Miller put Jack and me to work chopping the limbs we’d hauled in into foot-and-a-half lengths and piling them up along one side of the storage tent.
“Latrine’s over there, men,” Lou said importantly, coming up to us and pointing to a trail leading off into the trees. “I dug a slit-trench and put up a kind of a stool.” He was getting a kick out of all of this.
“How’s Sloane?” Jack asked him.
“Better, better,” McKlearey said. “He’ll be fine by morning. It was just blowin’ up that goddamn air mattress that laid him out.”
Jack grunted and went back to chopping wood. We kept at it for about another half hour, and my stomach was starting to talk to me pretty loud.
“Chow,” Clint hollered, and we all homed in on the fire and the food.
“Plates and silverware there on the table,” Clint said. “Grab ’em and line up.”
We had venison steaks from Miller’s freezer at the ranch, pork and beans and corn on the cob.
“Better enjoy that corn, men,” Clint said. “That’s all I brought. I figured we could spread out a little, first night out.”
We took our plates back to the logs and stumps on the far side of the fire and began to eat. Sloane was up and about now and seemed to be a little better.
“Damn good,” Jack said with his mouth full.
“Yeah, man,” Lou said, shoveling food into his mouth.
It took me a little while to get the hang of holding the plate on my knees, but as soon as I got the idea that there was nothing wrong with picking up a steak in my fingers, I had it whipped.
After we finished eating and had cleaned up the dishes, we finally got a chance to sit down and relax. We all had a drink — whiskey and that icy-cold springwater — and sat, staring into the fire.
“Sure is quiet up here,” Jack said finally. He’d be the one to notice that.
“Long ways from the roads,” Miller said.
We sat quietly again.
Then we heard the horses snort and start to stir around, and a few minutes later a kind of grumbling, muttering chatter and a funny sort of dragging noise came from the woods.
“What’s that?” Stan demanded nervously.
“Damn porkypine,” Clint said. “Probably comin’ over to see what we’re up to.”
McKlearey stood up, his eyes and teeth glowing sort of red in the reflected light of the fire. He pulled out his pistol.
“What you figgerin’ on Sarge?” Miller asked, his voice a little sharp.
“I’ll go kill ‘im,” McKlearey said. “Don’t want ‘im gettin’ into the goddamn chow, do we?”
“No need to do that,” Miller said. “He ain’t gonna come in here while we’re around. Long as we don’t figure on eatin’ ‘im, there’s no point in killin’ ‘im. I’m pretty sure the woods is big enough for us and one porky, more or less.” He looked steadily at McKlearey until Lou began to get a little embarrassed.
“Anything you say, Cap,” he said finally, holstering the pistol and sitting back down.
“Knew a feller sat on a porky once —” Clint chuckled suddenly.
“No kiddin’?” Jack laughed.
“Never did it again,” Clint said. “Matter of fact, he didn’t sit on nothin’ for about three weeks afterward.”
“How did he manage to sit on a porcupine?” Stan asked, amused.
“Well sir, me’n him’d been huntin’, see,” Clint started, “just kinda pokin’ through the woods, havin’ a little look over the top of the next ridge, like a feller will, and along about ten or so we got tuckered. We found what looked to be a couple old mossy stumps and just set down on ’em. Now the one I set on was a real stump, but his stump wasn’t no stump — it was a big ol’ boar porky —”
The story went on, and then there were others. The fire burned lower, popping once in a while as it settled into bright red coals.
McKlearey had several more drinks; but the rest of us had hung it up after the first one.
“I’d go a little easy on that, if it was me, Sarge,” Miller said finally, after McKlearey had made his fourth trip back to the spring for cold water. “It’ll have to last you the whole time. It’s a pretty fair hike back to the liquor store.”
We all laughed at that.
“Sure thing, Cap,” McKlearey said agreeably and put his bottle away.
“Well,” Sloane said finally, “I don’t know about the rest of you mighty hunters, but I’m about ready to tap out. Last night was a little shallow on sleep.” He was looking a lot better now but tired. I think we all were.
“Might not be a bad idea if we was all to turn in,” Miller said. “Not really a whole lot to do in camp after dark, and we might as well get used to rollin’ out before daybreak.”
We got up, feeling the stiffness already settling in our overworked muscles. We all said good night and went off to our tents. Miller and Clint were in the one right by the storage tent, Sloane and Stan in the next one, then Jack and I, and finally, in the farthest one up the line, McKlearey in one by himself — it just worked out that way.
Jack and I stripped down to our underwear and hurriedly crawled into our sleeping bags. It was damned chilly in the tent. I fumbled around and got out my flashlight and put it on the ground beside the gun belt near the top of my bed.
“You suppose we oughta close the flap?” he asked after a few minutes.
“Let’s see how it works out leaving it open,” I said. I was looking out the front of the tent at the dying fire.
“Well” — he chuckled —”I sure wouldn’t want to roll over on that porky.”
“I don’t think that tent-flap would really stop nun,” I said.
“Probably not,” he agreed. “Man, I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been up for a week.”
“You and me both, buddy,” I said.
“It’s great up here, huh?”
“The greatest.”
There was a long silence. The fire popped once.
“Good night, Danny,” he said drowsily.
“Night, Jack,” I said.
I lay awake staring at the fire, thinking the long thoughts a man can think alone at night when there are no noises to distract him. Once again I wished that somehow my little Bolshevik could be here to see all of this. Maybe then she’d understand. For some reason it was important to me that she did.
I guess I must have drifted off to sleep, because the fire was completely out when the first scream brought me up fighting.
“What the goddamn hell?” Jack said.
There was another scream. It was a man — right in camp.
I grabbed up the flashlight in one hand and the .45 in the other. I was out the front of the tent when the next scream came. I stubbed my toe on a rock and swore. I could see heads popping out of all the other tents except one. The screams were coming from McKlearey’s tent.
I whipped open the front flap of his tent and put the beam of the flash full on him. “Lou! What the hell is it?”
He rolled over quickly and came up, that damned .38 in his right hand. Son of a bitch, he moved fast! “Who’s there?” he barked.
“Easy, man,” I said. “It’s me — DAN.”
“Danny? What’s up?”
“That’s what I just asked you. You were yelling like somebody was castrating you with a dull knife.”
“Oh,” he said, rubbing at his face and lowering his gun, “musta been a nightmare.”
“What’s wrong?” I heard Miller’s voice call.
I pulled my head out of the tent. “It’s OK,” I called back. “Lou just had a nightmare, that’s all. He’s OK.” I stuck my head back in the tent. “You are OK, aren’t you, Lou?”
His face looked awful. He rubbed his bandaged hand across it again, and his hand was shaking badly. He tucked the gun back under his rolled-up clothes. “Keep the light here a minute, OK?” he said. He rummaged around in his sack and came out with a bottle. He took a long pull at it. I suddenly realized that I was standing there with that silly .45 pointed right at him. It had just kind of automatically followed the light. I lowered it carefully.
“Want one?” he asked, holding out the bottle toward me.
“No thanks. You OK now?”
“Yeah,” he said, “just a nightmare. Happens to a lot of guys.”
“Sure.”
“All the time. Lotsa guys have ’em.”
“Sure, Lou.”
“That’s true, isn’t it, Danny?” he said, his voice jittery as if he were shivering. “A lot of guys have nightmares don’t they?”
“Hell,” I said, “I even have some myself.” That seemed to help him.