Blood Sport

by Robert F. Jones

  “What trap?”

  “You think that Beppo is the great trapper around here, don’t you? Well, everything Beppo knows, I taught him. I am the trapper. Not of mere animals, but of men, Runner, of men and boys. I bait my traps with the two most effective lures known to man—curiosity and challenge. No man can resist the chance of knowledge or the threat of death.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You sound like my father—all that pompous baloney about challenge. I came because . . . because I like the country and I wanted my stuff back.”

  “Keep that in mind, Runner. It’s interesting that you should compare me to your father. Keep that in mind, too. But what I’m going to tell you now is the main reason I asked you out here for this little chat. We’re going to kill that madman up there.” He pointed the knife at the Jawbone—a darting thrust that seemed to impale the blackness and open it to the light. “You and I, Runner, we’re going to capture him and make him pay for what he’s done to our friends. Our friends, Runner. Because that madman is nothing to you anymore. You are one of us, now. Forever. And we kill our enemies.”

  I thought about that for a long, loud moment. The wind had increased in volume. The sand lashed at our boulder. To the east, a pumpkin moon was rising, orange through the dusty sky. I imagined my father, there on the dark height of the Jawbone, huddled in his bearskin against the wind. His eyes are bright with blood. He mutters curses against the wind and the darkness. His voice, in the grainy howling of the wind, sounds like Ratnose’s. . . .

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” I said finally. “I think you’re mad at me because I dared to take Twigan away from you. I think you want to make me pay for that by helping you kill my father. Okay, I feel bad about what he did to Frac, and to Hal McVeigh, and to those old men he chopped, but not bad enough to wish him dead. Up here, death doesn’t seem to mean that much. But the main thing, Ratnose, is that I don’t give a damn if I offended you by taking Twigan. I took her because she was willing, and even if she hadn’t been willing, I would have taken her eventually anyway. You taught me how to do that.”

  Ratnose smiled and sheathed his knife. He stood up and squinted his eye against the sand and the moonlight.

  “All right,” he said. “Twigan is yours. Tilkut is mine.”

  We walked back into the wadi.

  42

  I SLEPT POORLY and awoke in the false dawn, sneezing and shivering, with the image of the bear inside my eyelids. My teeth crunched with the night’s dirt, and my eyes were glued shut with a mud composed of sand and tears. When I finally cracked them open, I could see the others shuffling around in the half-light, yanking at bellybands and cursing the horses and oiling their weapons. Fric gave me a pull from his canteen. It was cold tea spiked with crait, and in a little while I felt much better. The images of the night faded as the day spun closer.

  We rode up the wadi, slumped low in our saddles. The wind had died, and the air smelled of crushed cactus. My first clear view of the Jawbone came as we emerged from the wadi into the full light of the sun. It rose above us like an enormous scab—swollen, pitted, crumbling, the color of old blood. Actually, it was lava from some ancient, cataclysmic eruption. Over the centuries, the wind and the weather had sculpted it into a shape that roughly resembled a dead man’s mandible. It was full of caves and crevices, but empty of life.

  “How in the hell do we hunt that kind of country?” asked Fric.

  “Slowly,” said Ratnose, “and on foot.”

  Leaving two men to watch the horses at the mouth of the wadi, Ratnose divided the remaining dozen of us into two-man teams. I was paired off with Korti, a tall, hollow-chested guy with gray hair and enormous forearms. He never talked much, but when he did, it was in broken English. Frac had once told me that Korti was an ex-Legionnaire who had split from Dienbienphu before it fell and just kept walking north. He had two women back at camp—his A team and his B team, he called them—and a nice string of horses. He and I were to hunt up the middle of the rockpile, over its highest point.

  “I want this Tilkut taken alive, if at all possible,” Ratty said before we moved out. “We could have some fun with him back at camp. But don’t take any chances that could get you killed too easily. Shoot to maim if you see him run.”

  Nice, clear orders, I thought. All we had to do was climb up this crumbling, convoluted hunk of rotten lava without breaking our ankles or our skulls, locate a madman sharpshooter who could be hidden in any one of a few thousand caves, flush him out without getting zapped ourselves, and then shoot him in the leg. I looked over at Korti and saw by the focus of his eyes that he had already erased Ratty’s orders from his mind: he would shoot to kill. He checked the selector switch on his AK-47 and flicked it to full automatic.

  Well, I couldn’t blame him, and he hadn’t lived that long through all those slaughters by playing the noble hero, but what was I going to do? I hefted the Mannlicher, cracking the bolt to make sure I had a round in the chamber. The rifle had been too heavy when I first tried to shoot it. Lately, though, it felt right for me: not exactly a feather, but balanced and solid, the iron sights lining up automatically—almost eagerly, it seemed—when I brought it to my shoulder. I could hit with it, I knew; when I was relaxed and cocky, I could hit with it at 300 yards from a rest and at 200 off the shoulder. But when I was nervous, the muzzle swung all over the place, my finger slapped the trigger like it was a shotgun, and I couldn’t hit my foot if I was leaning on it. And right now, as we started up the Jawbone, I was nervous.

  It was like climbing up into one of those nightmares where the ground is glue and your eyes don’t work, where everything is slow but panic, the earth too dark and the sky too bright. Chunks of lava like misshapen heads cracked and slid beneath our feet. We could hear the clatter of rocks kicked loose by the other parties echoing all around us. The black rock radiated heat, and within fifty yards I was slick with sweat. There were small, spiky cactuses growing in the creases of the rock, brightly flowered in this season, red and yellow and blue, but every time I lost my balance, my hand seemed to fall on one. Pulling out the spines with my teeth, I thought of the nature lovers back home, “Flower Sniffers,” my father called them. They would love the Jawbone. They would twitter and chirp over its “craggy beauty,” sigh over its “infinite mysteries.” Well, naturally enough, I guess. They wouldn’t have to worry about a .30- caliber bullet turning their chest into a pot of lung soup at any moment.

  Korti was ahead of me, nearly to the crest, when we heard the first shots. A rapid, distant popping, masked by the rock. Then silence for a space of perhaps five heartbeats. Then a heavier, louder burst, punctuated by the door-slamming bang of a rifle. Korti flattened against the rocks and I sat back quickly into a convenient crevice, picking up the inevitable cactus in the butt. Korti motioned me to swing around to my right, toward a broken outcropping that might give a view of the action. I waited until I heard another burst of automatic-weapons fire and then scrambled over to the outcropping. As I hunkered down behind the rock, concentrating on the sounds of the firefight over the hammering of my heart, something leaped out of the shadows—a gray, mottled lizard nearly a yard long that skittered down the slope quicker than my eye could follow. A caprizond, the leopard lizard of these hills. It scared the heart out of me. I slumped back in the rocks, feeling tears sting at the back of my eyes.

  When I looked up over the outcropping, I saw Korti just then disappear over the crest of the ridge, heading for the fight. I could see the mouth of a big cave about a third of the way down the slope on the far side of the crest, and then I saw the wink of muzzle blast in the dark of the cave’s mouth. A short burst -dut-dut-dut. Heavier fire answered from the rocks beneath the cave. Tilkut was in the cave. Some of our guys were pinned down on the lower slope. Then something came flying out of the cave and fell into the rocks below with a bright, flat crack: a grenade. Another burst of automatic fire from below and two furry figures tried to run up the hill to the cave under its cover. Tilkut cho
pped them down not ten yards from the mouth, and the bodies bounced back down the hill.

  God damn it, he was killing a lot of my friends!

  But it looked like Ratnose had him pinned down in there, all right. It was only a question of time, now. We had more ammo than he did. We had men enough to resupply ourselves and still keep him from moving. When dark came on, Ratty would ease his riflemen up closer to the cave mouth and either shoot or dynamite the Bear God out of there. Then I heard Ratty yelling from the rocks below the cave.

  “Tilkut! Tilkut! Speak to me, Tilkut!” I could imagine Ratty snickering at that.

  Another grenade came crumping down.

  “Don’t be that way, Tilkut! Listen to reason! We have you surrounded. No escape. I have more men coming, more than you can ever kill. Tilkut?”

  Silence.

  “Let’s end this ugly war! I have done you no harm, and you have done much to me. We are harmless country folk, woodcutters and trappers. We don’t know why you have chosen to pick on us. But we want no more killing. Come out and eat with us, talk with us, smoke with us, join our tribe. We want no more deaths, though we will accept them if we have to in order to kill you if you won’t come out. Tilkut?”

  Silence. But then I saw movement beyond the cave and just above it. Korti had circled about Tilkut’s den and was easing his way down to the cave mouth, the assault rifle ready in his hand. Ratnose must have seen him too.

  “Tilkut,” he pleaded, “have you no feeling for this wonderful country? This unpolluted paradise where man and rock and water and all God’s creatures live in meaningful harmony? Why splash it with blood? Why sully its silences with loud noises? Why befoul its air with the stink of gunpower? You see, Tilkut, I am like you a man of sensitivity, a man in love with nature and nature’s God, a peaceful man who seeks no gain from the earth or its creatures, great or small. Like that, Tilkut. Tilkut? Come out of there, you fucker, or we’ll blow you out!”

  Silence. By now, Korti had reached a ledge at the lip of the cave. He stood there for a moment as Ratnose finished his tirade. Then he seemed to take a deep breath. He jumped into the cave mouth with the AK-47 roaring even as he landed. He disappeared into the cave.

  Silence. After a minute, two more figures rose from the rocks below and started up slowly, bent-kneed, rifles at the ready, toward the cave. As they came closer, I saw that they were Hunk and Fric. When they reached the entrance, they yelled in for Korti, but got no answer. Then they went in. Down below, I could see Ratty peering over the top of a boulder. We waited.

  “Ratnose!”

  The yell came from the crest of the Jawbone, directly above the cave but a hundred feet higher. Tilkut stood black against the sky. He lifted a body by its hair and threw it down the cliff, crashing and bouncing on the rock, starting a small landslide. The body bounced over the mouth of the cave and flapped limp and broken down to Ratty’s boulder. Korti, sure enough.

  When I locked back to the ridge, Tilkut was gone. He must have found a chimney at the back of the cave, hidden in it, killed Korti and dragged him up to the top. But as I was figuring that out, I heard rocks clattering to my left, coming down the ridge. I swung the rifle around to cover the route Korti had taken to the top. Tilkut was coming.

  He burst on me with a speed that seemed impossible, leaping down the steep slope in twenty-foot jumps, huge, black-faced beneath the stiff bear snout, the BAR with its bipod rattling as he skidded into sight, snarling deep in his throat, only his teeth shining in a face dark with beard and rage and mud. As he roared past, he saw me and began to swing the BAR, but I slammed it out of his hand with the muzzle of my rifle and then poked it against his chest, hard. He staggered back, and his other hand went behind him for the Luger.

  “Leave the Luger where it is,” I said, jabbing him again with the muzzle.

  His eyes walked up the rifle barrel to my face, and I could see them come into focus. His chest was pounding under the green, wet uniform. The bearskin over his shoulders seemed to have a life of its own, but slowly that life died. His eyes narrowed, and the madness went out of them. I eased the tension on the trigger.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said.

  There was a clattering in the rocks behind us, and then Fric and Hunk dropped down on either side. Hunk kicked the BAR out of my father’s reach and then removed a knife, four grenades, and the Luger from various parts of his clothing. Fric looked on, white-faced and quivering.

  “Ah!” came Ratnose’s voice from behind us. “What a pleasant sight.”

  He was standing on the rocks overhead, his legs straddled and his eye joyous. He clicked the safety on his rifle.

  “A father and a son,” he said, “reunited at last!”

  Part III

  43

  TILKUT’S IRRATIONALE.

  My madness was total: sublime, ecstatic, unmarred by any doubts or sulks. At no point during the months I roamed that mean, lean country, killing for food and pleasure, do I recall one moment of reason, one instant of unhappiness. It was as if a caldron of liquid laughter had come to a slow, steady boil behind my eyes, perking joyfully there, sending shots of giggly steam down my nostrils and up my throat, exploding from time to time in scalding, superheated guffaws that left my vocal cords raw and aching with delight. I felt no fear, no hunger, no worry—only the immense, ridiculous power of my freedom.

  At first, when the boy failed to return, I was desolate—sane with concern. How could I ever explain his absence, his death, to his mother or his friends, or even to myself? Yes, much worse, to myself? I ranged out in ever-widening circles from the camp, searching for sign. The country was immense, empty. It cackled at me with rain and wind. At the foot of a hill, it would seem certain that he must be visible from the crest; from the height of the ridge, equally certain that he was behind me, circling back to camp, or perhaps lying up with a broken leg in some ravine on the far side of the river. I would dash back down the hill, heading in precisely the opposite direction to that which I had chosen for the days hunt. And then I would stop, ponder, panic, scoot off in yet a third direction, the country hooting with scornful laughter at my indecision. Still, as long as I was moving I had the illusion of accomplishment: I was doing something, getting somewhere, applying reason to a situation that only reason could resolve. But then, as the days progressed without any sign of him, any single clue, reason demanded that I go mad. A slow sour hint at first, easily dismissed with a wry chuckle. Then a hoarse whisper at night beside the dying fire: He’s gone, you won’t find him; if he’s not dead in a gully or already digested in the guts of a carnivore, he’s fallen among murderers, tortured and skinned out and devoured by Ratnose.

  Or else just gone, zip, like that. It had happened so often to other men in big country. One would read about it in the literature: “He headed out of camp that morning to fetch the rest of the elk he’d cached up in the box canyon, and it wuz a clear day, warm, & never cum back. . . .” I had seen it myself once, or part of it, up in the Skalkaho Country of the Bitterroots, where Lewis and Clark nearly starved on their outward journey. We had organized a deer drive, down a simple valley. My friends stood near me on the crest. We waved at each other and started down. A cloud blew over, burying us. At the bottom, one man failed to appear. We fired shots, we hooted and whooped, we tried to track him out. Nothing. No sign, no blaze, no smoke. It was as if the fog bank had absorbed him. The panic in my gut spread and strengthened like a fire on a west wind; it was worse than being lost oneself, because there was nothing more we could do. Finally, just at sunset, he emerged from the woods at the base of the mountain, sheepish and dehydrated. He ate a couple of apples and then vomited. No, he never heard our shouts or our shots, never saw the sun, never cut the stream that might have told him where he was. He just got turned around, that’s all. Happens to everybody sooner or later, doesn’t it?

  But—how horrible! There beside the campfire, with Reason insisting in a cold, clear voice that my son was gone, with Reason insisting th
at there was nothing more I could do in a reasonable way to find him, that he was gone for good, dead one way or another, for neither Reason nor I could even conceive the possibility that the boy had actually, willingly, gone forth to join Ratnose, my nemesis, my dread; with Reason insisting that nothing more could be done for me—like a reasonable mechanic in a garage one trusts, to which one has taken one’s automobiles for most of an adult lifetime, insisting that the car is done, finished, can’t be fixed, shifting his eyes away, embarrassed that he can no longer offer hope; or perhaps like a trusted family physician saying, Yes, it’s terminal, looking away, offering no hope, hope being after all, a finite phenomenon, and we’re out of it right now; there beside the cheerful hickory logs, hopeless, Reason suggested a sojourn—just a brief visit, mind you, nothing permanent—with his pal. Madness.

  Sure, why not?

  But Madness is coercive, concentrated, special, like an old friend one hasn’t seen in many years, an old college roommate perhaps, a shipmate, an old buddy with whom one drank and wrestled and went to parties, to whom one confided all the conquests and dismays, then didn’t see again for quite a while. When you get back together with Madness, the only place to go is on a binge. A freedom binge—yeah, man, let’s hang one on! Let’s really rip it off, man, all that shit that’s happened since we seen each other: fuck the job, fuck the responsibilities, fuck the old lady sulking at home and laying plans to make us suffer some more for our few, timid dashes at freedom. And the laughter boils up behind the eyes. The laughter paints the sleazy saloons with a golden varnish, spikes the booze with a belly- warming strength, erases the age, the stench, the cosmetics, the crevasses of calculation from the faces of the doorway trollops, unmans the muggers and sends them scuttling into their garbage cans like so many bubonic rats afraid just yet to nip. And then time stops, the night stands still, tomorrow is so distant as to appear absurd—a laughing dream, a projection that must be suffused with laughter: golden, no sweat, no remorse, not even there.