Deathwatch

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“T
HERE 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 silenced 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.