“Hey,” Tully said from behind him. “Lookit—they’re doing that searchlight-ass thing.”
That was an alarm gesture, making the white patch on their rumps bristle, visible for miles. A split second later they were all running westward for their lives—literally, because a golden-brown streak was after them from a jumping-off point behind a mesquite bush.
Cheetah! Tom thought; they all soothed their horses’ natural start of alarm at the sight and scent of an attacking carnivore.
Cat and antelope ignored them. The cheetah was accelerating as if it had rocket assist, its great hind paws landing as far forward as its ears, the long slender body flexing in a series of huge bounding leaps. The antelope were a little slower off the mark, but their top speed was a bit better than the cheetah’s—about seventy miles per hour as opposed to sixty-five—and they could keep it up a lot longer. One of the rearmost pronghorns nearly ran into the beast ahead of it, dodged to get around it, skidded sideways in a cloud of dust and thrashing of limbs, recovered…
…but not quite fast enough.
Got him! Tom thought.
The slender-limbed hunting cat rammed into the antelope, knocking it over in another puff of dust, then diving through the murk to clamp its jaws on its prey’s throat. Cheetahs killed by bunting their prey off its feet and then choking it; their doglike claws were too blunt to grip the way a lion’s did. By the time the riders went by, fifty or sixty yards to the east, the pronghorn’s limbs had stopped twitching, and the cheetah was settling in to feed. It raised its head and flattened its ears at the sound of the horses’ hooves but didn’t stir from its meal. Tom was slightly surprised; in his experience, predators were a lot more nervous around human beings.
“Cheetahs only got taken off the reserved list… oh, ten years ago,” Adrienne said, giving the little drama a glance. “They don’t breed as successfully as the other big cats—frankly, they’re too stupid to live. Inbred, and overspecialized.”
Tom chuckled. “Still, that one’s pretty calm with six people this close.”
“I don’t think the Collettas came hunting all that often, either, and there haven’t been any Indians to speak of around here for a generation or more. The game’s not man-wary.”
Tom nodded but didn’t speak; the sun was just dropping behind the Sierras, leaving the tremendous tawny granite cliff a few miles away in darkening purple, tinged with pink at the saw-edge ridge that topped it; night rolled over the valley floor toward them like a wall of shadow. He’d always found this the most magical time of day, tinged with an inexplicable sadness. It was getting cooler, too. He’d been riding in his T-shirt; now he pulled his bush jacket out of a saddlebag and put it on. That was more complicated than it sounded, since he had to undo his combat harness, adjust it, and put it on again over the heavier garment.
When he looked up he saw Kolo trotting in from the north, on foot. That raised his brows a little… and knotted his stomach a trifle, too. The main reason to travel by foot was to avoid kicking up conspicuous dust, which a horse did when you pushed the gait.
The Indian stopped in front of them; that let him address the air between Tom and Adrienne. He knew full well that the woman was in command, but it preserved his self-respect if he could pretend he was reporting to the Strong One, which was how he’d referred to Tom since the canyon fight.
“Camp—old camp, by lake. Many”—he opened and closed his hands several times—“men. On foot.”
“Better look into that,” Adrienne said.
Little Lake was a sickle-shaped piece of water with the blunt horns pointing westward, about half a mile long and a few hundred yards across; it was full dark by the time they arrived, with starlight glittering on the still surface of the water. Trees and grass surrounded it; water came from seasonal creeks flowing down from what he knew as Sequoia National Park to the west, and from springs that flowed year-round. Those were sweet water, cold and with only a pleasant mineral tang. Eastward were high volcanic hills, columns of black basalt solidified in a devil’s-pipe-organ pattern.
If they hadn’t found the campfires, Tom would have proposed a swim—the grime and crusted sweat of the Mohave was still thick on his skin. As it was…
“The Commonwealth militia use a twelve-man infantry squad, right?” he said.
“Yes,” Adrienne said. “Two fire teams of six—four riflemen, a Bren gunner, and his assistant—the assistant totes a machine pistol. Why?”
“This was a military marching camp, about platoon size,” Tom said. “Some mules…”
“Six,” Sandra put in. “And one horse, from the sign.”
Simmons nodded. “That’s standard, for an infantry platoon in unroaded country. Mules carry the heavy gear, and the horse’s for the officer or a messenger.”
Tom pointed out where the tents had been. “Those are about the size of your standard militia item, too, aren’t they?”
He indicated the other features—the regular spacing of the campfires, the sanitary slit trench filled in not far away. While he spoke, Simmons was quartering the grass, and Kolo crouched by one of the dead fires. They’d been put out with water and buried with a couple of shovelfuls of earth, standard practice. He sniffed, picked up a pinch of the ashes, tasted them.
“Cold for one day,” he said. “No more.” Then he held up a fragment of bone. “Deer.”
Simmons gave a little grunt of satisfaction and picked something up from the dirt. He flicked it up with his thumb like a man tossing a coin as he walked back to join the others, then held it out on an extended palm; an empty brass cartridge case.
“Thirty-aught-six,” Tom said.
He handed it to Adrienne. “Rolfeston Armory mark,” she said. “Couldn’t have been Colletta household troops. Not this many, this far from the lodge. A squad or two around their Prime, just in case—the desert tribes could raid here, if they were stupid enough to invite retaliation. But not a third of the whole guard company, fossicking around nowhere in particular…”
“It’s not legal proof I’m concerned with,” Tom said grimly. “Kolo, where did they come from? And where did they go?”
The Indian pointed northwest. “From there. Yesterday, leave this morning.” He pointed northeast. “Go that way at sunrise.”
“And no sign of them south of here,” Tom said. “At a guess, this the southern limit of the area they routinely patrol. Probably for training, mostly.”
Just then Tully grunted and straightened up. “Kemosabe,” he said, holding out a palm. “Take a look.”
Tom did; it was a rind of some kind of flat bread, about as long as his hand. The surface was brown and had bubbles, and it was stiff—not merely stale, but textured rather like a thin cracker. He took it and tasted an edge; the nutty flavor and grainy feel were unmistakable.
Corn tortilla. In fact, it’s exactly the sort that Dolorez used to make, back when I was stationed at Fort Hood, he thought—seized for a moment by nostalgia, for a young soldier away from home for the first time, bursting with excitement at the world opening up for him.
Adrienne touched him on the arm. “Tom?” she said.
“Ah,” he said, starting. And this is a lot wilder than anything I could imagine then! “It’s a tortilla. Who here eats ’em?”