The Hunter From the Woods (21 page)

“Yes, but there’s a very big difference between our futures. You’ll be a prisoner of war and I’ll be up there again. I
belong
up there, Michael. It’s where I truly live. Is there a place you truly live?”

Michael grunted quietly. The hunter from the woods is a very long way from home, he thought. “No particular place,” he replied.

“I’m sorry for you, then. All men need a place where they truly live. Where their souls and spirits are free. The sky is my place. I find it beautiful, even on a stormy day when the planes are grounded. It is a woman with a thousand faces, all of them exquisite. Are you married, Michael?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” He gave a short laugh. “As if I should ever wear such a chain! The first thing a wife would say to me is,
don’t fly so high or so fast
. And listening to her, and wanting to please her, would kill me as it has killed so many other pilots with…” Gantt searched for the right word. “Attachments,” he finished. He laughed again, only this time Michael thought it sounded a little forced. “Men like us don’t need attachments, do we?”

“Men like
us
?”

“The risk-takers. The men who
must
be on the battlefront. Take you, for one. Your reconnaissance work. That puts you at great risk, doesn’t it? And you’re out front, blazing a trail through the mines
and tank traps? Don’t tell me you’re simply a desk jockey, because I won’t believe it.”

“I’m not simply that,” Michael said.

“A man of action can recognize a man of action,” Gantt told him. “It’s in the way you move. And you’re confident, even now, even with your broken shoulder, that I’ll never get you to that outpost, aren’t you? Even with a pistol at your back, you’re confident. You think I’ll make a mistake you can take advantage of. Yes? And I’m confident that I will
not
make a mistake. So what does that make us?”

“Two confident fools in the desert with a couple of swallows of water in a shot-up canteen,” Michael answered. 

“No! It makes us comrades of sorts! Like chess players, you see? Two men of action, reduced to the barest minimum to survive! A challenge, to be overcome.”

“I think you need some more covering for your head.”

“Maybe I do, Englisher, but I’ll tell you…I find your confidence in this situation to be very interesting.
And
entertaining. I’m just waiting to see what you’re going to do to keep yourself out of a POW camp. Because I
know
you are going to try.”

“You would,” Michael said.

“Of course I would! I’d never give up trying. And that’s why we’re comrades of sorts, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.” A movement to the right caught Michael’s attention. When he looked, he saw across the white plain the small figure in the dirty rags and the khaki tam about a hundred meters away, keeping their pace.

“Ah, there he is again,” said Gantt. “Now…he’s not a Dahlasiffa scout, or he’d be on a camel. In fact, why
isn’t
he on a camel? I make him out to be…about four feet six? A small boy, I’m thinking? All alone out here? And why might that be?”

“If you want to find out,” Michael said, “offer him water.”

“And use up even a swallow of what we have?
Now
who needs his head covered a little better?”

“If he’s a native, he might know where a well is. In fact, he may be on his way there. So…one swallow of water for him could wind up filling the canteen. Once we get a decent plug in the hole,” Michael added.

They walked on in silence, but Michael could tell that Rolfe Gantt was thinking.

The wind had died and the sand had spun down but the sun had grown hotter. Michael’s mouth was parched. He figured the air temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten, and then the sun’s heat was intensified off the desert’s surface. Still, he was sweating and that was a good sign. When the sweat stopped…not good.

“All right,” Gantt said at last. “Tell him we have water.”

Michael abruptly stopped and Gantt pulled himself up short, then backed away a couple of steps. Out across the plain, the small boy also stopped and stared in their direction.

Michael made the declaration in, again, both Tamazight and then Tuareg Berber.

There was no response. “Hold up the canteen,” Michael said, and Gantt obeyed. Then Michael called out once more. His voice rolled through the silence, and the silence closed up in its wake.

No response. The figure just stood there, staring.

“He’s not coming in.” Gantt opened the canteen, put it under his head covering and took a quick sip that he let linger in his mouth for a few seconds before he swallowed. “Here.”

Michael sipped and also let the water, a warm yet delicious nectar, sit in his mouth. He sloshed it around and then, reluctantly, downed it. Gantt put the canteen’s strap back over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” said the pilot.

For the next hour, the figure stayed with them at a distance of never less than a hundred meters. They came upon an area of sand dunes that rose up in tremendous golden waves. What looked like piles of burned black rubble lay about, the perfect shelters for horned vipers and the three-inch-long scorpions they’d seen crawling around. Michael and Gantt at the same time saw the footprints leading from the hard stony surface up one of the dunes and over. Someone was walking ahead of them.

The small figure had vanished.

When they reached the top of the first dune, a hard slog for anyone no matter how physically fit, they saw the person who’d made the footprints struggling onward about two hundred meters ahead. It was a man in tan-colored clothes and wearing black boots. He had wrapped a dark green kerchief around his head. He fell and stood up, fell again and stood up again, and kept going.

“Oh my God,” Gantt said softly. “I think…that’s Hartler. My wingman. He’s wearing on his head the scarf his wife sent him.” He cupped a hand to his mouth to shout for his friend.

Before the shout could emerge, a piece of black rubble hit Gantt on the right shoulder. At nearly the same time, Michael saw six men on camels come up over a dune and surround Gantt’s wingman. Hartler fell to his knees. All the six men carried rifles, and one who seemed to be in the lead—a man wearing robes dyed bright crimson and a keffiyeh the same vivid hue—aimed his rifle at Hartler’s head.

“Get down,” Michael quietly told Gantt, who was already lowering himself to the sand. Michael got down on his stomach. Both of them watched over the dune’s rise at the scene as it unfolded, and both knew they were in the presence of the Dahlasiffa.

Two of the other men threw ropes around Hartler. One of the camels made a braying noise like harsh laughter, and two more got into an argument that involved the snapping of teeth until a short whip settled the disagreement. The man wearing the crimson robes and keffiyeh shot Hartler in the head at close range. The green kerchief took flight. When the rifle went off, Gantt shivered. Hartler pitched forward. His body was dragged between a pair of camels off across the sand and away.

Neither Gantt nor Michael moved for some time. Gantt’s breathing sounded like a key trying to turn in a rusted lock.

The Walther was clutched in Gantt’s hand and the hand was there within Michael’s reach. But first things first.

Michael grabbed up a handful of sand and flung it into the flyer’s eyes. Then he went after the gun hand, even as the blinded Gantt clubbed with it at Michael’s injured shoulder.

Grappling for the gun, they slid halfway down the massive dune. A blow from the Walther hit Michael’s collarbone on his wounded side and sent pain tearing through him. In that instant of agony his teeth began to lengthen; he could feel them bursting free from the gums. Small hairs rose up on the back of his right hand and along the arm, and the fingers began to change their shape.

Gantt’s knee crashed into his jaw. Michael fell backward, sliding away. Lights of every color glittered behind his eyes. He felt his spine contort as the change gnawed at him from the inside out. He got up on his knees and was met by a boot to the ribs. The pain of that, and the certainty that Gantt would shoot him if this meeting of men of action were to continue much longer, caused Michael to slam and lock his soul cage. The enraged green-eyed wolf held its anger in check. It slinked back into the dark. Then it settled down again to wait for a more opportune moment in which to sink its teeth into Rolfe Gantt’s throat.

“Do you think you’re
clever
? So damned
clever
? You’re a fool, is what you are!” Gantt, his makeshift keffiyeh nearly torn off, was standing over Michael with the pistol aimed at his enemy’s head. “I should shoot you!” he seethed. “One bullet to your brain and I’m finished with you!”

Michael looked up at the man with his single good eye. His own keffiyeh had come undone and his face was exposed. He spat out some fresh blood, the smell of which made his thirst and hunger explode. He managed a tight smile, but he had some trouble drawing enough breath to speak. A couple of broken ribs was all he needed. “If shooting me…is…worth bringing them back…after they hear the noise, then go ahead.”

Gantt’s finger twitched on the trigger. But when nothing happened during the next three seconds, Michael knew the shot would not be fired. His shoulder was killing him. Currents of heat and cold coursed through his arm. It had come out of the scarf and Michael had to ease it back into place, his teeth gritted against the torment. So much for the man of action, he thought grimly.

Gantt’s attention was suddenly diverted from Michael Gallatin. “What the hell do
you
want?” he asked someone, and Michael turned his head to see the boy in the dirty clothes, the brown keffiyeh and the khaki tam standing there next to the rubble pile he must’ve been hiding in. Michael surmised that the boy had seen the Dahlasiffa first, and he’d thrown a piece of rock at Gantt to keep the flyer from calling Hartler and getting them all killed.

“Ask him what he wants,” Gantt directed. Michael did, in the two languages, but he got no answer. “What’s wrong with him? Can’t he
speak
?”

You can’t speak
? Michael asked, choosing the more common Tamazight.

The boy didn’t move at first. And then he lifted his right hand and made a chopping motion across where his mouth would be under the keffiyeh. He repeated it a second time, with more vicious emphasis. Michael thought he understood. Painfully, he got up and walked to the boy, who began to retreat.

No danger here
, said Michael.
Let me see
.

The retreat ceased. The tam and the keffiyeh came off. The boy was about ten, with curly black hair and olive-hued skin and dark sunken eyes that had seen things no boy of ten should have ever witnessed. They were so full of misery and the shadows of sadness that they were frightening to peer into. The boy opened his mouth.

“His tongue’s been cut out. Looks recent,” Michael said to Gantt. Then, to the boy:
Your tribe did this?
That got a shake of the head and a hand pointing toward a bloody green kerchief that lay in the sand two hundred meters away.

Dahlasiffa?
Michael asked. The boy nodded once and closed his mouth. He wrapped the keffiyeh around his head and face, leaving a slit for the haunted eyes to stare through. The jaunty tam went back on, a soldier’s cap for the walking wounded.

“What do you think happened to him?” Gantt asked, standing behind Michael.

“War between tribes, I’m supposing. Maybe the Dahlasiffa raided his village. Could be they left him alive and removed his tongue as a warning. Maybe he’d befriended a Commonwealth soldier and the Dahlasiffa didn’t like that.” Michael rubbed his ribcage and thought it must be bruised instead of broken. He had gotten his wind back. He looked at his hand and saw no trace of the wolf. For now.

“Damn it,” Gantt said, but whether he was saying it for the sake of the boy’s plight or the fact that they had a straggler in their charge was unclear.

Michael noticed something the boy was doing with his left hand. It was balled up and he kept shaking it back and forth. There was a clicking sound. Michael reached out and prodded the hand to get him to open it. The boy resisted for a few seconds, the solemn dark eyes revealing nothing.

Then the hand opened.

In the palm was a pair of yellowed dice with red pips.

The boy closed his hand almost at once, and kept shaking the dice within it.

A gift from the same soldier who’d given him the tam? Michael wondered. “Give him some water,” he told Gantt.

“Hey, you don’t order
me
around!”

Michael turned to face him. The green eyes were hard and, as Gantt would have put it, supremely confident. “
Water
,” he repeated. The flyer muttered a curse that would have knocked down a B-17, but the canteen’s strap came off his shoulder. He uncapped the flask, stepped forward and gave it to the boy.

Drink
, Michael told him.

The boy did. One sip under the keffiyeh, and one sip only. He knew from the amount of water in the canteen how desperate their situation was. He handed it back to Gantt, who had already gotten his head covering back into an orderly position.

Michael was running out of his knowledge of Tamazight. He asked the boy,
A
well nearby?

The boy made a motion with his right hand like a bird taking flight. He ended it with a finger pointing to the southwest. Michael took it to mean:
A distance
.

Which, to these people, could be many, many miles.

“What are you saying to him?”

“Asking him if there’s a well anywhere near. He’s saying…I think…that it’s a distance away, to the southwest.”

“How far?”

“He couldn’t tell me.”

“I intend for us to continue our present course.”

“All right,” Michael said. “We probably each have one swallow remaining.” He began to work his shirt back into position over his head and face. Had he ever been so feeble in his life? he asked himself. Everything was such a damned labor. The heat was sapping even the will to move. “Continue your present course. I’m going with the boy to find a well.”