The soap smelled odd. Still, it worked. The water was too cold to stay in. Freeze an improper thought solid, it would. She stood up and soaped.
And realized somebody was leering lasciviously at her.
Well—something, anyway. The lower half was very definitely goat, down to the cloven hooves and tangled black curly fur leggings. The protruding evidence suggested that it was as randy as one. It had devilish twisted goaty horns curling up out of the dark hair. The horns went well with the loose-lipped expression.
Liz reacted instinctively. The shoulder bag was lying on the far bank. She grabbed the strap and swung. She swung with all her strength and screamed bloody blue murder.
If she’d hit any harder the satyr would have had two extra Adam’s apples. As it was, his flute went flying and he doubled over, lost his footing, and then fell into the pool. She leaped for the far bank, as running footsteps came pounding down from where she’d left the others.
* * *
As luck would have it, Cruz and McKenna were away higher up the slope, scouting. Lamont had been strapping up Jerry’s ankle with a strip of shirt. He’d just finished this makeshift job, when Liz shrieked. He and Jerry both flew to the rescue. Well, tried to. Lamont, in his first three steps, peeled a section of moss off a rock and tumbled into a mess of washed-out roots. That left Jerry, hobbling and swearing, heading to the rescue in a sort of stumbling run.
Jerry was thus first on the scene. And quite a scene it was.
There, against a backdrop of wild violets, was Liz. Clad only in a few soapsuds, militantly swinging her shoulder bag.
She took a horrified look at him. Dropped her bag. Attempted to cover herself with inadequate hands, while stuttering and turning puce. And then, in desperation, as the others arrived, she jumped into the pool.
Unfortunately, it was still rather full of groaning and spluttering satyr. Having a hundred and forty-two pounds of embarrassed girl land on his back was not at all the reception the satyr had been planning on. With a squeal, he dragged himself out of the pool and hurtled his dripping way past Cruz and McKenna before bounding off into the woods.
“What are you staring at?” shrieked Liz.
Jerry tried to looked away. Failed miserably.
Outraged, Liz repeated the question. Pedantry came to his rescue.
“Well. You.”
17
This little piggy went to market.
McKenna shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. I thought it wouldn’t be that hard to track them. I grew up on a farm, but it wasn’t like this.” He hefted the bayonet-tipped spear.
Jerry eyed the weapon a bit skeptically. After they’d lost Odysseus, the two paratroopers had taken the time to make themselves spears of sorts. What the paratroopers called the 550 cord in their rucks was no longer nylon parachute cord. It was . . . something else. But, whatever it was, it did an adequate job of binding their bayonets to longer shafts than their useless M16s provided. But Jerry was dubious that the bayonet-tipped former branches were going to be of much use in any real fracas.
Still—they were soldiers, and he wasn’t. And, at the moment, he deeply envied their superb physical condition. Neither Cruz nor McKenna exhibited a trace of Jerry’s own feeling of semi-exhaustion.
The path had led out to a tableland of mixed forest, oaks and beech trees, trackless and silent—except for the cicadas, who made up for the absence of other sounds in spades. The trouble was that it was all alike. Jerry had no idea any longer which direction they’d even come from. His ankle was so damned sore and he was really, really hungry as well as tired. They needed to take some kind of action. Decisive action.
Liz hesitated. “I’m not much of a tracker. We always had trackers on the farm, and my brother learned a lot from them. But I never really bothered. But there is a lot of game here.”
Jim McKenna looked startled. “I haven’t seen anything. I thought you were a marine biologist.”
“I’ve seen several buck, sign that looks like bushpigs and some squirrels. And everybody grew up somewhere. I grew up near Hoedspruit. Next to Kruger Park. On a game farm,” she added.