Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Suddenly they were at the edge of the lava flow. Ahead of them, the sandy desert stretched to the limitless horizon. Carson bent down in a salt pan that had formed along the edge of the lava and picked up a few pieces of alkali salt. It never hurt to be prepared.

“We can ride now,” he said, shoving the salt into his pocket. He watched as de Vaca mechanically put one foot in the stirrup. She hoisted herself into the saddle on the second attempt.

Watching her silent struggles, Carson was suddenly unable to stand it any longer. He stopped, reached over for the saddlebag, withdrew the canteen.

“Susana. Drink with me.”

She sat on her horse for a moment, silently. At last, without looking up, she said, “Don’t be a fool. We’ve got sixty miles to go. Save it for the horses.”

“Just a little sip, Susana. A sip.”

A sob escaped from her throat. “None for me. But if you want to, go ahead.”

Carson screwed the cap down without drinking and replaced the canteen. As he prepared to mount, he felt something run down his chin. When he dabbed at his lips, his fingers came away red with blood. This hadn’t happened in Coal Canyon. This was much worse. And they still had sixty miles to go. He realized, with a kind of dull finality, that there was no way they were going to make it.

Unless there were coyotes at the kill.

He put his foot in the stirrup, fighting back a sudden dizziness, and pulled himself upward onto the horse. The effort exhausted him, and he sagged in the saddle.

The vultures were still circling now, perhaps a quarter mile ahead. The two moved closer, Carson propping himself up with the saddle horn. In the distance, something dark was lying on the sand. Coyotes were tugging at it. Roscoe, seeing something in the featureless desert, automatically moved toward it. Carson blinked, trying to focus. His eyes were running out of water. He blinked again.

The coyotes bounded away from the carcass. At a hundred yards they stopped and looked back. Never been shot at, Carson thought.

The horses drew closer to the carcass. Carson looked down, working to bring the dead creature into focus. His eyes were so dry they felt as if they were caked in sand.

It was a dead pronghorn antelope. The carcass was barely recognizable: a skull, with the characteristic stubby horns, peeking out of a desiccated lump of flesh.

Carson glanced at de Vaca, pulling up behind. “Coyotes,” he said. His throat felt like it had been flayed.

“What?”

“Coyotes. It means water. They never go far from water.”

“How far?”

“Ten miles, no more.”

He leaned over the saddle horn, trying to control a spasm in his throat.

“How?” de Vaca croaked.

“Track,” Carson said.

The heat played about them. A single cloud drifted across the sky, like a puff of acrid steam. The Fra Cristóbal Mountains, which they had been approaching all day, now seemed bleached to bone by the sun. Behind them, the horizon had disappeared, and the landscape itself seemed to be evaporating, dissolving into sheets of light, floating upward into a white-hot sky. The coyotes were sitting on a rise, waiting for the interlopers to leave.

“They approached from downwind,” Carson said.

He rode in a spiral away from the dead antelope until he located the spot where the coyote tracks entered. As he followed the tracks away from the antelope, de Vaca drew up alongside. They rode for several miles, Carson leading, following the faint tracks through the soft desert sand.

Then the tracks veered into the lava and disappeared.

Carson drew Roscoe to a halt as de Vaca came along beside him. There was a silence. Nobody could track a coyote through lava.

“I think,” he croaked at last, “that we need to divide the remaining water with the horses. We can’t last much longer.”

This time de Vaca nodded.

They slid off the horses, collapsing in the hot sand. Carson removed the half-full canteen with a weak hand.

“Drink slowly,” Carson said. “And don’t be disappointed if it makes you even more thirsty.”

De Vaca sipped from the canteen with trembling hands. Carson didn’t bother to bring out the salt from his pocket; they wouldn’t be drinking enough water for it to matter. Taking the canteen gently from de Vaca, he raised it to his lips. The feeling was unbearably good, but it was even more unbearable when it ended.

He gave what was left to the horses, then tied the empty canteen on the saddle horn. They lay down in the shade cast by the two animals, who stood dejectedly in the afternoon sun.

“What are we waiting for?” de Vaca asked.

“Sunset,” said Carson. The drink already seemed a wonderful, unbearable dream. But talking was not the unbearable torture it had been. “Coyotes water at sunset, and they usually start calling. Let’s hope the spring is within a mile, so we can hear them. Otherwise. ...”

“What about Nye?”

“He’s still searching for us, I’m sure of that,” Carson said. “But I think we’ve lost him.”

De Vaca was silent. “I wonder if Don Alonso and his wife suffered like this,” she murmured at last.

“Probably. But they found a spring.”

They lapsed into silence. The desert was deathly quiet.

“Is there anything else you can remember about that spring?” Carson asked at last.

De Vaca frowned. “No. They started across the desert at dusk, and drove their stock until they were near to collapse. An Apache showed them the spring.”

“So they were probably about halfway across.”

“They started with barrels of water in their wagons, so they were probably much farther than that.”

“Going north,” said Carson.

“Going north.”

“You remember anything, anything at all, about the location?”

“I already told you. It was in a cave at the foot of the Fra Cristóbals. That’s all I can remember.”

Carson did a quick calculation. They were now about forty-five miles north of Mount Dragon. The mountains were ten miles to the west. Just at the edge of the coyotes’ range.

Carson struggled to his feet. “The wind is drifting toward the Fra Cristóbals. So the coyotes probably came from the west. So maybe—just maybe—the Ojo del Águila is at the foot of the mountains due west.”

“That was a long time ago,” de Vaca said. “How do you know that, even if we find it, the spring hasn’t run dry?”

“I don’t.”

“I’m not sure if I can make it ten miles.”

“It’s either that, or die.”

“You’ve got a great bedside manner, you know that?” De Vaca pushed herself into a sitting position. “Let’s go.”

Nye trotted alongside the lava flow for a while and then looped eastward, away from the mountains, to ensure that the two would not cross his trail. Although Carson had proven a worthy adversary, he tended to make mistakes when he was overconfident. Nye wanted to make sure Carson was as overconfident as possible. He had to make Carson believe he had thrown him off the trail.

Muerto was still going strong, and Nye himself felt good. The pain in his head had subsided to a dull ache. The afternoon heat was stifling, but it was their friend, the invisible killer.

Toward four o’clock he cut north again, returning to the edge of the lava flow. To the south, he could see a column of vultures. They had been hanging there for quite a while. Some animal or other. Far too soon for Carson and de Vaca to draw so big a crowd.

He stopped suddenly. The boy had vanished. He felt a panic.

“Hey, boy!” he called. “Boy!”

His voice died away without echo, sucked into the dry sands of the desert. There was little in the endless dead landscape to reflect sound.