Necessary Evil, page 18
Probably the fittest seventy-two-year-old in California, maybe in the country, Stalking Bear hiked at a pace that was an honor even to the young man who followed him down the mountain. The men in the white suits had seen Jessie's track. Stalking Bear knew his grandson, Kier, was fighting. They were perhaps a quarter mile from the Bear's Cave trail in the thickest brush to be found. He made a great circle around Jessie's old trail. He studied her steps, read in the ground the story of her ruse.
He sensed where she'd be. A feeling came over him. Something was wrong.
After passing through an oak thicket and a stand of tall fir, he found the small cave.
"I must sleep," he told James Cole. "You go ahead down the mountain. Go to the reservation. I will come after."
James hesitated.
"You can help them best by continuing on," he reassured the young man.
James thought a moment longer, then turned and trotted down the mountain. Unrolling his bedroll, Grandfather sat straight-backed, closing his eyes.
In his dream, Grandfather walks on. After heading across the mountain, through the windfalls, past the cabin, and into the red fir, he sees her track again. It is just where he expects. He follows for many paces. She circles and comes back. Tirelessly, he follows. When the time is right, he looks down into the dying face of Jessie Mayfield. Urgently, he bends over her. She must drink. Nearby is a rivulet. Using all his energy, he watches her drag her body. He waits until she drinks deeply.
Grandfather gently touches her face. As his flesh presses hers, his spirit leaps within him.
He wondered at it as he awoke in his cave. He rose and followed the boy. He knew that he must return and try to save the Tilok people.
After swinging wide into the canyon to get below the men, Kier drew close to the rock wall, still moving downhill through the brush while working toward the hut. He expected that the men would be cautiously approaching his previous hiding spot on the ledge. By now the shooter on the far hillside would have alerted them. It wouldn't take long for them to find his trail in the snow.
Near the hut a large crease ran vertically across the rock wall. Kier pressed into it. Then, peering around the sharp edge in the granite face, he saw the shelter he and Jessie had built. It looked like a giant ice cream cone stashed in the rock, the door plug a small lump of white next to it. He saw no fresh tracks anywhere.
The men had obviously turned around before getting this far, no doubt to search the ledge where he was last seen. Kier laid a track to the mouth of the hut, dusted the snow off the plug, inserted it, then very carefully walked backward in his own footsteps until he reached the smooth, gray granite of the cliff. An experienced tracker would be able to detect what he had done, but a novice would not.
Quickly, he found a sheltered area under a tree with a reasonable view of the hut. And then, down a slight incline from his hiding spot, two men appeared, just barely visible. They had come much faster than he had expected, but these were the novices, not the stalker from the hillside. They looked to be thirty or forty feet from the hut entry, one of them talking on the radio. Where was the man who knew how to hunt? What was he thinking at this moment?
As if to egg Kier on, one of the men fired a long burst with his M-16 into the hut. Kier's trigger finger tightened, the shooter in his sights. But he didn't want to kill if it could be avoided.
"Drop your guns," he shouted at the men, who looked up, bewildered. A four-shot burst by Kier brought the men to their knees, guns thrown down.
He left them naked, huddled under the leaves in the hut, and burned their boots and clothes before their eyes. Next he destroyed their radios and rendered the rest of their equipment useless. It was better than a prison. Kier doubted the stalker would even bother to look for them, and if he did, they would do him no good without shoes and clothes.
Angling carefully up the side slope of the canyon away from the men, Kier found something that stopped him cold. Grandfather's track, headed down the mountain. So that was how James Cole got away.
Kier crossed their tracks and continued on. He picked up Jessie's trail about a mile farther along the ridge from Bear's Cave, and he began following it, relieved that the stalker had not yet arrived. Jessie had made a giant circle. He smiled. With a glance, he saw her first false side trail, but knew it was a dead end by the way she had backed out. It would fool the inexperienced. He found a more recent side trail that could be easily missed. She had jumped from the main trail to the base of a tree as he taught her. A cursory glance would reveal only the dislodged snow that had fallen from its branches.
Seconds later, Kier found a track through the trees. After twenty feet, she had stood still. A shell's dull brass finish caught his eye. She had fired the gun.
Tracing the general direction of her shot by the angle of her toe, he studied the terrain. She had run to a fallen tree. He could see where she had crawled.
Looking up, he saw that bullets had ripped through the woods. His heart pounded. A grenade or mortar had exploded. She had hid behind the log, then crawled again… his eye followed. Quickly, he moved down the track.
A great sigh of relief escaped his lips when he came upon a man who had apparently been blown to pieces by a grenade. She got him. But where'd she go? He found the berm, then followed her track to the first shooting spot, then into the woods. Oh, God, there was another body-a man, sprawled, partially stripped. Kier's eyes took in the food wrapper, the vomit, the partially eaten bar, and the spot where she had spat in the snow. Drag marks. She had crawled.
He found Jessie lying in a fetal position with her face next to a barely flowing stream. Her tousled hair fanned from under the helmet. When Kier saw the blood over her stolen white coat, his soul seemed to shrink. A moan escaped his lips. He rolled her into his arms and cradled her head. He pressed her neck.
A pulse. Her chest rose in shallow breaths. Frantically, he tore at her clothes, exposing her body. The delicate white skin bore no marks that he could see.
She was still alive because she had ingested only a minute quantity of the poison. Judging from her distended belly, she had thought enough to drink lots of water. He redid her clothes to keep her warm.
Certain he had too little time, he cast about for a more secluded spot, placed Jessie over his shoulder, and crashed into the brash, making no effort to be quiet. Scrambling over two large logs, he forced his way through a thicket of branches, crashed them to the ground, and cleared a small area surrounded by windfallen trees and brash. Returning to the dead man, he obliterated the evidence of the poison, then moved the man's body a hundred yards down the trail. The man who hunted him would easily find them, but the heavy brash would make it difficult to approach in complete silence, and the soldier's body would provide a momentary distraction.
When Kier returned, she was leaning against the log where he had left her.
"Bathroom." She tried to rise.
"Okay."
Kier moved her through the heavy brash to a spot twenty feet away. He found a foot-high log to sit her on with a smaller six-inch log suspended in the brash pile over which he could drape her elbows. It was what nature had to offer in the way of a convalescent toilet. Using mittened hands, he cleaned the snow off both logs.
She groaned. He lifted her eyelids. She looked barely conscious. Gently, he shook her. Nothing. He shook her again- vigorously this time. With a flutter she half opened her eyes, seemingly more aware of her surroundings. Putting his ear to her belly, he heard bowel sounds and knew that what was coming would not be pleasant.
"Bathroom," she muttered again, made more alert by her discomfort. "Get out of here."
Her fingers began straggling with her coat. Without saying anything, Kier unzipped it. He took the large overcoat off long enough to strip down the arctic overalls underneath, then put the coat back on her for warmth. When he began to unbutton her jeans, her hand grabbed his.
"Get out of here," she said again, her voice hard.
Kier stepped back. "You can do this?" he asked even as her body seemed to wobble on the log.
"Get out of here," she repeated evenly. "I'll do this myself, or die trying."
Then, as if the effort of asserting herself was too much, she began to slump forward. Kier jumped and grabbed her. Maneuvering behind her, he reached around and stripped down her pants. When she tried again to grab for his hands, he put them back on the small log.
"I don't like this any better than you do. Stop struggling and let's do the best we can," Kier said, hot with embarrassment. "Just go." His large hands supported her thighs with her knees draped over the log. ''Come on, come on, push, push, push. It's poison. Let's get it out."
Somehow, he thought, if he made it seem like some kind of weird athletic event it might be less horrible for her. Her humiliation made a lump in his throat.
"I'm going to hate you forever for this," she said through clenched teeth.
Then she evacuated her bowels and peed for more than a minute.
"I thought I had already earned that distinction," Kier replied, grabbing toilet tissue from the dead man's pack.
"If you wipe my ass, I'll kill you."
Chapter 19
When the Great Spirit sent down woman, he required that she obey man just as Coyote listens to Rabbit.
— Tilok proverb
'' I need you to stand on the log,'' he said after he had packed things and was ready to move.
"What for?"
She appeared miserably weak. Her belly was still cramping after two more incidents. "I can't go standing up, if you'll recall."
"I am happy to see that your sense of humor is returning. I am going to carry you piggyback-style."
"No way. You can't carry me down this mountain with a full pack."
"Just until you're feeling a little better."
When Kier had first arrived, she could barely speak. Able to walk a little now, he knew she hoped she could go on her own. Undoubtedly, she was struggling for every shred of independence she could find. It was important to this woman to be dependant on no man. But her dependence was a fact, and he hadn't a clue as to how he could change it. She said nothing when Kier hoisted her up. Putting her arms around Kier's neck and her legs around his waist, he felt her leaning into his back, supported by his heavy forearms under her thighs. He was able to hold her securely despite the field pack and two M-16s between her and him.
At 115 pounds, her weight alone would not slow him down much. But he had another 40 or 50 pounds of equipment hanging off him, making the long hike a real challenge. Last time he had checked, he was a lean 230 pounds-most of it solid muscle.
Before starting out, Kier threw a line around her back, tying it across his chest. It gave her something to lean against. Once on the trail, he began a smooth jog, which with snowshoes was really more of a fast shuffle.
"This Tillman man is a dangerous hunter," he said. "It will take him no more than another fifteen minutes to find the spot we just left-assuming he went back to Bear's Cave."
After a time, Kier stopped. His labored breathing seemed to fill the quiet. They were in a grove of large pine.
"It's like a park, as though someone cleared all the underbrush," Jessie said.
"People have camped here and burned everything near the ground." Kier kicked off the snowshoes. "Also, the treetops keep out the sun, so only plants that like shade will grow, mostly broadleafs or hemlock."
"Are we going to stop here for the night?"
"We can't." Kier paused. "We've got to keep going."
"Where?" she said.
"A cabin. You'll like it."
"I wanted to tell you, that the guy who I got with a grenade talked before he died. He said his group was doing something with a Tilok mink farm."
"Yeah. I had a captive briefly who told me the same thing. They took five mink to the clinic."
"Why, I wonder?"
"I haven't a clue. They were waiting for that plane to drop the pods and that's why they were here."
"Instant army."
"The crash according to this guy was unexpected."
"Undoubtedly, they were shooting holes in the plane while they were shooting at each other."
"I did some more reading while you were asleep in the hut. I'll tell you about it when we get to the cabin."
Kier led her through the woods beside the open trail.
"Give me just the good stuff of what you read," she said as they walked.
"I want to show you some more passages."
"Fine, fine, but tell me the guts of it now."
"I want to show you why I think they felt the need to clone people. I've got to explain the research. At the cabin. I'll show you."
After backtracking one hundred feet, they stood five feet off the tunnellike passage through the forest that was the pathway.
"Move your feet just slightly, like you would if you were waiting impatiently."
"When he sees this, he will think we are trying to ambush him?" She was catching on.
"He will wonder, and the wondering is enough. It will make him cautious… slow him down."
"Why am I moving and you're not?"
"Because he knows I wouldn't move."
"What? So I'm supposed to be stupid?"
"You'll learn, and then he'll read your knowledge in your track. But if I had said nothing and we had been here for twenty minutes, wouldn't your feet have moved just a tiny bit? If there was no movement, he would think we had only waited for a short time." Kier pointed behind her. "Take one step back." She did as he suggested. Squatting down, Kier flicked on a small light. "Now look at the size of your track. See how large it is and how the borders are blurred? Now look at mine." Kier stepped backward. "If he looks at this, he will wonder if we waited twenty minutes trying to catch him unawares.
"He'll know from my prior track up the trail that I was carrying you, that you were sick or wounded. Then he'll see that here you walked along after me. See the angle of your feet, compared to mine? And the way you stood next to me? He'll think you were waiting for me while I was looking up the trail, probably with my gun at the ready. When you step, you don't raise your feet high. You walk tired."
Kier touched her shoulder. "Let's go. I think he'll get our message. The illusion is at least confusing."
When they returned to the pack, Kier pointed to a log.
"I can walk now," she said, obviously anticipating him.
"I want to jog," Kier said.
"Are you always so… dismissive?"
Kier turned to her, stepping so close that she looked up at him. Reaching out, he touched her face. He let his eyes say the words that he felt.
"Oh, God," she said, meeting his gaze. He thought he saw confusion and uncertainty in her face. Seconds passed before she lowered her eyes.
Kier dropped his hand and turned to pick up his pack. "I'll carry you. It will be faster that way. When you are stronger, you can go on your own."
"Come over here next to the log and I'll climb on."
Chapter 20
Stars are the spirits of our forefathers.
On cloudless nights we are overcome by their smile.
— Tilok proverb
Once again, Kier gave her a line to pass behind her shoulders to provide support for her back. Since she held on without much conscious effort, she soon fell into a stupor. After an indeterminate period of jostling, she prodded herself conscious and saw no snow falling. A hole in the clouds revealed more stars than she had ever seen and a bright moon against the black-velvet sky shone so clearly she could make out its surface texture. In its light, their shadows danced behind them on the satin shoulders of the mountain. Kier walked now at an ordinary pace.
"So tell me again that we're going to sleep in a cabin with a fire."
"In a cabin, by a fire. But it will be tomorrow."
"So I wasn't imagining things," she said with some hope that it was really true.
"The only other guy who knows about the cabin is in Montana. But it's up to us to get there."
"What do you mean?"
"I would like you to consider just trusting me and not having me explain it. How do you feel about that?"
"Why don't you wish to discuss it?"
"It's one of the reasons I am carrying you."
Confused, Jessie looked around. To her left stood a sheer granite wall. Instantly, she looked down to her right and sucked in a breath. It was a straight drop. In fact, she couldn't see what Kier was walking on.
"Is this a trail?"
"Of sorts," he said cryptically. "I need to concentrate on keeping my balance. Try not to move."
She noticed now that he was carrying his snowshoes.
Her gaze wandered over the outline of the tiny ledge that they traversed. For the first time she observed the long stick in his right hand that he held in front of them, feeling along the rock ledge. As she considered the danger of such tenuous and blind footing, she could feel her heart beginning to pound. Her cotton mouth made swallowing difficult. For a moment, she shut her eyes tightly, telling herself to relax. A few slow, regular breaths helped.
Again she looked. They were moving across a cliff on a narrow ledge. Below there was an almost vertical decline. Directly overhead occasional rock overhangs blocked out the clear night sky.
After a time, the rock wall to the left disappeared, and there was nothing but snow to both sides and below them. Ahead was another mountain, rising gently from the end of their ledge. Far below she could see where the landscape turned dark in the moon's glow-a forest. Kier snapped on a light. He was knee deep in snow on a razorback ridge. Now, on both sides, an abyss invited her mind to take leave of thought and embrace panic.
"Oh my God." She meant it as a prayer.
"I would like for you to carefully consider something."
