Deathwatch

by Robb White

  “Ben was standing there helplessly staring at the stone wall when something struck his arm, forcing it back against the rock, and then the sound of the shot cracked the silence. With the sound still echoing, Ben shuffled back into the protection of the slab and stood plastered against it. Moving his arm only a little, he stared in amazement at a small purplish hole in it halfway between his wrist and elbow.”

  ROBB WHITE was born in the Philippine Islands, where his father was a missionary. After resigning his commission in the Navy, Mr. White began the adventurous wanderings which have taken him around the world. He has written many short stories and twenty-two books, including The Survivor, Silent Ship, Silent Sea, Up Periscope, and Our Virgin Island.

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:

  THE CHOCOLATE WAR, Robert Cormier

  I AM THE CHEESE, Robert Cormier

  THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES ANYWAY, Robert Cormier

  THE KIDNAPPING OF CHRISTINA LATTIMORE, Joan Lowery Nixon

  THE SÉANCE, Joan Lowery Nixon

  A LITTLE BIT DEAD, Chap Reaver

  TWELVE SHOTS: Outstanding Short Stories About Guns, Harry Mazer

  SNOW BOUND, Harry Mazer

  DOWNRIVER, Will Hobbs

  BRIAN’S WINTER, Gary Paulsen

  Published by

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1972 by Robb White

  All rights reserved. For information address Doubleday Books

  for Young Readers, New York, New York 10036.

  The trademark Laurel-Leaf Library® is registered in the U.S.

  Patent and Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and

  Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79144-3

  RL: 5.6

  v3.1

  This book is for my wife Joan

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  1

  “THERE HE IS!” Madec whispered. “Keep still!”

  There had been a movement up on the ridge of the mountain. For a moment something had appeared between two rock outcrops.

  “I didn’t see any horns,” Ben said.

  “Keep quiet!” Madec whispered fiercely.

  Ben crouched behind a boulder and watched this man get into position on his stomach, his legs apart, the heavy rifle resting on a small, flat stone. Madec slowly lowered his face to the cheek piece and eased his hand down to the trigger. Now he lay motionless, looking through the long, fattened telescope sight.

  Ben had never known bighorn sheep to behave this way. There had been five of them on the ridge but something had alarmed them and they had disappeared. By now they should be half a mile from here and still going.

  “I’d wait until I saw some horns,” Ben whispered.

  Without raising his cheek from the stock, Madec said, “I saw horns.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You weren’t looking.”

  “I was looking.”

  “Not through a ten-power scope.”

  Ben stayed crouched, hanging his weight on the sling of his little .22 Hornet. The range was at least three hundred yards, but this man Madec was dangerous with a gun. On the way into the desert Madec had shot at anything that moved—and some things, like a Gila monster lying peacefully in the shade, that did not move. And Madec did not miss. The gun was a beautifully made .358 Magnum Mauser action on a Winchester 70 stock with enough power to knock down an elephant—or turn a sleeping Gila monster into a splatter. A bighorn hit with that gun would drop where he stood. Ben hoped that whatever it was up there would not show itself again.

  Madec huddled over the gun. There was an intensity in his eyes far beyond that of just hunting a sheep. It was the look of murder.

  There weren’t many bighorn left in the world and Ben couldn’t understand why anyone would want to kill one, and yet, for the past three days, that was all this Madec had thought about. Killing a bighorn and having the head mounted to hang on the wall of his office in Los Angeles.

  “Ben, my young friend, you’re not the type of man who can understand big-game hunting,” Madec had told him the first night in the desert.

  Ben had looked at Madec’s face in the firelight, the skin seeming cold even in that warm, soft glow. “The only hunting I understand is when it’s the only way you can get something to eat,” Ben had said. “Since we don’t need one for camp meat, shooting a bighorn doesn’t sound like a big deal to me.”

  That had really teed Madec off. “You may not know it, but the chances of getting a permit to kill a bighorn are about one in a million. I’ve been waiting for years hoping my name would be drawn from among the thousands of guys putting in for one. When you come out into this desert and risk your life stalking one of the smartest and wariest animals in the world, and you outsmart him and take him on his own ground, you’ve accomplished something. That’s something you’ll never understand.”

  Madec had irritated Ben from the start, and he was sorry now that he had agreed to come out here with him, although he needed the money Madec was going to pay him; it meant a semester in college, maybe two.

  “We can go back to town tonight,” Ben had told him, “and you can get a guide who thinks the way you do.”

  “A local-yokel hotshot I don’t need,” Madec had said. “All I want is somebody to show me where the bighorn are, and they said in town you knew as much about their range as anybody.”

  “If this is a big competition between you and a sheep,” Ben had said, “wouldn’t you feel a lot better doing it by yourself?”

  “Look, my permit only gives me seven days to kill a bighorn, and I could spend all seven of them roaming around out here and not even find one. You know where they range, and I’m paying you to take me there. From then on it’s just me and them, and I don’t need some sand-dune expert telling me what to do.”

  Ben looked at Madec sprawled on the ground. For three days and two nights Ben had been in the desert with this man; and the only time he had ever laughed was after he told some story about how smart he was. Madec never lost a business deal, according to Madec, and in every deal somebody got hurt. It wasn’t enough for Madec to outwit somebody, outdeal a man in some tricky way, the guy had to get really hurt, too.

  Listening to Madec made Ben glad he wasn’t in the same world as this man. In Ben’s town on the edge of the desert there wasn’t anything for a man like Madec to wheel and deal for. And, Ben thought, even after I’m a geologist and working for some big oil company, I still won’t be in the same world as men like Madec.

  Ben looked down at his Jeep on the flat desert far below them. The heat around it made it seem as though it were underwater, the shape of it wavery and indistinct.

  Four more days of this man. But he was getting paid for every one of them.

  Ben relaxed and listened to the silence. The heat seemed to have killed every sound. It was as though he were in an enormous bowl of silence; as though from the purple mountains sixty miles east to the brown mountains forty miles west all sound had been sil
enced by the intense, still heat. Even a plane from Edwards Air Force Base, the plane itself invisible, moved in silence, leaving two thin white lines across the hot blue sky.

  The sound of the gun was absolutely enormous. It was as though it had shattered the ground and cracked the blue vault of the sky and rolled the mountains back. The thing roared and echoed and lunged into the silence and seemed to roll on, mile after mile, never to stop.

  And then, just as suddenly, there was the dead silence again.

  Madec’s voice sounded small and flat after the great roar of the gun. He didn’t even seem interested in what he was saying. “Well, I got Him.” He was still lying prone as he worked the bolt, the brass empty flicking out and sailing end over end, then tinkling down among the stones at Ben’s feet. He reached down and picked it up, tossing it from hand to hand, for it was still hot from the explosion and the desert.

  Madec rose slowly and pulled the rifle up by the sling. He took the lens caps out of his pocket and carefully fitted them on the ends of the scope. “Your uncle tells me you’re working to get money to go to college,” Madec said.

  “That’s right,” Ben said, wondering why Madec suddenly wanted to chat.

  Madec dropped the clip out of the gun and slowly replaced the cartridge. “You want to make a deal?” he asked.

  Ben watched him shove the clip back in and hit it with the flat of his hand.

  Madec looked up. “Well?”

  “What sort of deal?”

  “Money,” Madec said. “For school. You see, Ben, this is the only chance I’ll ever get for a bighorn. They’ll never pull my name out of that hat again, not in a million years. So, naturally, I want a good specimen, a ram with a really good rack I can be proud of.”

  “You said you saw horns.”

  “I did, but not for long enough to tell whether a tip had been broken off, or they were all chipped up from fighting. You never can tell until you’ve really examined them, you know.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “It really doesn’t even involve you,” Madec told him. “But I’m giving up a week of my time and going to a lot of expense to get a good specimen. That’s all I want. So let’s go take a look at what I killed. But if it isn’t a good specimen …” Madec stood looking at him, smiling now.

  Ben thought of the bighorn. He usually saw them when the sun was low and the hard blue of the sky was fading into broad bands of soft colors and the mountains were turning purple. They would stand on the ridges then, probably looking a lot bigger than they really were. Just standing there against the sky looking as though they owned the desert, the huge, curved horns beautifully balanced. He had a feeling that when he and Madec got to the top of the ridge that sheep, with a .358 Magnum through it, was going to look small and forlorn, pitiful. A bloody thing lying among the hot stones, the big horns twisting its neck into some awkward position.

  “If it’s not the specimen you want I don’t report anything, and we just go on hunting for four more days. Is that it?” Ben asked.

  “It’s not up to you to report anything anyway, is it?” Madec asked. “I’m the hunter here. Right?”

  “Right,” Ben said. “But I don’t want any part of you going around shooting every bighorn in the desert until you get the specimen you want.”

  Madec laughed. “Ben, now you know as well as I do that I probably won’t even get another shot at one. So don’t be a Boy Scout. If this isn’t a good specimen how about—for double the money and a hundred-dollar bonus—we keep on hunting? If we don’t find anything we’ll come back and pick up this one. And you still get the extra money. Okay?”

  Ben remembered Madec’s stories about the deals he made. Somebody always got cheated—and hurt.

  But there were mountains where the bighorn never went. Mountains that looked exactly like these. Madec could spend the rest of his life looking for bighorn in those ranges and never find one.

  “Okay,” Ben said.

  “After all, I’m not asking you to do anything illegal, Ben. I’m just paying you some nice money to drive me around. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Not a thing,” Ben said.

  “Then it’s a deal,” Madec said, slinging the gun over his shoulder.

  Ben watched him start up the ridge, his feet on the stones making a lot of noise in the silence of the place. Ben knew now that whatever was lying there on the ridge wasn’t going to be good enough for Madec. It could be the biggest ram in the mountains but it wouldn’t be good enough.

  Ben looked around, picking out landmarks so he could find this place again. As far as he was concerned, Madec had seen the last bighorn he was going to see, and whatever he had killed up there was going to be all he killed.

  Madec was well ahead of him as he started climbing, the heat blasting down on him as though it had real weight.

  Ben had reached a little area of shale, the flat rocks sliding under his boots, when Madec got to the top and disappeared behind a boulder, so that only the muzzle of the .358 could be seen moving along.

  A patch of pale brown showed lying in a crack of the cliff face, and as Ben looked down at where they had been he had to admit that Madec had done a good job of shooting.

  He was not surprised to see Madec coming back, in such a hurry that he almost fell. Ben waited for him, wondering what he was going to say about the sheep he’d killed. That the horns weren’t big enough? Or were chipped?

  Okay, Ben thought, four more days of you, but you’ve seen your last bighorn.

  “What do you know?” Madec said, not even stopping as he went down the mountain. “I missed him. I thought I had him cold, but I missed him.”

  Ben looked at the man in disgust. He must have killed a ewe or a young ram with no rack at all and now didn’t want to admit it. “You didn’t miss him,” Ben said. “He’s lying right there in the crack in that cliff.”

  “No,” Madec said over his shoulder as he kept on going down. “I thought that was a sheep, too, but it’s only a rock. I missed. Must have jarred the scope climbing up here or this heat got to it, because ordinarily I don’t miss a shot like that. Let’s go see if we can find that herd again.” At last Madec stopped and turned around. “You’ve still got your deal if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “That’s not what’s worrying me,” Ben said.

  “So let’s go! If we can get around these mountains before sunset we might see ’em again.”

  Ben looked up at what he had thought was a dead sheep. What difference did it make to him that Madec was a liar?

  “I’m not paying you to stand around,” Madec snapped. “I’m paying you to hunt bighorn. So move it!”

  “The thing that interests me,” Ben said quietly, “is that rocks don’t bleed much.” He pointed with his thumb at the pale stone of the cliff. From the bottom of the V where the stone had cracked, a trickle of blood, very dark red in the hot sunlight, ran slowly, the heat congealing it on the stone face.

  Madec, his head down, walked slowly back up to where Ben was standing. Then he lifted his eyes and grinned. “I’m a liar, Ben. I didn’t miss that shot. Remember, you told me to look for horns, and I said I’d seen ’em. I was lying then, too. I shot a little female. I just didn’t want to tell you because I was · afraid you’d call off the hunt. You understand that, don’t you, Ben?”

  Ben shrugged. “Okay, I’ll bury it.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Because the game warden will spot her from his chopper and know who killed her, is one reason. You want some more?”

  “You can’t see her from the air. I had a hard time finding her. I was right on top of her before I saw her.

  “You’re not a game warden,” Ben said and kept on climbing.

  “Ben,” Madec said.

  Ben kept moving.

  “Ben!”

  Ben glanced back at him.

  “We’ll lose the rest of the day,” Madec said. “I’d rather take my chances with the game warden than lose a
whole day just burying a dead sheep. Come on, buddy, let’s get going.”

  The trouble with Madec is, Ben thought, he’s always right. There really wasn’t much point in lugging that dead weight down the mountainside to bury it in the sand. Here the vultures would be at it by dawn. By nightfall the coyotes would be there, and soon there would be nothing left but a few scattered bones which the rodents would in time destroy.

  And what difference does it make to me, Ben thought, if the Game and Fish Department gets all over this guy?

  He looked up once more at the blood, now dried on the stone.

  He was closer to the broken stone of the cliff now and his angle of vision was different, so that he saw farther into the fissure of the stone.

  A white-haired man was looking back at him. His eyes were a faded, skim-milk blue and were wide open. His mouth was open, too, and from it a trail of blood went down his cheek and out onto the rock.

  2

  THE .358 MAGNUM bullet had done fearful damage, blasting the man’s lungs out through his back.

  He was an old man who had been in the desert a long time, for the skin of his neck was copper colored and tough looking, old, tanned leather. His felt hat, almost completely stained with sweat, had fallen half off so that Ben could see the sparse white, unwashed hair, the pale skin of the head ending in a sharp line where it met the copper. He had on a brownish wool shirt with long sleeves buttoned at his wrists and a pair of denim pants faded to the color of his eyes. One hand still gripped the handle of the metal locator which lay out in front of him, the round pan of it shining.

  Ben knelt and turned him gently onto his back, the hat now falling completely off so that the sun shone down hard on the open eyes and grizzled cheeks. The few teeth he had left were long, stained, worn fangs. Suspenders, one loop shot away, held up his pants.

  The clothes lay on what was left of the man in loose folds.

  Ben had never seen this man before and wondered a little about that because he knew most of the old prospectors who still roamed these lonely hills, not even hoping any more, just roaming, happier in the desert than in the peopled land.