Moontrap - Don Berry Read online

  ***

  By mid-afternoon Monday was tense. At every bend in the trail he expected to see the crossroads, and it did not appear. They would have made up the start Webb had, perhaps even gained more than that. The endless jogging of the horse became a steady irritation. On either side the trees passed without end, a continuous wall of foliage that was exactly the same. Nothing changed, and they might as well have been riding in a circle for all the sense of progress.

  He had the crazy notion that they were going to meet Webb coming the other way. They would round a bend and there he would be, slumped indifferently in the saddle, coming toward them. Then there'd be hell to pay.

  And what if they were ahead of him? What if they got up to the mountain and found Webb behind them? Who was hunting, and who being hunted? Maybe in the end that was the real question: who was the hunted? Gradually he eased up toward the head of the column, out of the insane conviction that if they did meet Webb coming the other way he wanted to be the first to see him.

  When they did reach the crossing point of the trails, Monday had an instant of terrible shock, seeing V'ebb standing impassively waiting for them. But even as his heart jumped, he realized it was not a man, but the cairn of rocks that marked the informal trading site between the Killamooks and the Clatsops.

  He swallowed heavily, looking at the cairn. Thurston's beautiful bay pulled up beside him and they rode the last few yards to the cairn side by side.

  "Well, Monday," Thurston said.

  Monday looked at the trail that led off to their left, toward the mountain. "I think we best leave the horses here," Monday said.

  "Give your friend more time?" Thurston said.

  "You may as well quit, " Monday said evenly.

  Thurston shrugged indifferently Monday turned to the others, who were pulling up around them.

  "This trail ain't used much," he said. "We'll make better time on foot." He dismounted and began to take what gear he needed out of the saddlebags.

  The others sat their animals, waiting. Finally Thurston shrugged and swung gracefully out of the saddle. The rest then began to dismount, and Monday knew without caring one way or the other that if he had taken the lead yesterday morning, it was all over now. There was no question of who was running the show. It didn't matter. When they swung off on the trail Thurston said, "Monday, since you've been down here, why don't you come up front here?"

  "So you can keep an eye on me?"

  "So you can show us the way," Thurston said, smiling amiably.

  An hour on the new trail, and Monday was a little surprised by the pace Thurston was setting. The little man, whatever else he might be, was not soft. He could march with the rest of them, and better than most of the farmers. Monday figured he was politicking again, proving something. He was never done with proving something. The stillness of the afternoon heat was broken by the sudden ringing echo of a gunshot ahead.

  Monday stopped abruptly in the trail. Thurston looked at him, then back at the trail ahead.

  "There he is," Monday said.

  "Yes," Thurston said thoughtfully. "There he is."

  Now the question was answered. There was no doubt who was the hunted.

  2

  Shortly after he left the creekbed, the trail began to trend east, gradually rising along the flank of a ridge. In a short time the lowering afternoon sun was almost behind the old man. Now only one valley separated him from the double-peaked mountain, and he figured there would be a live stream at the base.

  He looked down slope at the almost impenetrable wall of foliage. Absently he played with the end of one of the scalp locks, wondering if he had missed a trail that would have taken him in the right direction. The one he followed was definitely heading east, and up. He decided to give it another half-hour, then cut straight across.

  There was no question of finding a man-trail now; he was too far in. As he walked he scanned the brush on either side of him, evaluating the slight breaks that might represent an animal track down toward the river. He passed several in the next half-hour, small, old, not recently used. When he reached one that appeared a little more fresh he turned off without hesitation, forcing down off the slope toward the valley bottom. The brush closed in around him, plucking at his shoulders and legs.

  The soil was both rocky and dusty under his feet, and in a short time the blanket-bottoms of his trousers were covered with reddish-gray dust and his moccasins merged indistinguishably with the trail beneath them. The loose rocks rolled and jabbed and pounded his feet through the thin leather. It was his last pair, and a hole had already started in one sole.

  All in all, groping through the brush was not as bad as he had anticipated. The trail he followed was not completely overgrown yet, and he figured it had probably been used in the spring as a main track down to the river. Then the deer would have changed, for reasons of their own, and one day the trail would be completely deserted and left to go back into brush. It was a sense deer had that men lacked: to use it for a while, then give it back to the world, freely.

  Thinking of the brush, he had overprepared himself for the unpleasantness, and the reality was satisfactory by comparison. He reached the river a little more than an hour later and began looking for a camp.

  It was a fair little stream, even this late in the season, and he supposed it probably had a name. Fifteen or twenty feet wide, flowing through the corridor of timber at the valley bottom with the endless shifting grace of light and water that never tired. Flowing down from a mountainside, winding through the forest in light and darkness, passing ten thousand ferns that nodded and dipped, ten thousand firs that stood by its banks. Without fatigue or hunger or the aching the old man felt. It was getting so he was tired by the end of a day, and grateful for the chance to rest a bit and think over what he had seen in passing. Once it had not been that way; he had pushed on into the dusk and been off again before dawn. There was so much to see ahead, so much to do. The point where the deer trail met the little river was disappointing. There was a small, relatively calm pool, but otherwise it was no different from any other point on the bank. It was a good little river, he thought, too good to waste on a camp he would not remember. He started downstream.

  The cold water felt good to his feet, but the river bottom was even rockier than the slope he had just come down, and he had to walk carefully. Here in the bottom of the valley itself he was shielded from both the warmth of the setting sun and its light. It was dark and cool, with spatterings of brightness catching the ripples and glinting off to trees at the side, speckling them with shifting spots of silver.

  In a quarter of an hour he had found a landmark that satisfied him, a huge boulder on the north bank. It was perhaps twenty feet high, soft with moss and ferns, ponderously leaning out over the flowing water. Opposite the boulder was a flat space in the shape of a tiny triangle, with one side facing the river and another facing a small inlet, not much more than ten feet long.

  He climbed out on the flat space, which he was already thinking of as "camp," and sat down, looking across the stream at his boulder. The camp space was rocky and small, but it would be all right; it was the boulder that counted, something pleasant to see and think of. He watched for a little, while the sun-blots crept and shifted over the green furry surface, fading and brightening in an unpredictable pattern as the trees moved gently and the sun lowered behind them.

  Finally he nodded with inner satisfaction. It was all right, he felt comfortable. It would be a good place to spend the night.

  3

  The stillness of dusk; a time almost perfectly neutral, a suspension, filled with the promise of depth and solitude in the night to come. The old man gathered wood, enjoying the changing shapes of his camp in the changing light, seeing how one tree began to recede into shadow and another, by contrast, move forward for his attention. He moved quietly in the warm grayness, picking up a stick here, a larger slab there, and carrying them two or three at a time back to his rocky little point. It was an i
nefficient way to get wood together, but he didn't mind. He liked to spend the calm expanse of dusk in a calm manner; it was insanity to do anything else.

  He did not need much wood, and there was not only the question of the fire, but a question of timing. He thought he was going to like this little camp very much, and he wanted things to go properly. It was most satisfying for him to finish laying the fire and have it ready to light at the precise moment in the growing darkness when it seemed tohim that he needed a little more light. It was, in the end, perfectly unimportant. But there was a certain contentment for a man in feeling that he has well suited his actions to the changes of the world around him.

  It was a kind of contentment the old man had not felt for a while now, ever since he got mixed up with the man-ugliness ofthe settlement. There it always seemed that he was running counter to something, always conscious of conflict, of tension. He couldn't let the world take him along, because of the noise and stink of the man-world. He shrugged as he kindled the fire, and put the thought away from him. It was over, now. This was not the place to be worrying about it. He filled his little cup half full of water, dropped in a couple of tiny pieces of flaky white suet from the pack. He put the cup by the fire where it would boil quickly and got a handful of the jerked deer. The jerky was in flat sticks like hardened leather, eight or ten inches long. He broke a few of them in half and stood them on end in the cup. They were still too long, and stood up out of the cup like a fistful of bark. When the water neared the boiling stage, he turned the strips end for end, to let the other half soften a little.

  When he was finished it was a little softer. Not much, but enough to make a difference—and he had a cup of weak broth to drink. lt was not like fresh meat, but it was better than no meat at all. He chewed on the rubbery strips and watched the orange and gold reflections of his fire ripple in the water, almost as though a tiny sun were burning just beneath the surface.

  Slowly the balance of light changed. The western sky grew dark, and in the east was the pale glow of the rising moon, not yet visible above the trees. The old man put one last stick on the fire to last until he was asleep. He made a halfhearted attempt to clear away some of the larger rocks before he rolled up in his blanket, but he knew it wouldn't make much difference. If you got rid of the rocks you had the holes they left. It was better to try to fit yourself around the worst spots.

  With the setting of the sun the night had become pleasantly cool. He took off his moccasins, which were still wet from the wading. The dust he had collected on the slope had formed a fine, silty layer of mud inside. He rinsed them out carefully, scrubbing away the soapy-feeling layer. Ruefully he noted that the hole in the right sole had grown considerably from the rough pounding down the rocky slope. He stuck his little finger through the hole experimentally, then shrugged. He washed his feet and put the moccasins back on to prevent them from shrinking up so badly in the night they could not be worn tomorrow.

  He pulled the blanket over him, tucked the edges under and rolled over to his side. He could see both the fire and the reflection of it in the tiny inlet beside him. He glanced up at the light and eerie glow that preceded the appearance of the moon, and realized there would be a time in the night when the great disk would be overhead in the space between the trees, directly over the river. Then he would be able to see both the moon and its reflection in the still inlet. It would be pleasant, but would not happen for a couple of hours. He thought he would like to wake up for it, to see two moons at the same time.

  A fly or something buzzed near his ear, and he sleepily swatted at it, hoping it was not a mosquito. Mosquitoes were a damned nuisance. They said the ones that buzzed weren't the ones that bit you, but the buzzing ones were the ones you swatted. It didn't seem fair, but he supposed it was probably true. There was nothing to guarantee that things would be fair. He wondered vaguely if a mosquito could see the end of its own nose.

  .

  He wakened without being startled, and at first could not understand why. Then he realized he had promised himself a look at the overhead moon, and it was the sudden increase of light that had brought him out of sleep. It was almost directly above, framed between the wall of trees that edged the river. The night was very clear, and the markings on the face of the brilliant disk were sharp and distinct. For the thousandth time the old man tried to make some sense of them, tried to make them fit into a comprehensible pattern, tried to see the man in the moon. He never could. Everybody else saw the man in the moon, and a dozen times people had tried to explain to him, but he never could see it. To him there were gray patches, and he was perfectly familiar with their shape; but he could not make pictures out of them. It was the moon, with its uniqueness, and resembled nothing but itself.

  It was sufficient.

  He glanced over at the reflection in the inlet, where the moon's twin wavered luminously in the darkness. The inlet was not as calm as it had appeared. The reflection lengthened and shortened and occasionally broke, distorting the perfect symmetry of the brilliance that hung overhead. He wondered if it would be possible to make it hold completely still, and be the perfect, flawless duplicate he had seen in his mind when he had thought about it before. In an odd way it seemed possible to him that in the reflection he might be able to see the pictures, even though he could not see them in the moon itself. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to be a good idea. He had always wanted to see the man in the moon. He unwrapped himself from the blanket. His fire was still glowing faintly, and he threw on one of the pieces of wood he'd been saving for morning. As it flamed up and lit a small circle he surveyed the problem.

  The mouth of the inlet was only about eight feet wide, and there was already a fallen log damming part of it. One end of the log rested up on his bank, and he thought if he could get that end into the water across the mouth it might do the job. It was too heavy to lift, but he thought he could pry it off with a lever of some kind. He looked around the edges of the fire circle until he found a windfall about six inches through at the base.

  He dragged it back to the fire and hacked off a few of the more troublesome branches. With the lever he waded to the river side of the log and thrust the thick end beneath, wedging it in the stones of the bottom. He heaved up, but the end of the lever slipped and the log dropped back to the bank. He took a more secure purchase and tried again, and this time it worked perfectly. The end of the log rose from the bank and slid down the lever with a great splash to lie directly across the mouth of the inlet.

  The splash completely destroyed the moon's image, scattering it in wild ripples and flecks of brightness that darted on the surface. He climbed back up on the bank and squatted on his heels to wait for the disturbance to die down and the whole image to return. When the ripples had settled, he found the reflection still wavered and moved. There was undoubtedly a current coming in from somewhere, probably around the end of the log, where it did not fit perfectly against the bank.

  He sighed, and gathered up some stones and twigs to dam the gap. He had to go back into the water to do it, and his legs were getting cold. He packed the sticks and rocks into the open space, sealing them in with mud. It would wash away, but it might last long enough to get the moon still for just a moment. There was not much to packing the end, but when he had finished the improvised dam he had to wait again for the ripples to subside so he could see if it had worked.

  It had not been enough. The reflection still wavered and distorted itself. The current must be coming in under the log itself. It was more complicated than he had expected, building a trap for the moon. He went back into the water again. Patiently he began to wedge stones at the bottom of the log, filling spaces between large ones with smaller ones, and scraping up gravel from the bottom to dam whatever holes he had left. He worked as quickly as he could, but plugging most of the eight-foot length still took him almost twenty minutes.

  When he got back to the bank and looked in the water there was no image at all. The moon had passed o
ver the clear space above and was behind the trees again on its slow and certain journey to the other side of the world.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1

  The morning light was thin and cold. The sky was clear, and the old man knew it would be hot. But the thickly grown river valley was like an undersea canyon, and he was submerged beneath fathoms of green that filtered out warmth from the light that reached him, seeping through the leafy roof like a winter rain.

  It was all right. When he opened his eyes and looked around him, he knew he had sloughed off the last of the protective skin, the horny coating of blindness and insensitivity he had grown to protect himself from the rawness of others' emotions, from the ugliness of their doings. This morning the world was new again, as it should be every morning. Washed clean by the night of all its tensions and confusions, pure and virgin under the sky. A new day, full of surprises and new things to see and new wonderings and maybe even an answer or two. A new day, free and limitless, to be lived for its own sake.

  There was still little warmth in the air when he had finished eating. He would have to get moving to get the dampness out of him. He gathered up his little gear and stuffed it in the pack. As he stood taking one last look around the campsite for forgotten articles, his glance flickered over the little inlet, with its absurdly ineffectual dam. He grimaced, and a sudden thought occurred to him.

  He shrugged out of the pack and knelt at the end of the pool away from the river. Slowly dipping his arm in, he tried to see if he could feel motion at that end of the inlet. It had just passed his mind that it might be an outlet for a spring, rather than an inlet of the river.

  But he could feel nothing. He stood again, wiping his hand absently on his trouser leg and staring down at the pool. Well, he would never know, now. He had tried to make a trap for the moon and failed, and he would never know exactly why.