Mackenzie winced at his own callousness. He sat furiously blaspheming to himself. Then he faced the truth. “Earle, listen to me.”

“Sure. I’ve got nothing else to do.”

“Don’t let yourself die for our convenience.”

“What makes you think—”

“Suicide is a mortal sin, isn’t it?”

“I’m not Roman Catholic. I’m Anglican—Episcopal.”

“Sorry. I heard you talking about sins before.”

“Hardly a concept exclusive to the Roman church.”

“Earle, I just don’t want to think you’re fooling yourself into some idea of noble self-sacrifice.”

Earle’s eyes turned smoky and hurt. “Have you seen me trying to slit my throat? Have you?”

“I want you to fight, that’s all.”

“I am fighting. I’d have been dead long, ago if I hadn’t.”

“You’ve got to start expecting to get out of this alive.”

“You’ve always detested me,” Earle said with practical sensibility. “Why are you so concerned about my survival?”

“Because there’s got to be a difference between me and Calvin Duggai.”

“Do you want to be cryptic?”

“We’ve got to prove we’re better than Duggai. We’ve got to survive—all of us.”

“So that’s the obsession that’s driving you.”

“Listen, you God damned son of a bitch, I intend to have Duggai’s head in a basket and I expect you to help me get it.”

Earle went all colors at Mackenzie’s profanity. Then abruptly he smiled. “You’re a mystic after all. You believe in that Indian witchcraft just as much as he does.”

“What do you know about that?”

“I know enough to figure out why he left us alive instead of shooting us. Devils and spells and demons. I read up on it when the lawyers asked me to examine him. Thought it might be a key. After all, he’s had cultural implantations a lot different from mine.”

“How the hell do you reconcile your religious faith with that behaviorist dogma?”

“God makes the laws. Our behavior is just obedience to God’s laws. I don’t see any contradiction, do you?” Earle coughed distressingly and then smiled. “You’re trying to change the subject.”

“What was the subject?” He was tired; he honestly didn’t remember.

“Your mystical obsession with proving that your devil power is stronger than Duggai’s.”

Earle fell back exhausted soon after and Mackenzie left him to rest. He’d tried to dismiss Earle’s speculations but their ripples disturbed him for a time.

Shades of lavender and lilac suffused the distance. He fed the fire and turned on his haunches to look for Shirley. He found her in dramatic silhouette: she stood on a boulder searching the horizons. Against the sky she was like a sculpted Diana. The picture was vivid and he held it, not moving, watching her and absorbing the sight: a wild dramatic work of graphic art.

Finally he went uphill toward her. She looked heart-breakingly beautiful.

He put his hands around her ribs and lifted her down off the boulder. She stood against him; she didn’t draw away.

She didn’t smile. “Can you feel my heart?”

“I thought it was mine.”

“Sam—right now I feel about sex roughly the way I feel about eating ground glass. But I want you to squeeze me until it hurts. I want to draw your strength into me.”

They cleaned themselves with wood-ash soap and scraps of rabbit fur; they sponged Earle down and he spoke softly of God’s bounties. Mackenzie built up the fire higher than it had been on previous nights: Jay would want a beacon to find his way back. He went down along the new trapline that Jay had set but it was too early and there were no prizes yet. They drank from the still and bagged the rest of the water, cleaned out the pit and spent half an hour gathering cactus and cutting it up into the hole to provide tomorrow’s water. Mackenzie found the tattered scraps of the moccasins Jay must have used on his expedition of the previous night; apparently Jay had made new moccasins for tonight’s travel. Jackrabbit hide was too thin to last long on this terrain—and Jay was foraging a good many miles out. Mackenzie had an idea what Jay’s feet must have been like by the time he’d returned to camp fourteen hours ago; it spoke of Jay’s courage that he had gone out again tonight. Maybe Duggai would leave him alone again.…

The clay bowls were clumsy but they were serviceable: Shirley improvised a thick soup from meat and blood and water and chopped saltbush. Mackenzie wasted nearly an hour searching a widening area for poles long and thick enough to make a litter but the land didn’t provide anything nearly substantial enough; they would have to carry Earle on their backs until they got into heavier growth somewhere.

When he returned to the fire he said, “We should plan to move out tomorrow night.”

“To where?”

He pointed toward the hills to the northeast. “I’ve heard coyotes up there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’d be water not too far away. Bigger animals. Maybe salt too. That’s the way we’ll go until we find what we need. When we can equip ourselves with more clothes and better footwear. Then we strike out due north. We move all night and hole up by day.”

“Why north?”

“There’s a superhighway.”

“How do you know that?”

“Senita. The little organ pipes. They only grow in Arizona west of the divide.”

“Where does that put us?”

“East of Yuma. Luke Air Force Gunnery Range.” He indicated the compass points. “That’s east, more or less. There’s a road that runs north from the Mexican border through one or two little towns, finally ends up at the highway junction at Gila Bend. We could strike out for that road but it might be a hundred miles from here.”

“That far? My God.”

“This thing probably measures five or six thousand square miles. That way’s the Mexican border. Might not be too far south of us but I don’t think there’s anything down there. Lava beds, craters, a lot of dry mountain ranges. They could have built towns down there in the past twenty years but I doubt it. That country’s even less hospitable than this.” He poked his chin toward the west. “That way we’d hit the Colorado River. Sooner or later. But we’d have to cross the Yuma flats to reach it—sand dunes. And again we don’t know if he put us down east or west of center—it might be only twenty-five miles from here to the river, then again it could be more than a hundred. From Ajo to Yuma it’s about a hundred and forty miles. It’s all gunnery range. No—our best shot’s north. The main highway between Tucson and San Diego. It can’t be more than forty or fifty miles.”

“I didn’t know there was any uninhabited area that big any more.”

“There are no roads, no human existence at all. Travel into these areas is forbidden.”

“And forbidding.”

“Anyhow we’ve got to go north. It won’t be just forty miles. You can’t go ten miles without running up against a range of mountains—they look easy from here but that’s steep rubble and they’re bigger than they look—six or seven thousand feet. You can go around the ranges but it trebles the distance. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Don’t they ever patrol with helicopters?”

“If they’ve got reason to suspect someone’s out here. Now and then I guess they do a routine sweep. But Duggai can reach us with that rifle if he sees a helicopter.”

“If it came to that he probably wouldn’t mind shooting the helicopter to pieces.”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and nodded agreement. “He’s just the one to prove he can do it. He knows ’copters—he’d shoot for the radio first, then the rotor coupling.”

“What chance have we got then? Honestly.”

“What difference does it make? It’s the only shot we’ve got.”

She began to clean out the bowls with a handful of grass. “It’s tempting to get maudlin, isn’t it.” Mackenzie watched the play of muscles under her skin. She sat crosslegged, spine bent in a hunched concentration, breasts pendant, lip between teeth. “If you scrub too hard you disintegrate these things. I ruined one last night.”