The Monkey Wrench Gang (45 page)

Floods? The sand is powder dry, the bedrock of the gulch as arid as iron. Nevertheless, it is a drainage channel.

“We’ll be shit out of luck if this place gets flooded,” Hayduke says.

“We’ll take some losses,” says Smith, “and I wish we had time to find a better hiding place. Sure as shootin’ it’s gonna rain.”

“Pretty clear now.”

“It’s building. See that ring around the moon? Tomorrow night you’ll see a solid overcast. Next day it’ll rain.”

“Is that a weather forecast?” Bonnie asks.

“Well,” hedges Smith, “like you might of noticed by now there’s
two things a person can’t depend on. One of them is the weather and I ain’t sayin’ what the other one is.”

Three low hoot-owl hoots from Doc on lookout.

“Reckon we better go, George,” says Smith, hoisting his pack on his back, buckling the hip band.

Hayduke slings the rifle across his back and the pack on top of it. The rifle is light, a chopped-down sporting model, but it makes an awkward package wedged between his clavicles and the pack frame. He could sling it over one shoulder, and will later, but right now needs both hands free to scramble up the sandstone. He thinks: Ready anyhow, I guess, if a man is ever ready for anything.

Reinforcements coming for the Team. Three more pairs of headlights are moving up from the south, amber-colored in the dust. Got their flats fixed. The other vehicles remain shut down, invisible, their crews unseen. Same goes for the helicopter.

“They’ll be spreading out, I’d say,” Smith says. “We better head this gulch here and then turn north, single file if you’ll kindly foller me. Keep your feet on stone and leave no tracks and we’ll be all right, least as long as this slickrock holds out which it won’t all the way, naturally. Huh?”

“I said,” Bonnie says, “how far to the Maze?”

“Ain’t far. Watch out for this prickly pear, honey.”

“How far is that?”

“Well, Bonnie, I’d say we’re only about two miles—three miles at the most—from the turnoff.”

“You mean the turnoff to the Maze?”

“That’s right.”

“Good. So how far from the turnoff to the Maze itself? In miles.”

“Well it’s a pretty good walk but it’s a nice night.”

“How far?”

“The Maze, that’s a mighty big piece of country, Bonnie, and if you mean the near end of it or the far end of it that makes considerable difference. And that’s not counting the up and down.”

“The up and down what?”

“Canyon walls. The fins.”

“What exactly are you talking about?”

“I mean this country, it’s mostly stood on edge, honey. Some of it you can stand on but most of it goes straight up or straight down. You can get boxed in or rimmed up pretty easy. Which means that usually the long way around is the shortest way. Usually the only way.”

“How far, please?”

“Walk ten miles to get one mile, if you see what I mean.”

“How far?”

“Thirty-five miles to Lizard Rock. Where we cached some water. We could take shortcuts if there was any but there ain’t. None that I know about. But it’s complicated country and you never know what you’re gonna find.”

“So we won’t get there tonight?”

“We won’t even try.”

Hayduke, bringing up the rear of the file, stops to remove his pack and re-sling the rifle. In the pack he carries food, six quarts of water, ammunition and too much else. Plus the rifle on his shoulder, the loaded gun belt and holstered revolver, the knife sheathed on his hip. A walking arsenal and it hurts; but he is too stubborn to leave any more behind.

They pad ahead through the vague moonlight, staying on solid stone, skirting the lip of the shadowy ravine on their right. Smith pauses frequently to look and listen, then leads on. No sign anywhere of their enemy; nevertheless the enemy waits out there somewhere, in those shadows under the fifteen-hundred-foot cliffs, among the quietly breathing junipers.

Bonnie’s head is full of questions. Who brought in the helicopter—state police, Sheriff’s Office, Park Service, or other members of the Search and Rescue Team? If we can’t get to the Maze tonight, what do we do when the sun comes up? Also I’m hungry and my feet are going to hurt pretty soon and who put the pig iron in my pack?

“I’m hungry,” she says.

Smith halts, hushing her. He whispers, “Them other folks is out there, Bonnie. We’re gettin’ close. Wait here a minute.”

He puts down his pack and glides off like a phantom, a shadow, a Paiute, across the rolling sea of petrified dunes toward the road. Bonnie watches his lanky figure recede into the moonlight, fading into moonshade, phasing itself out. Now you see him, now you don’t. Seldom becoming Never Seen. Bonnie and the others remove their packs. She unzips the side pocket and pulls out a Baggie full of her personal mixture of raisins, nuts, M & Ms, sunflower seeds. Doc chews on a stick of jerky. Hayduke stands and waits, staring after Smith. He unslings the rifle, resting the rubber butt plate on his boot.

“Why the gun?” Bonnie whispers.

“This?” Hayduke stares at her. “This is a rifle.” He grins. “
This
is my gun.”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“Then don’t ask dumb questions.”

“Why did you bring that gun?”

Doc intervenes, the moderator. “Now now, let’s keep it down.”

For a minute or so they remain silent, listening.

Off in the desert, at an indefinable distance, an owl calls. One call. The great horned owl. They hear a second call.

“Two hoots?” Bonnie says. “What’s that mean, I forget.”

“Wait….”

From farther away again, or not so far, but from an opposite direction, comes the sound of another great horned owl, hooting gently into the moonshine and the night. The second owl calls three times. Meaning danger, on guard; meaning distress, trouble, I need help. Or meaning in owl language: You there, little bunny rabbit hiding under that bush, I know you’re there, you know I’m here and we both know your ass is mine. Come.

Which call is true? Which owl is false? Neither? Both? They hadn’t planned on real owls.

A whisper of light feet on rock. Seldom Seen emerges from the moonlight. Eyes shining, all tooth and ear and leather and hair,
breathing slightly harder than normal, he says, very quietly, “Let’s go.”

Groaning and creaking, they struggle back into their packs. “What’d you see?” asks Hayduke.

“Them Search and Rescue people are all over the place and they’re not waiting till sunup to come find us. I saw six of ’em along the road and I don’t know how many more come in that goddanged infernal heliclopter up ahead. Every man I saw has a shotgun or a carbine and they’re all carrying them little walkie-talkie radios and spreading out in a skirmish line. Like beating the brush for rabbits.”

“We’re the rabbits.”

“We’re the rabbits. We can’t get back to the road so let’s find a way across this gulch here. Follow me.”

Smith leads back for a short distance along the route they had come, finds a descent into the gulch and disappears. The others, Hayduke on rearguard duty, scramble down after him and find Smith ahead in the sandy wash, making tracks. Can’t be helped. On either side the walls are nearly perpendicular, twenty to forty feet high. They stumble through the shadows, blindly following their guide.

After a while Smith finds an opening in the wall, a tributary wash. They go upwash over the dry sand and within a hundred yards reach an exit, a sloping dome of stone on the inside of a curve. Up they scramble like monkeys, on fingers and toes, Doc puffing a bit, and regain the moonlight and open terrain. Smith strikes off northeasterly toward a sharply defined skyline of buttes and pinnacles. He walks like an old-time prewar pre-pickup-truck Indian, with a steady loping stride, the feet pointed straight ahead, perfectly parallel. The others hurry to keep up.

“How many more … little canyons … like that?” Bonnie gasps. “Between here and … I mean … where we’re going?”

“Seventy-five, maybe two hundred. Save your wind, honey.”

The long march is under way. At every hundred paces or so Smith pauses to look, listen, test the air currents, feel the vibrations. Hayduke at the end of the file, catching his rhythm, alternates Smith’s vigils with his own, stopping while the others march for an extra look
around. He is thinking of that helicopter: what a nice coup it would make. If he could only slip away for a half hour….

Hayduke lingers behind, pausing to tap a kidney. Absorbed, self-satisfied, he contemplates with pleasure the steady drumming on the stone. Purified Schlitz, shining by the moon. Thank God I am a man. Flat rock. Splashing his boots. He is shaking it, trying to free that last drop which will inevitably drip down his leg anyhow, about to tuck it away and rezip, when he hears a sound. A foreign noise, alien to the desert peace. A metallic click and clash.

A powerful ray of light sweeps across the slickrock—from a spotlight attached to the helicopter?—impaling Smith and Abbzug on its beam. They stand frozen for a moment, pinned by the white lance, then start running among the junipers. The light beam follows, catching them, losing them, catching Doc Sarvis lagging behind.

Hayduke draws his revolver. He kneels, steadies his gun hand with his left and aims at the turning light. Fires. The shattering muzzle blast stuns him for a second, as always. Missed the target too, of course. The disembodied light, like a great glaring eye, comes searching Hayduke’s way. He fires and misses again. Should unsling the rifle but there isn’t time. He is about to fire his third shot when the light goes out. Whoever was guiding it has suddenly realized that he is too close to the target. That he is the target.

Hayduke runs awkwardly after the others, the enormous pack riding on his back. From behind comes the sound of running feet, shouts, a spasm of symbolic gunfire. Hayduke stops long enough to snap off three shots, aiming at nothing in particular—for in the vague and treacherous moonlight there is nothing in particular to shoot at that he can see, and even if there were he couldn’t hit it with this jolting cannon in his hand. But the noise slows the pursuers, makes them cautious. The shouting dies away; the Team is busy with its radios. Scrambled transmissions jam the airwaves, excited voices canceling one another out.

Running, the awkward burden on his back, Hayduke catches up to Doc, huffing along like a steam engine far behind Smith and Abbzug—dim figures jogging over the rise ahead. Hayduke can see that
they have shed their big backpacks. In his rear the shouts resume, orders, instructions, the thump of running boots. Spotlight on the move again. Two spotlights.

“We got to … dump these packs,” he says to Doc.

“God yes!”

“Not right here—wait….”

They reach the rim of another incipient canyon, a typical slickrock-country gash in the stone, with overhanging walls and inaccessible floor—a cleft too wide to leap, too deep and too precipitous to descend.

“Here,” says Hayduke, stopping. Doc stops beside him, blowing like a horse. “We’ll drop them here,” Hayduke says, “under the wall here. Come back and get them later.” He takes off his pack, pulls out a coiled rope, then gropes deep in the big pocket for his box of rifle ammunition. Can’t immediately find it, jammed as it is beneath sixty pounds of other gear. Sound of pursuit coming closer, the heavy boots running. Too close. Hayduke lowers his pack and pack frame over the edge, lets go: they drop fifteen feet onto something rough.
Crump!
That beautiful new Kelty. Attachment to possessions. Yes! He slings the coil of rope across his back, carries the rifle in his hand.

“Hurry up, Doc.”

Dr. Sarvis is wrestling with something in his pack, trying to draw a black leather bag up and out from its tight fit in the center of the load.

“Come on
come on!
What’re you doing?”

“Just a moment, George. Have to get my … bag out of here.”

“Drop it!”

“Can’t go on without my bag, George.”

“What the hell is that?”

“My medical bag.”

“For chrissake, we don’t need that. Let’s go.”

“Just a moment.” Doc finally gets his satchel out, shoves the rest of the backpack over the edge. “I’m ready.”

Hayduke glances back. Shadows scamper over the rock, flitting among the junipers, approaching rapidly. How far? One hundred, two
hundred, five hundred yards? In the crazy moonlight he can hardly guess. A hand-carried spotlight flicks on, the bright beam seeking prey.

“Run for it, Doc.”

They pound over the stony terrace where they’d last glimpsed Bonnie and Smith. And find them waiting on the other side. They carry only a couple of canteens.

“Right behind us,” Hayduke gasps, running past them. “Keep going.”

Without a word all follow, Smith moving up to run at Hayduke’s side. “George,” he says, “let’s use that rope … before we get … rimmed up….”

“Right.”

Doc lags again, blowing hard, the satchel bumping against his knee at every pace. Bonnie grabs it, carries it on.

They run along the edge of the small canyon, Hayduke looking for a tree, a shrub, a boulder, a stony knob, some sort of projection to double the rope around. Rappel time again. But there is nothing usable in sight. How far down? Ten feet? Thirty? A hundred?

Hayduke stops at a point where the wall below is neither overhanging nor vertical but bulges outward, sloping a bit, not much, toward the bottom. Good rappel pitch. He peers down. Can’t see the bottom. Darkness and silence below, the faintly perceived forms of shrub and juniper.

“Here.” He uncoils his rope, shakes it out and, as Doc and Bonnie come close, panting desperately, faces flushed and glistening with sweat, he takes them both without a word in a big embrace, loops one end of the rope around them and ties it snug with a nonslipping bowline knot.

“Now what?” Bonnie says.

“We’re going down into the canyon. You and Doc first.”

Bonnie looks over the edge. “You’re crazy.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll belay you. You’ll be all right. Seldom, gimme a hand here. Okay, down you go. Back off the edge.”

“We’ll get killed.”

“No you won’t. We’ve got you. Back over the edge there. Lean back. Lean way back, goddammit. Both of you. Keep your feet flat against the rock. Okay, that’s better. Now, walk down, backward. Don’t try to crawl down, there’s no way. And don’t grab the rope so hard, that won’t help. Lean back.
Lean back
for chrissake or I’ll kill you! Feet flat on the rock. Just use the rope for balance. Walk on down. Easy, see? That’s better. Keep going. Keep going. Holy sweet motherfuck. Okay. Fine. Where are you? You down?”