Fear in a Handful of Dust

“Take it easy now. We’ll get you splinted up tonight when it’s cool enough to move around. You’re going to be all right.”

“Any damn fool knows a man needs water to survive.” The clarity of Dana’s voice surprised him.

“We’ll get water. Where things grow there’s always water. Get some sleep.” And he left because he couldn’t stand talking to the man. He carried the earthen tray of excrement away and threw it up the slope and limped back to his trench and lay absolutely still until his pulse slowed and his breathing lengthened and the sweat cooled on his body.

He used one of the new shells to pry the split cartridge apart far enough to remove the case that had been wedged into it. Then he began to work with the split case. He hooked a new shell over it and worked it slowly back and forth. He lay back to do this work and expended his effort with miserly sloth. After a long time metal fatigue set in and the bent side broke off.

He laid the split shell on the anvil rock and began to hammer, using the second shell as a punch, flattening the long side of the split shell. He kept working until he was satisfied, not hurrying. In the end he had a knife.

Now he began to hone the blade against the rock.

He made three knives before he ran out of material—the fourth and fifth shells had been crumpled beyond repair in the workings. When he was satisfied with their sharpness he put them aside and looked up over the edge of the pit.

Far away to the north he saw the thin streamer of a high jet contrail. A small cactus wren flitted from shrub to shrub down on the flats. They would have to set out some sort of signals to attract aircraft. They could watch what the birds ate and eat it too; he knew of nothing in the desert that a bird could digest that would harm a man.

And the bird itself was food if you could catch it.

By the sun it was early afternoon. He lay back in his cool shelter and closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky; he tried to blank his mind because he needed to sleep but anxiety overcame him and he went pawing frantically around in his memories trying to find clues to survival.

He had camped out numerous times with his father on the reservation but it was nonsense to rely on atavistic mythology. He was no more a primitive wilderness-dweller than any of them. His last camping trip on the reservation had taken place thirty-six years ago when he was twelve years old; after that his father had gone into the army and two years after that had been killed by a Stuka in North Africa. His mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland who had run the church at Window Rock, had moved with Sam to Denver after the war and he had been back to the reservation only three or four times in all the years since, never for more than a day or two.

For all he knew there could be more survival knowledge in any of their heads than there was in his. Jay had done three years in the army in Korea; Earle Dana had been an air force chaplain; either of them might have been a Boy Scout. Even Shirley was something of an outdoor girl: her father had been a fanatical trout fisherman and the family had gone off far into Canada on angling expeditions that lasted weeks.

But I’m half Navajo by blood and I work in the forest nowadays and that’s supposed to endow me somehow with the powers of a Moses to lead them through this wilderness.

It was farce. The fall of a coin. He must have made some snappish remark, forgotten now, that had caught all of them—himself included in that crazy first moment—in the grip of the notion that Mackenzie had the answers. Mackenzie had the blood and the instincts. Mackenzie had been born in the desert. Mackenzie was invincible. Mackenzie would save their lives.

I’m older than any of them—a good twelve or thirteen years on Shirley, for God’s sake—it ought to be up to them to look after me, not the other way around.

But they’d abdicated. They’d embraced despair: it had been their first thought. Hopelessness. Surrender and die. He’d been the only one to fight it and that made him the leader.

For better or for worse until death do us part.

But what the hell do we do now?

10

He didn’t hallucinate but his mind jumped the straight track and he frittered hours away on meaningless calculations.

A hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit was what, fifty-one degrees centigrade?

They were in Arizona certainly—but where in Arizona? The state was nearly as big as all of New England.

Brass shells meant aerial gu

Quit wasting time now—you haven’t got it to spare.

There was no saliva in his mouth to be drawn by the rolling pebble. He took it off his tongue and lay back breathing through his nose and tried to push away the tentacles of panic.

Time was so short. It was possible to die very quickly in the desert. The ancient rule of thumb was that a man could live at least three days without water but that was not true in the desert, where the sun and the sand-dry air and the furnace plains leached the body of its moisture. You could die in twenty-four hours. Duggai’s companions five years ago had died in less time than that. Because they’d been overcome by panic: they’d tried to hike, perhaps even tried to run. The desert had consumed them as fire consumes kindling. But even without exertion they’d have died by the second morning.

The ground pit might add an additional twenty-four hours to their lives now but the clock had started ru

We’ll make it through tonight. But if we don’t get water we’ll die tomorrow before the sun goes down.

An early effect of fasting was urinary cleansing. That was a medical fact with which he was familiar. During the day he’d left the trench at least half a dozen times to urinate. He’d heard the others doing the same. By now Earle Dana’s trench probably stank of ammonia because Earle didn’t have the luxury of mobility.

It was tempting to hold it in as long as possible under the delusion that by retaining fluid the body held its grip on life that much longer but he knew that wasn’t the case at all—once the fluid had gone through the organs it was of no further use and the body only damaged itself by locking acid into the tract. So when the impulse overcame him he obeyed it.

But it would strike with ever increasing frequency until in the strong-stinking trickle of their final discharges there would be gritty little green crystals of pure uric acid.

By that time they would be too dehydrated to notice the pain.

If we get that far we’ll never come back from it.

He suspected it was self-delusion to hope they could sustain themselves for more than a few hours on cactus. It contained moisture to be sure. But not much. And it would contain enzymes and bacteria that could produce dysentery—cathartic and dehydrating reactions. Cactus might prolong life but certainly couldn’t improve it. To cheat Duggai’s hell they needed more than survival: they needed strength.

There was something. It caromed through shadows in his mind. Elusive. Maddeningly it shied from the light.

There was something and if he could remember it they might have water, they might live, they might win.