Mackenzie’s father, the silversmith, had never been a citizen: in Arizona Indians only got the vote in 1948. Tsosi was dead by then.
Why am I thinking about all that?
He heard the swoop of movement in the air, a brief falsetto squeak; the labored beating of wings. The owl had nailed something.
The night was alive all around them: things grunted and moved through the brush. Through hooded eyes he watched the lone jackrabbit. It hadn’t moved from its hypnotized place.
Then there was the definite smash of something big enough to make a racket in the bush: a sudden scrabbling-something had been hooked. It scratched to get loose. Not far away.
The racket was enough to break the jack’s spell: it bolted away into the night.
Mackenzie gripped the knife and walked away from the fire.
14
One of the snares had been torn away, nothing left but a broken branch. Perhaps the owl had taken the catch. But there was a half-strangled jackrabbit twenty yards down the trail and there was a bonus nearby: another noose had trapped a half-grown one. He killed them both with the knife and carefully removed the loops and reset his snares. Then he heard something struggling and he went down the path to search out the source of the noise.
He couldn’t identify it at first. Its struggle with the snare had sent it into the thicket of the manzanita’s center and Mackenzie was reluctant to reach blindly through the tangle. He moved around the bush until starlight picked up the scaly shine-a lizard, a very big one, as big as his forearm. If it was a Gila Monster he wanted no part of its poisons. He spread branches apart carefully to get a better look and the lizard thrashed until its face came into the light.
Chuckwalla-eight or nine pounds in weight. Mackenzie’s hand shot in through the spiny twigs; he killed the lizard with the blade and untangled the snare with precise caution because one of them had already been ripped away and he had no more string.
He carried the three carcasses to the fire. Earle was awake again. The three of them looked upon his booty; he caught a telltale dart of Shirley’s tongue, a twitch of Earle’s cheek muscle. Jay only watched empty-eyed.
Mackenzie skinned the lizard and cut chunks of meat, skewered them on green twigs and passed them out. “Make sure it’s cooked before you eat it.”
Shirley regarded it with revulsion.
“And forget your prejudices,” Mackenzie added mildly. He attended to the two hares: he lined a little pit with the lizard skin and drained the blood into it; then he disemboweled the jackrabbits and skinned them with slow care to retain the hide. He took the meat off the bones carefully and sliced it into strips; he cut seams in the ears and opened the skins out flat; he broke leg bones and ribs off and threw them directly on the fire.
He gathered up the lizard skin cupped in his hands. “Drink.” Nothing in the world was more nourishing than fresh blood.
He sent them foraging and they returned with a harvest of salad makings: grass tips and saltbush-they would need a great deal of that; until they found an animal lick it would be their only source of salt-and maguey greens mashed to pulp on rocks.
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.
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
