He emptied the sand out of his moccasins and laced them up and went to inspect the still for damage. A good deal of dust floated on the water but the cup was nearly full. Withered bits of cactus surrounded it. He peeled the raincoat back and laid it out dry-side down and rubbed his hands on its beaded surface until they were dripping; he tried to wash some of the grit off his face.
The dust devil made its weird dancing way out along the plain, leaving a tan haze smeared across the sky. The six-o’clock sun threw its shadow across rocks and bits of brush. The air in his nostrils felt close and heavy; the temperature still hung well above the hundred mark but it would dissipate quickly now. Mackenzie used a clay pot to scoop a few mouthfuls of water out of the cup; he drank slowly and savored it. On his haunches by the rim of the ravine he squinted out along the hills and knew they would find Jay up that way; the question in his mind was what condition they’d find him in.
The jerky was safe because they’d wrapped it; there’d been no need for a buzzard watch on the meat but he was a bit surprised he hadn’t been awakened at least once during the day by the flap of wings as a bird swept down to inspect the motionless humans in their graves. It gave him bleak pause to wonder whether the buzzards might have found in Jay a more likely source of carrion nourishment. He saw no birds in the sky but that signified nothing.
He tightened the drawstring of his breechclout and shoved the two knives under the belt to free his hands. The dust devil was blowing itself out against a hillside. He studied the folds and creases of the land, trying to think as Duggai would think, trying to spot the most likely place from which Duggai might observe them. You couldn’t expect anything as obliging as a telltale wink of sunlight off his telescope; Duggai knew better than that. He wouldn’t show himself inadvertently.
Rule out anything in a line with the sun’s arc; it would have put the sun in Duggai’s eyes, either evening or morning. He’d be to the north or south of them.
The slope along which they’d scattered their trenches lay in a rough northeast-to-southwest line; it wasn’t very steep but it couldn’t be seen from the south or southeast because the crest was above them there. So Duggai was somewhere along the northerly horizon.
Mackenzie looked north; his eye measured an arc from left to right, about 120 degrees to its limits—logic had narrowed the search to one-third of the visible horizon.
To the northwest the flat extended quite a few miles to the foothills of crumpled mountains. Ten or twelve miles of plain. Duggai needed something substantial enough to conceal the pickup truck. Bearing that in mind, Mackenzie ruled out the flats. It fairly well confined Duggai to the range of hills a mile away to the north and northeast—the area where Jay had disappeared. So Jay had walked right toward Duggai: right by him—or right into him.
The low hills were buckled into crazy involuted contours: the range looked like the surface of a brain. Whatever lay beyond it was concealed. Probably another bowl of flat scrub, foothills after that, mountains eventually—it was a guess but it conformed to the pattern of the district.
He kept prodding the image of the camper-pickup in his mind. Duggai would want to conceal it not only from the ground but also from the air. The camper was wide and high-bodied; a substantial bulk. You couldn’t simply camouflage it with brush—it would make an enormous heap out of proportion with the standard of shoulder-high scattered scrub. Anything that big would be spotted easily from the air; it would be conspicuous enough to draw attention even from twenty thousand feet.
How would I hide something that big?
It would require an excessive run of luck to find a spot under a rock overhang big enough to conceal the camper. The hills ran to patches of bare earth separated by strewn fields of giant boulders but there weren’t any dramatic cliffs or overhangs; it wasn’t that sort of terrain. You had to go pretty far east or north to find redrock mesa country. These were tan-gray boulders weathered round and smooth by erosion.
Well you could bury it, he thought, but he couldn’t see Duggai doing that amount of work or rendering the truck that inaccessible. In any case Duggai was undoubtedly living in the truck. The cab was air-conditioned. You couldn’t run it all day long but you could use it for temporary relief during the hottest stretches.
So it needed to be hidden but accessible. Probably in the shade. There were no trees big enough to cast worthwhile shade.
I think I know what I’d do. I’d back it up into a high-sided ravine. Wedge it close to the wall under the shadow of a big rock if I could find it. Sprinkle rocks across the roof. Plant a couple of bushes on the hood and the roof to break up the straight lines of it. Paint it with mud. Make it blend. But keep a clear track straight ahead so I could start the engine and bust right out of there full-speed if I had to.
It suggested the sort of place where Duggai probably had his camp.
It would be in a wash or gully—something big enough to serve as hiding place and road. It would be in the steep boulder-littered part of the range. And it would be near a point of high ground to which Duggai could walk: a point he could use for surveillance.
The range slanted away. The near end lay perhaps three-quarters of a mile distant. It sloped from there toward the north, slanting along a tangent—its sinuous spine ran roughly from northwest to southeast—and the far end where the range petered out into the flats lay due north of Mackenzie about three miles away. There were some high humps of ground up near that terminus but he ruled those out from Duggai’s point of view: too far away. Even with keen eyes and a good glass you couldn’t see much at three miles at night. Duggai would be closer than that so that he could keep close tabs on them.
By that reasoning he ruled out the left-hand half of the range and now he had narrowed Duggai’s probable location to a stretch of hills to the northeast in an arc measuring no more than a mile in width. He ticked off the criteria he’d previously postulated and concluded that there were only two summits in sight that could serve as Duggai’s observation posts. One was a flat-topped ridge with boulders scattered along its western slope like hogans in a Navajo compound. The other had the highest peak in the range; it had the shape of a human foot cut off jaggedly above the ankle—a very steep slope to the right where the heel would be and a much gentler slope to the left trailing off into an uneven tangle of toes. It stood perhaps a hundred feet higher than the hogan-village ridge but it was a quarter of a mile farther away; the ridge appeared to be not more than a mile from Mackenzie.
One of those two. But what if I’m wrong?
The sun dropped; it stood briefly balanced on a mountaintop, a great bloody disc against the pale sky. Mackenzie’s shadow lay far out along the earth like something in an El Greco and at the end of it Shirley’s head appeared, her cropped hair standing out in red tufts. She didn’t see Mackenzie against the sun until he stood up. His shadow covered her. She came down for water.
They ate a meager supper in twilight. Mackenzie built up a new fire. When it was burning he piled logs high on it. Earle said, “I thought we were leaving. What’s the fire for?”
“To give Duggai something to look at. And give Jay something to home on.”
“I don’t understand. If we’re leaving—”
“I think we can intercept him. The only way he’s going to find his way back here is to follow the tracks he made when he left. When he comes in sight of the fire he’ll walk straight toward it. We’ll spot him.”
“Seems to me we could pass each other in the dark.”
Mackenzie shook his head. There were no clouds; there’d be light enough to see movement against the open ground. He said to Shirley, “Take a look at those hills. Just to my right you’ll see a flat-top ridge with big boulders down the left side. Got it?”