Moontrap - Don Berry (42 page)

"
Think he's waitin'?"

Monday nodded.

Bill thought about it, frowning. "Me, I don't
like that much," he said.

Monday shrugged. "Just the way it is."

They rode in silence for a few moments before Bill
said, looking around him, "You know this here Saddle Mountain?"

"I been around it once," Monday said.

"Hard going? Me, I don't like climbin' mountains
and things like that."

"Not much to it," Monday said. "Just a
nice walk uphill."

"
That's good."

"Pretty easy place to set a mousetrap, though,"
Monday said.

"How so?" The other man frowned, and Monday
was faintly pleased.

"The two peaks ain't but about a quarter-mile
apart. Little razorback ridge in between 'em. A man tryin' t' cross
that ridge, he's about two hundred feet below the peaks. Pretty easy
target from either side."

"We1l," Bill said hesitantly, "maybe
we'll catch up to him afore he gets up there."

"Ain't likely," Monday said. "He'll be
headin' for high ground fast as he can. I expect he'll just get up
there an' try to pick us off one at a time."

"
Well," Bill muttered, "I just hope
nobody gets hurt, is all."

"Jesus christ, man!" Monday said, finally
at the end of his patience. "What the hell you think we're here
for?"

Startled by Monday's vehemence, Bill looked up at
him, and Monday was disgusted by the fear so evident in the other
man's loose face.

"
Hell, y' don't have t' get mad about it,"
the carpenter said. "I ain't got nothin' t' do with this
anyway."

"You're here."

"
So are you, far as that goes," Bill said
defiantly.

"Sure. We're all here," Monday said
morosely

The other man reined back his horse and drifted down
the line. They were all here, Monday thought. It was a kind of puppet
show. Would they have any notion if they saw the old man over the
sights of their rifles that they were looking at a man of flesh, like
their own? He doubted it. Everything outside their own skin was part
of the puppet show. Like the malicious gossip at the mill, there was
no sense of real persons, of real harm. It was just a way of passing
the time. The only man for whom it was real was the old man who
waited for them,
because death is real.

"
Damn their eyes,"
he whispered. "God damn their eyes." His throat felt tight,
as though he wanted to holler, but he did not. He rode along with the
column and behind him the carpenter assuaged his hurt feelings by
cursing Monday and all like him.

***

By mid-afternoon Monday was tense. At every bend in
the trail he expected to see the crossroads, and it did not appear.
They would have made up the start Webb had, perhaps even gained more
than that. The endless jogging of the horse became a steady
irritation. On either side the trees passed without end, a continuous
wall of foliage that was exactly the same. Nothing changed, and they
might as well have been riding in a circle for all the sense of
progress.

He had the crazy notion that they were going to meet
Webb coming the other way. They would round a bend and there he would
be, slumped indifferently in the saddle, coming toward them. Then
there'd be hell to pay.

And what if they were ahead of him? What if they got
up to the mountain and found Webb behind them? Who was hunting, and
who being hunted? Maybe in the end that was the real question: who
was the hunted? Gradually he eased up toward the head of the column,
out of the insane conviction that if they did meet Webb coming the
other way he wanted to be the first to see him.

When they did reach the crossing point of the trails,
Monday had an instant of terrible shock, seeing V\'ebb standing
impassively waiting for them. But even as his heart jumped, he
realized it was not a man, but the cairn of rocks that marked the
informal trading site between the Killamooks and the Clatsops.

He swallowed heavily, looking at the cairn.
Thurston's beautiful bay pulled up beside him and they rode the last
few yards to the cairn side by side.

"Well, Monday," Thurston said.

Monday looked at the trail that led off to their
left, toward the mountain. "I think we best leave the horses
here," Monday said.

"
Give your friend more time?" Thurston
said.

"
You may as well quit, " Monday said
evenly.

Thurston shrugged indifferently Monday turned to the
others, who were pulling up around them.

"This trail ain't used much," he said.
"We'll make better time on foot." He dismounted and began
to take what gear he needed out of the saddlebags.

The others sat their animals, waiting. Finally
Thurston shrugged and swung gracefully out of the saddle. The rest
then began to dismount, and Monday knew without caring one way or the
other that if he had taken the lead yesterday morning, it was all
over now. There was no question of who was running the show. It
didn't matter. When they swung off on the trail Thurston said,
"Monday, since you've been down here, why don't you come up
front here?"

"
So you can keep an eye on me?"

"So you can show us the way," Thurston
said, smiling amiably.

An hour on the new trail, and Monday was a little
surprised by the pace Thurston was setting. The little man, whatever
else he might be, was not soft. He could march with the rest of them,
and better than most of the farmers. Monday figured he was
politicking again, proving something. He was never done with proving
something. The stillness of the afternoon heat was broken by the
sudden ringing echo of a gunshot ahead.

Monday stopped abruptly in the trail. Thurston looked
at him, then back at the trail ahead.

"There he is," Monday said.

"Yes," Thurston said thoughtfully. "There
he is."

Now the question was answered. There was no doubt who
was the hunted.

2

Shortly after he left the creekbed, the trail began
to trend east, gradually rising along the flank of a ridge. In a
short time the lowering afternoon sun was almost behind the old man.
Now only one valley separated him from the double-peaked mountain,
and he figured there would be a live stream at the base.

He looked down slope at the almost impenetrable wall
of foliage. Absently he played with the end of one of the scalp
locks, wondering if he had missed a trail that would have taken him
in the right direction. The one he followed was definitely heading
east, and up. He decided to give it another half-hour, then cut
straight across.

There was no question of finding a man-trail now; he
was too far in. As he walked he scanned the brush on either side of
him, evaluating the slight breaks that might represent an animal
track down toward the river. He passed several in the next half-hour,
small, old, not recently used. When he reached one that appeared a
little more fresh he turned off without hesitation, forcing down off
the slope toward the valley bottom. The brush closed in around him,
plucking at his shoulders and legs.

The soil was both rocky and dusty under his feet, and
in a short time the blanket-bottoms of his trousers were covered with
reddish-gray dust and his moccasins merged indistinguishably with the
trail beneath them. The loose rocks rolled and jabbed and pounded his
feet through the thin leather. It was his last pair, and a hole had
already started in one sole.

All in all, groping through the brush was not as bad
as he had anticipated. The trail he followed was not completely
overgrown yet, and he figured it had probably been used in the spring
as a main track down to the river. Then the deer would have changed,
for reasons of their own, and one day the trail would be completely
deserted and left to go back into brush. It was a sense deer had that
men lacked: to use it for a while, then give it back to the world,
freely.

Thinking of the brush, he had overprepared himself
for the unpleasantness, and the reality was satisfactory by
comparison. He reached the river a little more than an hour later and
began looking for a camp.

It was a fair little stream, even this late in the
season, and he supposed it probably had a name. Fifteen or twenty
feet wide, flowing through the corridor of timber at the valley
bottom with the endless shifting grace of light and water that never
tired. Flowing down from a mountainside, winding through the forest
in light and darkness, passing ten thousand ferns that nodded and
dipped, ten thousand firs that stood by its banks. Without fatigue or
hunger or the aching the old man felt. It was getting so he was tired
by the end of a day, and grateful for the chance to rest a bit and
think over what he had seen in passing. Once it had not been that
way; he had pushed on into the dusk and been off again before dawn.
There was so much to see ahead, so much to do. The point where the
deer trail met the little river was disappointing. There was a small,
relatively calm pool, but otherwise it was no different from any
other point on the bank. It was a good little river, he thought, too
good to waste on a camp he would not remember. He started downstream.

The cold water felt good to his feet, but the river
bottom was even rockier than the slope he had just come down, and he
had to walk carefully. Here in the bottom of the valley itself he was
shielded from both the warmth of the setting sun and its light. It
was dark and cool, with spatterings of brightness catching the
ripples and glinting off to trees at the side, speckling them with
shifting spots of silver.

In a quarter of an hour he had found a landmark that
satisfied him, a huge boulder on the north bank. It was perhaps
twenty feet high, soft with moss and ferns, ponderously leaning out
over the flowing water. Opposite the boulder was a flat space in the
shape of a tiny triangle, with one side facing the river and another
facing a small inlet, not much more than ten feet long.

He climbed out on the flat space, which he was
already thinking of as "camp," and sat down, looking across
the stream at his boulder. The camp space was rocky and small, but it
would be all right; it was the boulder that counted, something
pleasant to see and think of. He watched for a little, while the
sun-blots crept and shifted over the green furry surface, fading and
brightening in an unpredictable pattern as the trees moved gently and
the sun lowered behind them.

Finally he nodded with inner satisfaction. It was all
right, he felt comfortable. It would be a good place to spend the
night.

3

The stillness of dusk; a time almost perfectly
neutral, a suspension, filled with the promise of depth and solitude
in the night to come. The old man gathered wood, enjoying the
changing shapes of his camp in the changing light, seeing how one
tree began to recede into shadow and another, by contrast, move
forward for his attention. He moved quietly in the warm grayness,
picking up a stick here, a larger slab there, and carrying them two
or three at a time back to his rocky little point. It was an
inefficient way to get wood together, but he didn't mind. He liked to
spend the calm expanse of dusk in a calm manner; it was insanity to
do anything else.

He did not need much wood, and there was not only the
question of the fire, but a question of timing. He thought he was
going to like this little camp very much, and he wanted things to go
properly. It was most satisfying for him to finish laying the fire
and have it ready to light at the precise moment in the growing
darkness when it seemed tohim that he needed a little more light. It
was, in the end, perfectly unimportant. But there was a certain
contentment for a man in feeling that he has well suited his actions
to the changes of the world around him.

It was a kind of contentment the old man had not felt
for a while now, ever since he got mixed up with the man-ugliness
ofthe settlement. There it always seemed that he was running counter
to something, always conscious of conflict, of tension. He couldn't
let the world take him along, because of the noise and stink of the
man-world. He shrugged as he kindled the fire, and put the thought
away from him. It was over, now. This was not the place to be
worrying about it. He filled his little cup half full of water,
dropped in a couple of tiny pieces of flaky white suet from the pack.
He put the cup by the fire where it would boil quickly and got a
handful of the jerked deer. The jerky was  in flat sticks like
hardened leather, eight or ten inches long. He broke a few of them in
half and stood them on end in the cup. They were still too long, and
stood up out of the cup like a fistful of bark. When the water neared
the boiling stage, he turned the strips end for end, to let the other
half soften a little.

When he was finished it was a little softer. Not
much, but enough to make a difference—and he had a cup of weak
broth to drink. lt was not like fresh meat, but it was better than no
meat at all. He chewed on the rubbery strips and watched the orange
and gold reflections of his fire ripple in the water, almost as
though a tiny sun were burning just beneath the surface.