Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) (14 page)

"I didn't think--I didn't think!" cried Adam, remembering the advice of Dismukes.

Overcome by the shock, he sank upon the ground and fell prey to gloomy and hopeless forebodings.

"I'll lie down and die," he muttered. But he could not so much as lie down. He seemed possessed by a devil who would not permit the idea of surrender or death. And this spirit likewise seemed to take him by the hair of his head and lift him up to scatter the tears from his eyes. "Why can't I cuss the luck like a man--then look around to see what's got to be done?"

Jinny had made good her escape. When Adam gave up 411 hope of finding the burro the hour was near sunset and it was high time that he should decide what to do.

"Go on--to the Indian camp," he declared, tersely.

He decided to start at once and walk in the cool of night, keeping close to the mountain wall so as not to lose his way. His spirits rallied. Going back to the camp scene, he carefully gathered up all the unburnt matches and placed them with others he carried in his pocket. He found his bag of salt only partly consumed, and he made haste to secure it. His canteen lay beside the spring.

The ruddy sunset and the stealing down of twilight and the encroaching blackness of night had no charms for Adam now. His weariness increased as the hours prolonged themselves. Short, frequent rests were more advisable than long ones. The canopy of stars seemed in procession westward; and many a bright one he watched sink behind the black slope of mountain toward which he was bound. There were times when his eyes closed involuntarily and all his body succumbed to sleep as he toiled on. These drowsy spells always came to a painful end, for he would walk into a thorny mesquite. Adam saw a weird, misshapen moon rise late over a dark range to blanch the desert with wan light. He walked all night, and when dawn showed him landmarks now grown familiar he had a moment of exhilaration. The long, low-reaching ridge of mountain loomed right before him. When he rounded the sharp, blunt corner his eyes were greeted by sight of a deep-mouthed canyon yawning out of the range, and full of palms and other green trees. He saw a white stream bed and the shine of water, and what he took to be the roofs of palm-thatched huts.

"I've got there. This is the Indian canyon--where Dismukes told me to stay," said Adam, with pride in his achievement. A first sight of what he took to be habitations cheered him. Again that gloomy companion of his mind was put to rout. It looked worth striving and suffering for--this haven. The barrenness of the desert all around made this green canyon mouth an oasis. It appeared well hidden, too. Few travellers passing along the valley would have suspected its presence. The long, low ridge -had to be rounded before the canyon could be detected.

With steps that no longer dragged Adam began his descent of the canyon slope. It was a long, gradual incline, rough toward the bottom, and the bottom was a good deal farther down than it had seemed. At length he reached the wide bed of white boulders, strewn about in profusion, where some flood had rolled them. In the centre of this bed trickled a tiny stream of water, slightly alkaline, Adam decided, judging from the white stain on the margin of sand. Following the stream bed, he made his way up into the zone of green growths, a most welcome change from the open glare of the desert. He plodded on perhaps a mile, without reaching the yellow thatch of palms.

"Will I--never--get there?" panted Adam, almost spent.

Finally Adam reached a well-defined trail leading up out of the stream bed. He followed it to a level flat covered with willows and cottonwoods, all full foliaged and luxuriantly green, and among which stately palms swaddled in huge straw sheaths of their own making, towered with loftily tufted crowns. The dust in the trail showed no imprints of feet. Adam regarded that as strange. Still, he might be far from the camp or village that had looked so close from the slope above. Suddenly he emerged from the green covert into an open glade that contained palm-thatched huts, and he uttered a little cry of joy. But it took only a second glance to convince him that the huts were deserted, and his joy was short lived. Hastily he roamed from one hut to another. He found ollas, great, clay water jars, and pieces of broken pottery, and beds of palm leaves through which the lizards rustled, but no Indians, nor any signs of recent habitation.

"Gone! Gone!" he whispered, hoarsely. "Now--I'll starve--to death!"

His accents of despair contained a note of hardness, of indifference born of his extreme fatigue. His eyes refused to stay open, and sleep glued them shut. When he opened them again it was to the light of another day. Stiff and lame, with a gnawing at the pit of his stomach and an oppressed mind, Adam found himself in sad plight. Limping down to the stream, he bathed his face and quenched his thirst, and then, removing his boots, he saw that his feet were badly blistered. He decided to go barefoot, to save his boots as well as to give the raw places a chance to heal.

Then without any more reflection he wrought himself into a supreme effort of will, and it was so passionate and strong that he believed it would hold as long as intelligence governed his actions.

"My one chance is to live here until the Indians come back." he decided. "There's water here and green growths. It's an oasis where animals, birds, living creatures come to drink...I must eat."

His first move was to make slow and careful examination of the trails. One which led toward the mountain bore faint traces of footprints that a recent rain had mostly obliterated. He lost this trail on the smooth rock slope. The others petered out in the stones and sage. Then he searched along the sand bars of the stream for tracks of living creatures; and he found many, from cat tracks to the delicate ones of tiny birds. After all, then, the desert was an abode for livings thing. The fact stimulated Adam, and he returned to the glade to exercise every faculty he possessed in the invention of instruments or traps or snares.

He had a knife and a pair of long leather boot strings. With these, and a bundle of arrow-weed sticks, and a tough elastic bow of ironwood, and strips of bark, and sharp bits of flinty rock Adam set to work under the strong, inventive guiding spirit of necessity. As a boy he had been an adept at constructing figure-four traps. How marvellous the accuracy of memory! He had been the one to build traps for his brother Guerd, who had not patience or skill, but who loved to set traps in the brier patches for redbirds. Adam's nimble fingers slacked a little as his mind surveyed that best part of his life. To what extremity a man could be reduced! The dexterity of his idle youth to serve him thus in his terrible hour of need! He remembered then his skill at making slings and following this came the inspired thought of the possibility of constructing one. He had a strong rubber, band doubled round his pocketbook. Sight of it thrilled him. He immediately left off experimenting with the bow and went to making a sling. His difficulty was to find cords to make connections between the rubbers and a forked prong, and also between the rubbers and a carrier of some sort. For the latter he cut a triangular piece out of the top of his boot. Always in the old days he had utilised leather from cast-off shoes, and had even made a collection of old footgear for this purpose. But where to get the cords? Bark would not be pliable and strong enough. Somewhere from the clothes he wore he must extract cords. The problem proved easy. His suspenders were almost new and they were made of linen threads woven together. When he began to ravel them he made the discovery that there was enough rubber in them to serve for a second sling.

When the instrument was finished he surveyed it with satisfaction. He had no doubt that the deadly accuracy he had once been master of with this boyish engine of destruction would readily return to him. Then he went back to work on the other contrivances he had planned.

A failing of the daylight amazed him. For an instant he imagined a cloud had crossed the sun. But the sun had set and darkness was at hand.

"If days fly like this one, life will soon be over," he soliloquised, with a sigh.

In one of the thatched huts he made a comfortable bed of palm leaves. They seemed to retain the heat of the day. When Adam lay down to go to sleep he experienced a vague, inexplicable sense that the very strangeness of the present circumstance was familiar to him. But he could not hold the sensation, so did not understand it. He was very tired and very sleepy, and there was an uncomfortable empty feeling within him. He looked out and listened, slowly aware of a great, soft, silent black enveloping of his environment by the desert night. There seemed to be an aloofness in the immensity of this approach and insulation--a nature that, once comprehended, would be appalling. This thought just flashed by. His mind seemed concerned with something between worry and fear which persisted till he fell asleep.

In the dim, grey dawn he awoke and realised that it was hunger which had awakened him. And he stole out on his imperative quest. He did not see the sunrise nor the broadening day. His instinct was to hunt. Doves and blackbirds visited the stream, and a covey of desert quail seemed tame; but, owing to overeagerness and clumsiness, he did not succeed in killing a single one. He followed thrill from place to place, all over the oasis, until he lost sight of them. He baited his two traps with cactus fruit and set them, and he prowled into every nook and cranny of the canyon oasis. Lizards, rattlesnakes, rats, ground squirrels rustled from his stealthy steps. It amazed him how wary they were. He might have caught the rattlesnakes, but the idea of eating them was repugnant and impossible to him. The day passed more swiftly than had yesterday. Its close found him so tired he could scarcely stand, and with gnawing hunger growing worse. The moment he lay down sleep claimed him.

Next day he had more and better opportunities to secure meat, but he failed through haste and poor judgment and inaccuracy. His lessons were severe and they taught him the stern need of perfection. That day he saw a hawk poise high over a spot, dart down swiftly, to rise with a squealing rat in its claws. Again he saw a shrike, marked dull grey and black, sail down from a tree, fly very low along an open space of ground to avoid detection, and pounce upon a lizard. Likewise he saw a horned toad shoot out an extraordinary long and almost invisible tongue, to snatch a bee from a flower. In these actions, Adam divined his first proof of the perfection of desert hunters. They did not fail. But he was not thus equipped.

All during the hot period of the day, when birds and animals rested, Adam practised with his crude weapons. His grave, serious eagerness began to give way to instinctive force, a something of fierceness that began to come out in him. It seemed every moment had its consciousness of self, of plight, of presaged agony, but only in flashes of thought, only fleeting ideas instantly repudiated by the physical. He had given a tremendous direction to his mind and it spent its force that way.

The following morning, just at sunrise, he located the covey of desert quail. They had sailed down from the sage slopes to alight among the willows bordering the stream. Adam crawled on the sand, noiseless as a snake, his sling held in readiness. He was breathless and hot. His blood gushed and beat in his veins. The very pursuit of mea made the saliva drip from his mouth and made his stomach roll with pangs of emptiness. Then the strain, the passion of the moment, were beyond his will to control, even if there had not been a strange, savage joy in them. He glided through the willows, never rustling a branch. The plaintive notes of the quail guided him. Then through an opening he saw them--grey, sleek, plump birds, some of them with tiny plumes. They were picking in the damp sand near the water. Adam, lying flat, stretched his sling and waited for a number of the quail to bunch. Then he shot. The heavy pebble sped true, making grey feathers fly. One quail lay dead. Another fluttered wildly The others ran off through the willows Adam rushed upon the crippled quail, plunging down swift and hard; and catching it, he wrung its neck. Then he picked up the other.

"I got 'em. I got 'em!" he cried, elated, as he felt the warm plump bodies. It was a moment of strange sensation. Breathless, hot, wet with sweat, shaking all over, he seemed to have reverted to the triumph of the boy hunter. But there was more, and it had to do with the physical reactions inside his body. It had to do with hunger.

Picking the feathers off these birds required too much time. Adam skinned them, and cleaned them, and then washed them in the stream. That done, he hurried back to his camp to make a fire and cook them. A quick method would be to broil them. He had learned how to do this with strips of meat. His hunger prevented him from waiting until the fire was right, and it also made him hurry the broiling. The salt that he had rescued from his pack now found its use, and it was not long before he had picked clean the bones of these two quail.

Adam found that this pound or so of meat augmented his hunger. It changed the gnawing sensations, in fact modified them, but it induced a greedy, hot hunger for more. An hour after he had eaten, as far as appetite was concerned, he seemed worse off. Then he set out again in quest of meat.

The hours flew, the day ended, night intervened, and another dawn broke. Success again crowned his hunt. He feasted on doves. Thereafter, day by day, he decimated the covey of tame quail and the flock of tame doves until tile few that were left grew \vary and finally departed. Then he hunted other birds. Quickly they learned the peril of the white man; and the day came when few birds visited the oasis.

Next to invite Adam's cunning, were the ground squirrels, the trade rats, and the kangaroo rats. He lived off them for days. But they grew so wary that he had to dig them out of the ground, and they finally disappeared. At this juncture, a pair of burros wandered into the oasis. They were exceedingly wild. Adam failed to trap one of them. He watched for hours from a steep place where he might have killed one by throwing down a large rock. But it was in vain. At last, in desperation, holding his naked knife in hand, he chased them over stones and through the willows and under the thorny mesquites, all to no avail. He dropped from exhaustion and weakness, and lay where he had fallen till the next morning.