'This is more discouraging than selling computers.'
'You really couldn't sell any?'
'I really didn't want to sell any. I didn't care. All my life nothing I've done has quite jelled. I just want to succeed at something, but first I have to decide what I want to succeed at. Now it looks like I might succeed at dying of thirst.'
'We just have to hang in there. Do you know what happened to Burke and Wills?'
'Who?'
'The first white men to cross Australia, south to north. They left most of their party at a creek, pushed on, almost reached the sea, and came back. They were starving. When they got back to the creek their help was gone. Their companions had given up the wait that morning. They died.'
'Geez, there's some luck.' Tucker looked out over the desert. 'You were a history major, right?'
'Military history.'
'And why that? All that killing?'
'I liked the courage. Courage I doubted I had. Like the Spartans.'
'I heard of them. Kick-ass guys, right?'
'A Spartan who came home heroically dead from battle was a joy to his mother, but one who died with a wound on his back was a humiliation. They were awesome. Three hundred of them took on a Persian army of tens of thousands, and almost won. They blocked a pass.'
'Almost?'
'They were betrayed and the Persians got around them. But until then they were invincible. They gave the rest of Greece time to prepare.'
'So what happened to them?'
'They died. It was a sacrifice.'
'And like their moms, you think that's good.'
'No, I think it admirable. What's life for? For them it was to train, and die like heroes, and save Western civilization. They found their why.'
'And for us?'
'We just have to prove we can stick it out, Tucker, until we find our own why. Prove that people still belong to a place, instead of the place belonging to them.'
'I hope I belong here. It's not as easy as I thought.'
'I won't disagree with that.'
'It's not the dying I would mind. I just want to count for something, you know? In today's world there's too many of us, so nobody matters.'
'Out here you matter.'
They sat for a while, the lack of a sign giving them little inducement to look farther. Then something big flicked out of sight.
'Kangaroo!' Tucker breathed.
'No,' said Daniel, suddenly uneasy and sitting straighter. 'It didn't jump like that.' He peered hard at the shadowy brush but couldn't see any movement. 'It was that guy again. Come on!' They trotted to where they'd seen the figure and separated, looking for tracks.
'Uh-oh,' Tucker called. 'Oh boy. You were right.'
Daniel came over. As the eastern sky glowed a brighter pink, he saw what his companion was hypnotized by. It was a human boot print, but not one of their own. The waffle soles of a hiking boot. He looked closer. The tread design was peculiar. The grid looked like a street map.
'We got company,' Tucker said. 'Is that good?'
Daniel glanced around. 'It must be another Outback Adventurer. Why'd he run?'
'Maybe he's a loner.'
'Maybe he knows the way to water.'
They followed the tracks, winding circuitously through the brush. The course seemed deliberately confusing. 'He's trying to lose us,' Daniel said. 'Or get us lost.'
'So where is camp?'
'We'll see the breakfast smoke when Ico and Amaya wake up. He must have seen our fire last night.'
'So why doesn't he just say hello? This is weird.'
As the sun broke the horizon they saw another flicker of movement at a low ridge crest. As soon as they saw it, the stranger was gone.
'Goddamnit.' Tucker bolted ahead, moving agilely for such a big man. He bounded up the lower sand slopes of the ridge and scrabbled toward the steeper rocks.
'Tucker! Wait up!' Daniel trotted after him with his spear.
Tucker was up on the ridge now, hoisting himself through the boulders in hopes of getting a glimpse of the elusive fugitive. He climbed heedless of caution, half leaping from one hold to another. Daniel stopped to map a more prudent route.
Then Tucker screamed, springing backward from the rocks as if he had been fired from a cannon. He made a twisting loop, roaring and flinging his right arm, launching something long and rubbery into space. Then he crashed into the dirt at the base of the rocks and rolled downward, Daniel following through Tucker's cloud of dust.
'Snake!' Tucker shouted, curling into a ball and holding his arm. 'Snake, snake, snake! Oh-my-God-it- hurts!'
'Tucker, stop! Where's the snake?' Daniel pulled at him wildly, fearfully looking for the reptile before realizing that it must have been flung away. The big man no doubt put his hand into a nest in his anxious scramble upward. Now Daniel grabbed his bitten hand and saw fang marks plain in the flesh in back of the thumb, the skin beginning to swell. He paled. Australia had some of the most venomous snakes in the world.
'It hurts so bad,' Tucker moaned. 'I hate snakes!'
'Then you should have gone to the Arctic.' It was a lame attempt at levity. Daniel yanked at the man's shirtsleeve, ripping it from the shoulder. He wound the material around the forearm and pulled tight to make a tourniquet. A pocketknife made a quick, bloody incision and he squeezed the flesh, hoping he was squeezing some venom out. His friend howled as he did it, blood spraying to spatter gray leaves.
'Jesus, what a mess!' How poisonous was it?
Tucker was sweating despite the dawn cool, his chest heaving frantically. Daniel was frightened he was going to die. 'Okay, lay back, I'm going to get some help,' he told his friend with more reassurance than he felt. Their antivenin kit had been lost in the flood. 'You're going to be all right, understand?'
Tucker nodded, pale with fear. 'Where's the snake? I'm afraid of the snake.'
'The snake? You must have put it in orbit. Don't worry about snakes, your thrashing has just about scared the shit out of everything in Australia, with legs or without.'
'That's good.' He gave a grimaced smile. 'Man, I'm hurt from the fall too. What a screw-up mess.'
'I'll be right back, okay? Just wait.'
He groaned. 'Like I'm going to go anywhere.'
Daniel could hear the confused calls of the others and shouted back, jogging off in that direction. They were only a few hundred yards away. He stumbled into camp.
'Where's Tucker?'
'Snakebite,' he gasped.
The other two looked stricken.
'And I was right, someone else is sneaking around here.'
They looked about wildly.
'Look, I think the stranger's gone, but Tucker's in bad shape. We'll have to carry him into camp.'
'We can't carry Tucker!' Ico protested. 'He weighs a ton!'
'I think we have to.'
They hurried back to the weakening man. He was delirious when they got to him, curled again and shaking, looking like a ghost from the coating of dust. 'Holy shit,' Ico breathed. 'He looks like he's dying.'
'What kind of snake?' Amaya asked.
'How do I know? It's not like it matters now.'
