Destiny Doll

TWELVE

We sat around the fire in the deepening dark.

“Bones,” said Hoot. “Bones upon the ground.”

“You’re sure of that?” I asked. “Could it have been something else? Why should the hobbies be so scared of bones?”

“Sure of it,” said Hoot. “Bones was all to see. Nothing else in sight.”

“Maybe certain kinds of bones,” said Sara. “The skeleton of something they are afraid of, even dead.”

Somewhere in the fastness of the badlands a band of honkers were talking back and forth, breaking forth at times into flurries of insane gobblings. The fire flared as a new piece of the oily wood took flame and the wind that came flowing down the draw had an edge to it.

And here we were, I thought. Marooned in the center of a howling wilderness, not even sure where we had been heading, the winding trail our only orientation and the only place to flee to, if we could flee, back to that great white city, which in its way was as much of a howling wilderness as this.

But this, I sensed, was not the time to bring the matter up. In the morning, at the beginning of a brand new day, we’d have a look at it and then decide the best course for us to take.

Hoot waved a tentacle at the pile of blankets.

“I greedy,” he said. “I take too much of him. He have less than I imagine.”

“He’ll be all right,” said Sara. “He is sleeping now. He drank a bowl of broth.”

“But why?” I demanded. “Why did the damn fool do it? I was ready and willing. I was the one Hoot asked. It should have been me. After all, Hoot and I...”

“Captain,” Sara said, “have you considered that this was the first chance Tuck had to make a contribution? He must have felt a fairly useless member of this expedition. You have done your best to make him feel that way.”

“Let us face it,” I said. “Up until he did this job for Hoot, he had been fairly useless.”

“And you begrudge him this chance?”

“No,” I said. “No, of course I don’t. What bothers me is what he said. I have life to give, he said. What did he mean by that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Sara. “There is no point now in worrying about what he might have meant. The thing we have to worry about is what we do now. We have been put afoot. Whatever we do we’ll have to leave supplies behind. Water is the problem. Most of what we can carry will have to be water. Unless the hobbies should come back.”

“They won’t come back.” I told her. “They’ve been waiting for this chance ever since we left the city. They would have deserted in a minute if it hadn’t been for Hoot. He kept them in line.”

“Surprise they catch me by,” said Hoot. “I was ready for them. I bop them time and yet again and it did no good.”

“The horrible thought occurs to me,” said Sara, “that this may be standard operating procedure. Take a group of visitors out here somewhere and leave them stranded, with little chance of getting back. Not, perhaps, that it would do much good if they did get back...”

“Not us,” I said. “Other people, maybe, but not these particular people. Not us, around this fire.”

She glanced sharply at me and not approvingly-but that was not peculiar. By and large, she did not approve of me.

“I can’t quite be sure,” she said, “if you are trying to make fun of me or are whistling in the dark.”

“Whistling in the dark,” I said. “You have no idea how much a little inspired and determined whistling will achieve.”

“I suppose you knew exactly what to do,” she said. “You have it all in mind. You’ll disclose it to us in a sudden flash of genius. You’ve been in jams before and you never panic and...”

“Oh,” I said, “lay off it. Let’s talk in the morning.”

And the terrible thing about it was that I really meant let us wait till morning. It was the first time in my life that I had ever put off decision-making. It was the first time in my life that I found myself reluctant to face what I was up against.

It was these badlands, I told myself-these barren, desolate stretches of tortured land and twisted trees. They took the heart out of a man, they ground him down, they made him as desolate and no-account as the tangled, forsaken land itself. One could almost feel himself melting into the landscape, becoming a part of it, as uncaring and as hopeless.

“In the morning,” Sara said, “we’ll go and’ see Hoot’s bones.”