And good things had a way of coming to an end.
Dwayne wanted to get closer, but there was no safe or defensible location nearer the village. And the settlement was more extensive than they realized the night they showed up. It stretched to the west along the beach far from the bonfire that they had incorrectly assumed was at the center of the village. The huts around the black fire pit were burnt or blown down but there were many more still intact in a sprawling section of the village that ran all the way to the opposite wall of the bowl.
He figured there were four hundred adult males minimum in camp, along with three or four times that many women and kids who would fight as well. He guessed that was a complete count since there was no need for any hunting parties to be out with all the available meat around. It didn’t appear they’d sent anyone out to look for the strangers who attacked them. But there was no way to be sure of that. Maybe he was right and the skinnies assumed the Rangers had drowned. If they couldn’t swim themselves, they’d naturally think that the strange visitors could not either.
The Rangers had underestimated the skinnies in their first encounter by assuming they’d scatter at the first blast. Judging from the piles of tusks, the skinnies hunted the big mastodons that almost made Dwayne and the others lose their mud. The skinnies might be cruel, man-eating assholes, but what they weren’t was cowards. They had the reckless courage of mad dogs. It was going to be a fight to get Caroline out of the cave and away.
A low whistle from the brush came behind him. Dwayne dropped the binoculars and picked up one of the spears he made earlier in the morning. Just straight tree limbs sharpened on one end with the clasp knife.
Jimbo parted the branches of the scrub pine and headed toward Dwayne, his approach concealed from below by the lip of the escarpment. He carried a crude bow made from bundled reeds bound together with vines and a boot lace for a string. Six unfletched arrows, made with seasoned wood that Jimbo found in a dead patch of berry bushes were wrapped in an improvised quiver fashioned from a shirt sleeve. They’d work well enough close in.
“Any action?” Jimbo knelt and pulled out some long black feathers from inside his shirt. He was barefoot. He gave up his boots to Renzi and Dwayne wore the other surviving pair. No problem. He’d spent half his life on the reservation shoeless.
“No sign of Caroline Tauber,” Dwayne said. “But the old witch is keeping the men out of the cave. I take that as a positive sign. What do you think?”
“You asking me that as a pesky redskin? You think I have some aboriginal wisdom to impart?”
“I’m asking for a guess, dickhead.”
“Beats the shit outta me, paleface. Could be the women want to eat her and the men want to fuck her, and the women are in there marinating her right now.”
“Thanks for that sunny prognosis. What’s going on up at the insertion site?”
“The field’s not open,” Jimbo said and sat cross-legged. “But I set up a sign using rocks to point them to our camp.” He worked at splitting the feathers down the center of their quills using the point of his clasp knife.
“No way of knowing how long we have to wait,” Dwayne said and rolled on his belly to return to his vigil.
“Think Hammond will come along?”
“Chaz and a buttload of cash can be pretty persuasive. If Chaz can find him.”
“Yeah,” Jimbo began binding a six-inch length of feather to the shaft of one of the arrows with a length of thread stripped from his shirt. He wound it round and round with infinite patience.
Dwayne raised the binoculars and eyed the white-painted chief. He was easy to pick out from the others even at a distance. The chief sat watching the cave opening from the shade of an outcropping. He was fixated on the cave every bit as much as Dwayne was.
“What if they don’t come?” Jimbo said after a while. “What if something goes wrong on the other end?”
“Wrong like what?”
Jimbo chuckled. One arrow was fletched, and he set it aside and picked up another.
“Anything could go wrong, Dwayne. That reactor breaks down. The coil breaks. Computer failure. The whole damned thing could just blow up. Maybe the feds show up asking questions about why two Iranian illegals are running an unauthorized nuke plant.”
“So, we stay here and make the best of it,” Dwayne said. The chief was up and pacing, walking halfway to the cave mouth, then walking back to his shady spot.
“We don’t even know if a return trip is possible. Ever think of that? Maybe Chaz and Renzi vanished into the universe in a billion pieces.”
“We stay here, Jimbo.”
“The rest of our lives?”
“Yeah. Forever till the day we die. Could you deal with that?”
“Sure. Might make for a hell of a life. Plenty of game. Fresh air and good water. No taxes and nowhere I need to be.”
“Spoken like a true pesky redskin.” Dwayne watched the white-painted chief who laid back in the shade but raised himself up on an elbow to keep watch on the cave.
“Back to my
