It worked on their nerves. For a while no one spoke again. Shirley’s eyes had a vacant glaze. Jay picked sunburnt skin shreds from his nose. Earle’s breath began to raise frightened puffs of dust from the ground-like a fallen horse. Shirley put a hand to his forehead to gauge Earle’s fever and Earle uttered a thin startled little cry. His eyes opened to the fire: he looked over his shoulder into the darkness and winced from it like a galley slave.
Shirley said, “Duggai did that on purpose. To remind us he’s there.”
At least it confirmed Duggai’s presence; it was no longer a paranoid supposition.
Mackenzie saw something wink from the darkness-an animal attracted by the fire. Its motionless eyes gleamed. Mackenzie’s hand gripped the knife. There was nothing out here big enough to attack a man-nothing but Duggai-but Mackenzie’s hand grew slippery on the knife.
But he knew Duggai this well: Duggai couldn’t kill them yet. There were reasons that would make no sense to anyone but a Navajo; but they were binding. Duggai would not attack-not yet.
Shirley ventured toward the fire; she began to hum a tune-her voice small but true. Perhaps she wasn’t aware she was doing it. She used to do that, he remembered-she used to sing to herself when there was trouble she couldn’t handle.
Jay watched, his chin tucked in with disapproval.
Mackenzie watched the disembodied glowing eyes out on the edge of the night. His father had taken such things as signs. His father’s spirits and demons had not been the sort of gods Mackenzie had ever understood very well; they were vain, whimsical, crafty, corrupt, easily bored and frequently inconsistent. But his father had been comfortable with them.
Earle startled him-not by speaking but by what he said, because it lapped across the drift of Mackenzie’s thoughts:
“Are you religious, any of you?”
None of them answered right away and Earle turned his plea on Shirley: “Are you?”
“I was,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“We’re still alive, aren’t we? God’s looking after us.” Jay snorted audibly.
“Jay, you may not believe in God but He believes in you. Yesterday I heard you praying. The Lord’s Prayer.”
“An aberration.”
“You’ve got no faith?”
“Faith? Crap. Faith is accepting something without evidence. No. What good’s that? You can’t eat faith. You can’t drink it.”
“God is keeping us alive. I don’t know why.”
“If you want to talk let’s talk about something else.”
“There’s nothing else to talk about.”
“Then shut up.”
Shirley said, “Jay,” with quiet reproach. Mackenzie caught a sour whiff of Jay’s sweat.
Jay said, “I’ve always resented living in a society that requires me to profess a belief in a nonexistent God in whose name people can justify any heinous crime they choose to commit. Now we’re out here away from all that-a whisker away from dying and this idiot’s trying to lay that crap on me. It’s something I damn well don’t need right now.”
Earle withered a little.
Mackenzie discovered a second animal out along another vector from the fire-he saw the pink reflections of its eyes.
Shirley had seen them; now Jay turned to watch.
A kit fox came in plain sight and sat fascinated by the fire twenty yards from them.
Opposite the fox the pink-eyed one moved into view more cautiously, materializing tentatively: an antelope jackrabbit, huge ears erect, nose twitching. It sat up like a kangaroo and emitted a series of faint guttural barks. Its big feet drummed a fast tattoo: Mackenzie could feel the vibration.
It was talking: inviting others to come see the fire. Mackenzie began to smile.
“There are answers for everything.” Jay kept his voice right down but it was harsh. “It happens we have very few of them but that’s no reason to be an abject fool about it.”
The fox sat still, no bigger than a squirrel, far too small to threaten the jackrabbit: the herbivore and the carnivore sat in the same circle of light and studied the mystery of fire.
Jay’s monotone droned fitfully. “The thing that boggles the mind is how every religious fanaticism has to be so hostile to all the other fanaticisms. So you have endless atrocities committed by one fanaticism against another. Even if you were stupid enough to concede that one of them might be true-out of all those thousands of idiotic faiths not more than one could possibly be true. So all the others are false.”
Shirley looked away as if Jay’s maunderings embarrassed her: they seemed to reveal too much about Jay. He was reverting to banalities: attacking Earle, who was the most defenseless of them-and Mackenzie, when he felt a wave of anger against Earle, realized they were like a flock of mindless chickens who would suspend their pecking order just to hammer a sick member of the flock to death.
Mackenzie’s square brick of a hand lifted against the fire and splayed, drawing their attention. “Quiet down, Jay.”
The big jack thumped several times, patterns of sound. Something swept past over their heads-owl or bat. For a while it was a studied tableau: four naked humans, the fire; fox and hare watching from the edge of the circle of firelight.
There was bile in Mackenzie’s throat; his stomach knotted with the hot sour pain of acute hunger. He watched the flux and flow of Jay’s expressions-Jay’s grip on reason was failing; he was swaying with the conflicting pressures of raw feelings. It was inevitable and Mackenzie felt the same temptations in himself: the physical reduction to elemental atavism demanded a parallel reduction in emotional behavior but it was something they had to fight because if they gave in to it they were lost.
Jay laughed dispiritedly. “What difference does it make. I’m sorry, Earle-I’m taking it all out on you. Forgive me.”
“I don’t mind, Jay. It’s circumstantial influence.”
“What?”
“The Pavlov experiments.” Earle’s eyes were shut; his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “Present an animal with an insoluble problem-put a rat in a maze that’s got no exit. He’ll hallucinate eventually. Isn’t that what Duggai’s doing to us?”
“How the hell do you ever reconcile religious nonsense with that behaviorist nonsense? Seems to me the two are mutually exclusive.”
“Never mind.” Earle’s head rolled back. “I’m too tired.”
Mackenzie heard the frightened squeal when something hit one of the noose snares.
Jay gathered his legs.
“Keep quiet,” Mackenzie murmured.
The squeal from the darkness had agitated the fox; it backed away to the very rim of darkness so that the bright dots of its eyes were surrounded by nothing more than shadows suggestive of its outline. The jackrabbit sat up alert, ears twisting.
Mackenzie kept his face averted from the fire and his eyes squinted down to slits: he didn’t want night blindness. What had the snare trapped? Rabbit-or only a mouse?
He pushed two small logs deeper into the fire. There was the distinct hoot of an owl not far away. He watched the jackrabbit. It carried its forepaws high and limp-wris-ted; the nostrils and ears kept wiggling. Irrationally Mackenzie kept listening for the truck again.
Shirley murmured, “We ought to be telling ghost stories.”
Silence again and then it was broken when the jackrabbit made its heel-and-toe tattoo. It made Mackenzie think of the ceremonial dances: the repetitive hypnotic chant, shuffling horny feet stamping the beaten earth, heads jerking, arms pumping, outcries to the knee-high gods of the pantheistic world.
For Mackenzie’s paternal grandfather, whom he’d never known, it had been a twenty-five-mile walk to the trading post; the old folks had to carry water in buckets from a well half a mile away from the hogan. And their son,
