In time he had found something new to justify his existence. A love of the forest. He’d been happy. But now Calvin Duggai and the past had returned to deform the present.

He rubbed his forehead fiercely as if that could expunge his memories. He watched the line of sun-shadow move across the north wall of the pit. Its angle grew flatter but when he lifted his head to scent the air he discerned no reduction yet in its stifling heat. He sagged back into the grave to wait it out.

During the morning at intervals he’d heard Jay and Shirley calling across the island between their trenches but since the descent of the day’s heat he hadn’t heard any more of that.

It took no imagination to chart their symptoms; Mackenzie shared them. The tongue had begun to swell: it cleaved to the flesh of his mouth. His eyes had gone dry and it was painful to open them, even to slits. His lips were cracked. His belly had begun to knot. Soon he suspected there would be cramps. Lying still he could feel the solemn stubborn thud of a pulse in his ears: it made a rhythm against the high-frequency whistle there. His head ached.

All that would get worse. But it would be a while before it became incapacitating.

A buzzard drifted overhead, circling lower for a better look; it cruised in and out of the frame of his vision. Finally it skimmed so low over his trench that he felt the breeze of its passage. He sat up. The blood rushed from his head and he felt consciousness flood away; he tightened the band of his stomach muscles against it and through the gray haze on his vision watched the buzzard flap away, startled by his movement. It planed along the flats until it caught an up-draft; he watched it swing aloft. For the next half hour it hovered in vast lazy circles far overhead. After a while several others joined it.

The color of the sky began to change. He drowsed fitfully, rousing himself at intervals to have a look at the buzzards; if they came low again he’d throw something at them to warn them off. He didn’t want to be awakened by a beak drilling into his eye.

It was too easy to envy the buzzards their freedom. With their cambered wings they could slide effortlessly—a hundred miles in a few hours if they wished—to water or to a safe nest.

It made him think of Calvin Duggai. Somewhere on the surrounding heights Duggai was sure to be camped. Every now and then he’d be taking out his field glasses to find out how his victims were getting along.

He went half asleep and didn’t realize it until a sound startled him and he split his eyes open and saw Jay Painter’s silhouette against the sky foreshortened by perspective.

Jay didn’t speak at once. Mackenzie got up slowly, giving the circulation time to adjust. He stood in the hip-deep hole and scanned the desert. The sun, not nearly so strong now, slanted down from a flat angle near the horizon. Dust devils funneled erratically along the flats some distance away, a yellow wheeling of sand and twigs and leaves.

The buzzards were no longer in the sky. Perhaps Jay’s perambulation had discouraged them.

“What now?” Jay’s voice was painfully hoarse.

Mackenzie picked up the brass knives. “We cut open a cactus.”

11

Jay and Shirley watched his work with dubious expectation, reserving hope. Resentment deformed their features.

The barrel cactus had heavy fishhook spines and he had to cut them out one by one with the clumsy short-bladed tool. He heard Jay’s mutter: “Come on, come on,” and ignored it. It would have been faster to smash the cactus with a rock but that would have wasted half its precious juice. He denuded a collar band around the plant and sawed through it and lifted the lid neatly off the cactus. Then he dug inside with his fingers, scooping out pulp.

He turned, proffering. Shirley took the handful of moist dark substance from him like an addict snatching an overdue fix.

Mackenzie could have let them dig for themselves but by bestowing water upon them with his hands he maintained his fragile leadership. He withheld his thirst; he drank last—because anarchy would kill them faster than anything else. The one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind: fuehrer of the dung heap.

Jay shoveled the stuff out of his cupped hands: lips peeled back in a simian grimace, jaws working.

“God,” Shirley croaked. “It’s horrible.”

“It’s wet.” Mackenzie cut out a section of pulp and sucked on it. His throat and tongue absorbed the bitter liquid greedily. The spasmodic constrictions of his swallowings were ferocious and painful. And all for a few drops of moisture the taste of which was as tart as the smell of new-mown grass.

He scooped out more of the plant’s innards. “Take it to Earle.” Jay held his hands out and looked at it greedily: a dark soggy fibrous substance as unappetizing as compost. Mackenzie swung away.

Jay spat something out. “Where you going?” His suspicion had the querulousness of incipient panic.

“Splints. Go on, Jay.”

Only the manzanita had any approximation of solid wood—gnarled, stunted, its bark the color of ripe cherries. He found a suitable branch and put his entire weight on it to split it loose from the twisted trunk; the limb broke but the bark refused to let go: it resisted him with ropy tenacity. He twisted and pulled and cursed, dragged the branch all the way around the tree, finally broke it free, taking a long curling strap of bark with it. He tried to slice this off with the cartridge knife but the metal was neither strong nor sharp enough; it hardly scored the bark. Finally he held it down under the ball of his foot and pulled up, tearing off most of the length of the limb. He stripped the twigs off one by one until he had a pole a few feet long.

It took half an hour’s hobbling about the slope before he found and stripped four branches of suitable size: two on each side of the leg ought to be sufficient. He carried them back toward what he had begun to think of as the cemetery.

The sun fell; the plain filled with twilight.

The gravity of Shirley’s glance disturbed him. He had the feeling Jay had told her he meant to use her hair to bind Earle’s splints and he had a fair idea of the tone and choice of words Jay must have used.

They sat on the rim above Earle. He looked up at them, his mouth pinched into a small line. When Mackenzie came up he was assaulted by the stink of urine.

Earle said, “Why don’t you just fill the hole in. With me in it.”

“You’ll make it, Earle.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve made my peace with God.”

Mackenzie glanced at Jay. They got down in the hole and Mackenzie laid the poles out beside Earle. “First we’ll splint you up. Then we’ll get you out of here.”

“I’m cold.”

“It’s warmer topside. The sun’s had a chance at the ground.”

“That won’t last. Going to be a cold night.”

“We made it through last night, didn’t we?”

Earle licked a shred of cactus pulp off his chapped lower lip. “You’re the doctors. I’m not a doctor, you know.”

“That’s all right. There’s enough doctors here.”

“Well if you insist on trying to make repairs I don’t mind. Get on with it.”

Mackenzie looked up. Shirley sat crosslegged at the rim, the small tight breasts shadowing her rib cage. Her shoulders were beet-red. Bits of earth clung to her skin.

“Jay told you what we’re going to do?”

“I’d just about decided to cut off all my hair anyway. A week ago.” She lied listlessly.

Mackenzie tested the knives and selected one. “I honed this one as sharp as I could.” He offered it to Jay. “You want to do it?”

“No. But I suppose we’ve got to.”

“Nothing else we can use out here. The plants are too brittle.”

Shirley said, “For God’s sake stop talking about it. Do it.”