempt like this was something he had to take personally. These men had the concept of mercy; still they had robbed, injured, and terrorized him.
He remembered Roger Septien, taunting him from that bone-dry hillside. These bastards were no better at all.
Gordon picked up their trail a hundred yards to the west of the blind. The bootprints were clear and uncovered… almost arrogant in their openness.
He took his time, but he never even considered turning back.
It was approaching dusk before the palisade that surrounded New Oakridge was in sight. An open area that had once been a city park was enclosed by a high, wooden fence.
From within could be heard the lowing of cattle. A horse whinnied. Gordon smelled hay and the rich odors of livestock.
Nearby a still higher pallisade surrounded three blocks of what had once been the southwest corner of Oakridge town. A row of two-story buildings half a block long took up the center of the village. Gordon could see the tops of these over the wall, and a water tower with a crow’s nest atop it. A silhouetted figure stood watch, looking out over the dimming forest.
It looked like a prosperous community, perhaps the best-off he had encountered since leaving Idaho.
Trees had been cut to make a free-fire zone around the village wall, but that was some time ago. Undergrowth half as high as a man had encroached on the cleared field.
Well there can’t be many survivalists in the area, anymore, Gordon thought, or they’d be a whole lot less careless.
Let’s see what the main entrance is like.
He skirted around the open area toward the south side of the village. On hearing voices he drew up cautiously behind a curtain of undergrowth.
A large wooden gate swung open. Two armed men sauntered out, looked around, then waved to someone within. With a shout and a snap of reins, a wagon pulled by two draft horses sallied through then stopped. The driver turned to speak to the two guards.