Savaged by hunger they consumed the three pounds or so of meat on the chuckwalla in the course of an hour, cooking it spitted over the fire a bite at a time.

Mackenzie poked around in the fire with a stick, found the burnt rabbit bones, scraped them out into a maguey leaf. “We eat these bone ashes. Dysentery preventive.”

“All that rabbit meat—it’ll spoil, won’t it?”

“We’ll hang it dry.”

“Don’t you need salt to cure meat?”

“The sun does the job.”

They stripped the spines off an arm of Senita and quenched their thirsts on its pulp.

Earle ruminated on a mouthful of chuckwalla. “Tastes like curried chicken. You set a good table, Sam.”

He felt mildly pleased with himself.

His belly churned: unaccustomed food, unaccustomed fullness after long hunger. The satisfaction of simple bodily needs made room for an awareness of other hurts and it was his feet that concerned him most. With the edge of one of the splintered quartz fire-rocks he scraped the rabbit hides as clean as he could; then while they were still pliably soft he sliced narrow strips off them lengthwise to use for lacings later on. He showed Shirley and Jay how to hang the meat where the sun would dry it; he was back at work on the skins while they did that job and gathered more firewood; then he heard again the twang of a tripped snare, the angered lungings of something in the brush, and he lurched out of the fire’s circle to retrieve the catch.

Another jackrabbit: a small one no more than a few months old. It told him he’d made a mistake and he set all the snares a few inches higher so that the loops hung nine or ten inches above the ground; possibly he’d missed catching several full-grown jacks because his snares had been set too low.

Before he skinned out the new catch he had to sharpen the knives again. The brass alloy took a fairly good edge but wouldn’t hold it long. He’d bent one of them doing something; he didn’t straighten it—a bent knife was preferable to a weak one.

Tidbits of memory kept drawing him along the path of knowledge like crumbs scattered before a pecking bird: he visualized his father’s moccasin-work and the beaded rabbit-skin jackets they’d made forty years ago and this time he remembered to remove the hare’s sinews intact and to clean out the insides of the ears without slitting them open; once the flesh was removed it was possible to turn them inside out, scrape them clean, hang them for a sun cure. It was the most rudimentary curing system and would leave them with unsatisfactorily hard leathers but these would be far better than bare-ass nakedness—it was a matter of protection, not prudery. If they could keep the snares working for a few more nights they’d accumulate enough skins for essential clothing. It would be stiff and it would stink but if they were to have a chance of outwitting Duggai they needed to have mobility and that meant shoes, hats to keep the glare off, clothes to protect their privates from injury and their skins from the sun: there were things you simply couldn’t do at night, you had to be able to move about in daylight more than they’d done today—otherwise this might take months and none of them was going to survive that long on rabbit meat and cactus: if nothing else they’d die on account of the simple lack of salt. You could eat saltbush until you were stuffed and it would do about as much good as a pinch of table salt.

If I were alone out here, he thought, I’d make it. Duggai and all, I’d make it.

But he wasn’t alone and Jay and Shirley were greenhorns; and the broken leg anchored all of them. Of course Duggai had broken Earle’s leg deliberately with this in mind: Earle had given him the excuse but it might just as easily have been any of them. Duggai wasn’t the sort of avenger who left anything to chance.

Thinking of Duggai as an avenger—it was a turn of phrase that occurred to him now for the first time—made him recall Duggai’s parting speech to them: it had been just over twenty-four hours ago. Now maybe you find out how much of a crime it is. Maybe you find out how crazy you got to be to want to live. I tell you one thing—whatever happens to you out here ain’t half as bad as what they do to a man in them hospitals.

Ordinarily if a man nursed the dream of vengeance on account of his capture and imprisonment he vented the dream against policemen or prosecutors or witnesses who identified him as guilty. Duggai hadn’t gone after any of those. His resentment was aimed at the practitioners who had searched around inside him and concluded that he was not responsible for his actions. By making that statement they diminished him. And they put him away in a place that was to a man like Duggai infinitely less tolerable than a penitentiary. In prison the rule was brutality and Duggai could have lived with that—it would have been a finite sentence, he’d have been able to look forward to parole. For a misfit like Duggai a commitment to the state mental hospital must have looked like a one-way ticket and it wasn’t the kind of place where a man could sustain himself on immediate physical hate: the attendants and doctors would treat him with professional competence rather than contemptuous ruthlessness. There was no object in sight on which to focus rage; therefore it focused on something more distant but less elusive—the four psychiatric witnesses who’d sent him to the place.

But there was more than that. There was the heritage of witchcraft and shamanism.

Mackenzie had felt the glancing edges of it in his own childhood. Now and then there was a witch-hunt—sometimes when someone got sick, sometimes when someone ran amuck. Either way it was the same: sick or drunk he’d been witched; people had a duty to find out who was responsible and deal with the witch. There was only one way and that was to hire a shaman whose powers were stronger than those of the witch. Then you had to bring the witch—by force if necessary—into the presence of the shaman and the shaman would make medicine to drive the spirit out of the witch. They didn’t advertise it but the Navajo were firm believers in exorcism. In a good many cases it wasn’t all that much different from psychiatry. The jargon differed but the objective was the same and the methods were not totally dissimilar.

It was something Grandfather Mackenzie had always tried to combat: his rigid Presbyterian mentality had loathed superstition and psychiatry alike—“They don’t call them headshrinkers for nothing.”

Duggai had been witched. He could escape from the hospital and he might break to freedom—there was always Mexico—but he would remain a doomed man unless he could exorcise the demons from inside him. You didn’t get rid of demons by simply killing the witches who had injected them into you; you had to crush the witches’ power. Only when their power was squashed could you gather enough strength to expel the demons.

That was why Duggai hadn’t simply killed them and dumped the bodies. And it was why Duggai was still out there. Otherwise he’d be deep into Mexico by now. But he was a Navajo and he’d been witched and he had to take care of that first. He had no medicine of his own. He had to rely on nature’s medicine: the gods of the desert: they would provide his justice.

Duggai would not interfere with their attempts to survive but he would wait out there and he would watch and he would terrorize them. If they lived and tried to get past Duggai then he would have to kill them for simple practical reasons—revenge and the prolongation of his own freedom—but if it came to that Duggai would kill them without pleasure because he would know that their power was too strong for him and therefore his demons were still intact; he would know he was doomed.

If Duggai ended up having to kill them with bullets he wouldn’t live long after that. He’d try to shoot up a town or he’d walk into a police station and start a battle. Driven by the demons he’d be forced to precipitate his own destruction.