Deathwatch (2 page)

“If it’s not the specimen you want I don’t report anything, and we just go on hunting for four more days. Is that it?” Ben asked.

“It’s not up to you to report anything anyway, is it?” Madec asked. “I’m the hunter here. Right?”

“Right,” Ben said. “But I don’t want any part of you going around shooting every bighorn in the desert until you get the specimen you want.”

Madec laughed. “Ben, now you know as well as I do that I probably won’t even get another shot at one. So don’t be a Boy Scout. If this isn’t a good specimen how about—for double the money and a hundred-dollar bonus—we keep on hunting? If we don’t find anything we’ll come back and pick up this one. And you still get the extra money. Okay?”

Ben remembered Madec’s stories about the deals he made. Somebody always got cheated—and hurt.

But there were mountains where the bighorn never went. Mountains that looked exactly like these. Madec could spend the rest of his life looking for bighorn in those ranges and never find one.

“Okay,” Ben said.

“After all, I’m not asking you to do anything
illegal, Ben. I’m just paying you some nice money to drive me around. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Not a thing,” Ben said.

“Then it’s a deal,” Madec said, slinging the gun over his shoulder.

Ben watched him start up the ridge, his feet on the stones making a lot of noise in the silence of the place. Ben knew now that whatever was lying there on the ridge wasn’t going to be good enough for Madec. It could be the biggest ram in the mountains but it wouldn’t be good enough.

Ben looked around, picking out landmarks so he could find this place again. As far as he was concerned, Madec had seen the last bighorn he was going to see, and whatever he had killed up there was going to be all he killed.

Madec was well ahead of him as he started climbing, the heat blasting down on him as though it had real weight.

Ben had reached a little area of shale, the flat rocks sliding under his boots, when Madec got to the top and disappeared behind a boulder, so that only the muzzle of the .358 could be seen moving along.

A patch of pale brown showed lying in a crack of the cliff face, and as Ben looked down at where they had been he had to admit that Madec had done a good job of shooting.

He was not surprised to see Madec coming back, in such a hurry that he almost fell. Ben
waited for him, wondering what he was going to say about the sheep he’d killed. That the horns weren’t big enough? Or were chipped?

Okay, Ben thought, four more days of you, but you’ve seen your last bighorn.

“What do you know?” Madec said, not even stopping as he went down the mountain. “I missed him. I thought I had him cold, but I missed him.”

Ben looked at the man in disgust. He must have killed a ewe or a young ram with no rack at all and now didn’t want to admit it. “You didn’t miss him,” Ben said. “He’s lying right there in the crack in that cliff.”

“No,” Madec said over his shoulder as he kept on going down. “I thought that was a sheep, too, but it’s only a rock. I missed. Must have jarred the scope climbing up here or this heat got to it, because ordinarily I don’t miss a shot like that. Let’s go see if we can find that herd again.” At last Madec stopped and turned around. “You’ve still got your deal if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“That’s not what’s worrying me,” Ben said.

“So let’s go! If we can get around these mountains before sunset we might see ’em again.”

Ben looked up at what he had thought was a dead sheep. What difference did it make to him that Madec was a liar?

“I’m not paying you to stand around,” Madec snapped. “I’m paying you to hunt bighorn. So move it!”

“The thing that interests me,” Ben said quietly,
“is that rocks don’t bleed much.” He pointed with his thumb at the pale stone of the cliff. From the bottom of the V where the stone had cracked, a trickle of blood, very dark red in the hot sunlight, ran slowly, the heat congealing it on the stone face.

Madec, his head down, walked slowly back up to where Ben was standing. Then he lifted his eyes and grinned. “I’m a liar, Ben. I didn’t miss that shot. Remember, you told me to look for horns, and I said I’d seen ’em. I was lying then, too. I shot a little female. I just didn’t want to tell you because I was · afraid you’d call off the hunt. You understand that, don’t you, Ben?”

Ben shrugged. “Okay, I’ll bury it.”

“Why bother?”

“Because the game warden will spot her from his chopper and know who killed her, is one reason. You want some more?”

“You can’t see her from the air. I had a hard time finding her. I was right on top of her before I saw her.

“You’re not a game warden,” Ben said and kept on climbing.

“Ben,” Madec said.

Ben kept moving.

“Ben!”

Ben glanced back at him.

“We’ll lose the rest of the day,” Madec said. “I’d rather take my chances with the game warden than lose a whole day just burying a dead sheep. Come on, buddy, let’s get going.”

The trouble with Madec is, Ben thought, he’s always right. There really wasn’t much point in lugging that dead weight down the mountainside to bury it in the sand. Here the vultures would be at it by dawn. By nightfall the coyotes would be there, and soon there would be nothing left but a few scattered bones which the rodents would in time destroy.

And what difference does it make to me, Ben thought, if the Game and Fish Department gets all over this guy?

He looked up once more at the blood, now dried on the stone.

He was closer to the broken stone of the cliff now and his angle of vision was different, so that he saw farther into the fissure of the stone.

A white-haired man was looking back at him. His eyes were a faded, skim-milk blue and were wide open. His mouth was open, too, and from it a trail of blood went down his cheek and out onto the rock.

T
HE
.358 M
AGNUM
bullet had done fearful damage, blasting the man’s lungs out through his back.

He was an old man who had been in the desert a long time, for the skin of his neck was copper colored and tough looking, old, tanned leather. His felt hat, almost completely stained with sweat, had fallen half off so that Ben could see the sparse white, unwashed hair, the pale skin of the head ending in a sharp line where it met the copper. He had on a brownish wool shirt with long sleeves buttoned at his wrists and a pair of denim pants faded to the color of his eyes. One hand still gripped the handle of the metal locator which lay out in front of him, the round pan of it shining.

Ben knelt and turned him gently onto his back, the hat now falling completely off so that the sun shone down hard on the open eyes and grizzled cheeks. The few teeth he had left were long, stained, worn fangs. Suspenders, one loop shot away, held up his pants.

The clothes lay on what was left of the man in loose folds.

Ben had never seen this man before and wondered a little about that because he knew most of the old prospectors who still roamed these lonely hills, not even hoping any more, just roaming, happier in the desert than in the peopled land.

“I know you won’t believe me,” Madec said, standing behind him and looking down at the man. “But I just glanced once and saw that there were no horns and didn’t look any farther. I just assumed I’d shot a ewe.”

“You didn’t.” Ben put the old man’s hat over his face.

“Do you know him?”

“No,” Ben said, standing up.

He didn’t look at Madec as he picked up the Hornet and said, “I’ll go down and bring the Jeep up as high as I can. Then I’ll bring the groundsheet, and we can tie it to the rifles and get him down.”

“Why not leave the rifle,” Madec said, reaching for the Hornet. “You don’t need it.”

Ben handed it to him and went down the short face of the cliff and on down across the shale bed.

He tried not to think of Madec at all as he climbed down the long slope of the mountain, picking out a path for the Jeep as he went. Instead, he made a mental list of what they would need—the groundsheet, some rope, a blanket to wrap the body in. He debated about that, though, wondering for a moment why it was necessary to
stain a blanket, but decided it was.

It was going to be past midnight before they got the body down to the Jeep and got out of the desert. Who should he get in touch with first, Ben wondered. The sheriff? The Highway Patrol? The justice of the peace? Maybe Madec knew.

Poor old man, all by himself out there. All alone with the empty desert stretching out for miles. Walking along, crouched over a little, holding the locator out and close to the ground, listening hour after hour for the buzz that gold or silver would make but never hearing it and never, really, expecting to hear it. Just out there to be by himself.

The Jeep was hot and hard to start, but he got it going and headed back toward the slope of the mountain. He could see no sign of Madec, only the white cliff face with the V now casting a dark shadow.

It was a funny thing about these old prospectors. They only had one life—the desert. They never told you where they had come from before they came to the desert. They never told you of their childhood or their children or wives or parents. If they had ever played a game or gone to school or loved someone, you didn’t find it out from them. The only life they had was the last trip they had made into the desert, and the one they were now getting ready to make.

And every one of them had found his gold mine—once. Gold so pure it was lying shining on the ground. They had marked it well, claim-staked
it, and then pinpointed it with landmarks of mountains or Bishop pines that had been growing in place for a thousand years. Marked and located their gold so well they could come back and find it in the dark.

Except that when they did come back with a new grubstake and equipment they never could find that place again; no gold lay where they had seen it, only rocks and sand.

One-name old men. Sam, Hardrock, Walt, Zeke. No last name, no known address other than Death Valley or Mohave or Sonora. Any desert. No next of kin.

It took Ben half an hour to wrestle the Jeep up the slope, getting it up as high as he could, not wanting to carry the weight of the man any farther than he had to in the afternoon heat. But when the slope became so steep that there was danger of the Jeep rolling over, he turned it around, heading it down the hill again, and then got the gear and started walking.

He was halfway there with still no sign of Madec when he heard the shot.

Instinctively Ben ducked behind a boulder and then felt embarrassed. There was no telling what Madec was shooting at now, but it wasn’t at him.

The rifle cracked again, and Ben only listened to it as he kept on climbing. It wasn’t the roar of the .358, it was the Hornet with that sharp, snapping sound.

Idiot, Ben thought, one shoulder sweating under the folds of the nylon groundsheet, the other
under the coil of rope and the wool blanket.

Madec was sitting on the ground in what shade there was. He had the Hornet across his knees, looking at it as Ben climbed up to the flat and walked over to him.

“What are you shooting at now?”

“Nice little machine,” Madec said, holding up the Hornet. “I’d never shot one before. Good flat trajectory. What’s the muzzle velocity?”

He had moved the dead man so that he was half-sitting against a boulder, his ruined body slumped back against the rock, his head hanging down on his chest.

“Enough,” Ben said, dumping the groundsheet and unfolding it. “We’ll make a stretcher.”

Madec didn’t move. “You wouldn’t believe in this day and age that a man could go around with no identification at all. No driver’s license, no social security card.” He laughed. “Not even any credit cards. There isn’t a thing to identify him. And he hasn’t got a dime.”

Ben folded the two edges of the sheet over so that they met in the middle and then began to lace them together with the rope.

“No name,” Madec said. “No number. Nobody.”

Ben glanced over at him sitting in the shade, the Hornet across his knees, the .358 lying beside his leg. It was going to be awkward carrying the old man with nothing to hold the rifles apart.

“All these old geezers wandering around out here are running away from something,” Madec
said. “Their wives, the law, the people they owe money to. Nobody knows who they really are. And a man as old as this has been out here so long nobody cares.”

Ben left the rope long enough at both ends to tie the body between the rifles and then went over to the old man and spread the blanket out on the ground beside him. “Give me a hand, Madec. We’ll roll him in the blanket and then lash him between the rifles.”

Madec didn’t move. “Let’s talk a little, Ben.”

“What about?”

“This thing was a pure accident, you know that, Ben.”

“I don’t know what it was,” Ben said. “Some people don’t shoot at something just because it moves.”

“Oh, come on,” Madec said. “I thought it was a bighorn. You thought it was a bighorn. We’d just seen ‘em standing right here. I thought when they moved that we’d scared ’em. How was I to know that this old man was what had really scared ’em?”

“Okay,” Ben said. “It was an accident. So let’s get him down the mountain.”

“That’s what I want to talk about, Ben. This old man with no name, no nothing, is dead. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

The old man had no socks, and one boot was laced with a piece of wire. Ben lifted him, the desert flies swarming up into his face, and laid
him down on the blanket. When he pulled his arm out from under the body it was smeared with dirt and blood.

“Not a thing,” Madec said. “And it really doesn’t matter, does it? I know that sounds pretty cold-blooded, but it’s a fact, Ben. Nobody cared whether this old man lived or died. Nobody is waiting for him to come home because his only home was out here in the desert.”

Ben angrily drove the flies off with a corner of the blanket and then wrapped it around him, covering the staring eyes, the open mouth, the mess. The flies settled down on the blanket.

“Are you going to help me with this?” he asked.