Chapter 3
In the morning his panic had faded but the deep-seated fear was still with him. He got out of bed carefully, and swallowed apprehensively in terror that he might have a sore throat. He handled himself with all the care of an aged hypochondriac. When he walked downstairs he balanced himself meticulously, realizing that even a sprained ankle might mean death.
He immediately began preparations for flight, and as always when he began acting upon some definite plan, even though the plan in itself made little sense, he felt a quietness and satisfaction. His own car was old. He therefore began to look around for a better one among the many hundreds that were parked along the streets. Most of these were without keys, but finally in a garage he found a station-wagon which suited his fancy and which contained a key. He pressed the starter, and the engine responded perfectly. He idled it for a minute, raced it, and decided that it was good. He started to engage the gears, and then suddenly paused with a feeling of uneasiness. He did not regret leaving his own car, but still something worried him. In a moment he remembered. He went back to his old car, and took out the hammer. He carried it over to the station-wagon and laid it at his feet. Then he drove out of the garage.
From a grocery he stocked himself, nibbling some crackers and cheese for lunch as he walked about selecting his cans. He realized he might pick up supplies at any town. Still, it would be convenient to have a reserve with him in the car. From other stores he took a sleeping-bag, an ax and a shovel, a rain-coat, cigarettes, enough food to see him through several days, a small bottle of good brandy. Remembering his experiences of the day before, he went into a sporting-goods shop, and selected a variety of weapons—a light shot-gun, a medium-calibre repeating rifle, a small automatic pistol that would go handily into a side-pocket, a hunting-knife.
Just when he had finished loading the station-wagon, and was about ready to start, he looked around and first became conscious of a dog. He had seen many dogs in the last two days, and he had tried to shut them out of his mind. They were pathetic, and he did not like to think what was happening. Some of them looked starved; some of them looked too well fed. Some seemed uncertain and cringing; others snarled and were all too well assured of themselves. This particular dog was like a small hound, with long drooping ears, of a white-and-liver color—a beagle, probably, although he did not know much about breeds of dogs. It stood at a safe distance of ten feet, looked at him, wagged its tail, and whimpered just audibly.
"Go away!" he said, roughly, for his heart was suddenly bitter within him, and he felt himself building a wall against more attachments which must only end with death. "Go away!" he repeated. Instead, the dog took a step or two closer to him, and put its forequarters down on the ground and laid its head on its forefeet and looked up at him with strangely appealing eyes, which rolled upward. Long drooping ears gave the face an expression of infinite sadness. Obviously, the dog was saying, "You have broken my heart!" Suddenly, without thinking, he smiled and he remembered then, it was perhaps the first time he had smiled, except ironically, since the snake had struck.
He came to himself instantly, and realized that the dog was rubbing against his leg, quick to sense the change of his mood. As he looked down, it scurried away suddenly in fright, or pretended fright, then dashed around in a little circle variegated with two quick dodges, and ended again with its forelegs on the ground and its head between them, giving out an eager little bark which changed into a hound-like howl. Again Ish broke into a smile which this time was really a broad grin, and the dog sensed his mood. It dashed around him again in a swift run, with sudden changes of direction, giving an imitation of what it would do if chasing a rabbit. It ended this little demonstration of varied abilities by running boldly up to Ish's legs again, rubbing against them, and putting its head there as if to be patted, as much as saying, "Wasn't that a good act I put on?" Realizing what was expected of him, Ish dropped his hand on the dog's head, and patted the sleek forehead. The dog gave a little whimper of satisfaction.
The tail wagged so vigorously that the whole body seemed to be wagging from the ears back. The light-colored eyes rolled upwards until the whites showed along the bottom. It was the picture of adoration. The long ears fell on each side, and little wrinkles showed on the forehead. The dog was certainly making a good case of love at first sight. Its actions said, "This is the only man in the world for me!"
Ish relaxed suddenly. Squatting down, he patted the dog unashamedly. "Well," he thought, "I've got myself a dog—whether I want one or not." And then he reconsidered, "I mean, the dog has got me."
He opened the door of the station-wagon; the dog jumped in and lay down, at home on the front seat.
Going into a grocery, Ish found a box of dog-biscuits; he fed the dog one from his hand. The animal took the food without any particular sign of affection or thanks. This was obviously what a man was for. Once you had got yourself a man, there was no need to be particularly grateful to him. Noticing for the first time, Ish saw that it was not a dog, strictly speaking, but a bitch. "Well," he said, "a case of pure seduction, apparently."
He went back to the house, and picked up a few of his personal belongings—some clothes, his field-glasses, a few books. He reflected a moment whether there was anything else needed for a trip which might take him clear across the continent. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
He took out his wallet, and discovered that he had nineteen dollars in fives and ones. He certainly did not need any more money. He even considered throwing the whole wallet away, but finally kept it. He was so used to having it in his hip-pocket that he felt uncomfortable without it. The money would probably do him no harm.
Without any real hope, he composed a note, and left it posted conspicuously on the living-room desk. If they should return while he was away, they would know that they should wait for his return or leave a note of their own for him.
As he stood by the car, he gave another look up and down San Lupo Drive. There was no one in sight, of course. The houses and trees all looked the same as before, but he noticed again that the lawns and gardens already showed the lack of care, particularly of watering. In spite of the fogs, the long drought of the California summer was already settling down.
By now it was mid-afternoon. Nevertheless, he decided to start at once. He was anxious to be off, and he could spend the night at some near-by town.
As with the dogs and cats, so also with the grasses and flowers which man had long nourished. The clover and the blue-grass withered on the lawns, and the dandelions grew tall. In the flowerbed the water-loving asters wilted and drooped, and the weeds flourished. Deep within the camellias, the sap failed; they would bear no buds next spring. The leaves curled on the tips of the wisteria vines and the rose bushes, as they set themselves against the long drought. Foot by foot the wild cucumbers quickly sent their long vines across lawn and flowerbed and terrace. As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nurslings of man.
The staunch motor hummed steadily. He drove, the moming of this second day, with exaggerated caution, thinking of blow-outs and of steering-gear or brakes which might suddenly cease to function, and of cattle wandering on the highway. He tried to keep the speedometer needle at forty.
But that motor had never been designed to keep a car at such a speed, and he constantly found that he had slid up to fifty or sixty without realizing it.
Yet, even to be moving at all kept him from feeling quite so depressed. Mere change of place was a comfort; flight itself, a solace. Deep within, he knew that all this was because he was temporarily escaping from the necessity of depision. As long as he was merely pulling down the curtain of one landscape behind him and raising that of another in front of him, as long as he was merely driving, he did not need to make plans for the future, to decide how he should live, or even whether he should live. The necessity now was only to decide how he should steer around the next approaching curve.
The beagle-bitch lay beside him. Now and then she put her head in his lap, but mostly she slept quietly, and her being so close was also a comfort. In the rear-view mirror he never saw a car behind him, but he looked in it occasionally, out of habit. In it he saw the rifle and shot-gun on the middle seat behind him, and the back seat piled high with his sleeping-bag and the cartons of food. He was like a sailor in his own boat stocked and ready for emergencies, and he also felt the deep desperation of the solitary survivor of a ship-wreck, alone in all the vastness.
He followed Highway 99 south through the San Joaquin Valley. Although he drove slowly, he made excellent mileage. He did not have to slow down behind a truck, or to stop for traffic-lights (though most of them were still functioning), or to reduce speed for towns. In fact, in spite of his apprehensions, he had to admit that driving Highway 99 under these conditions was much safer than driving it through thick and madly speeding traffic.
He saw no man. If he had searched through the towns, he might have found someone, but there was no use of it now. A straggler here or there he might pick up at any time. Now he was searching to see whether some greater remnant might be left somewhere.
The broad plain stretched away—vineyards, orchards, fields of melons, fields of cotton. Perhaps a farmer's eye could have seen that already everything showed neglect, and the absence of the hand of man, but to Ish it all still looked about the same.
At Bakersfield he left 99, and turned toward the winding road over Tehachapi Pass. Fields gave way to scattered slopes of oaks, and higher still came open park-like stands of thin-foliaged Coulter pine. Here, too, there was no one. Yet he did not so much feel the absence of people, for this had always been empty country. He came down the side of the pass on the other end, and looked out over the far reaches where the desert began. More sharply than ever he became apprehensive. Although the sun was still well above the horizon, he stopped at the little town of Mojave, and began to make his preparations.
To cross those two hundred miles of desert, men had carried water in their cars even in the Old Times. There were stretches where one might have to walk for a full day to reach even a roadside stand if the car went bad. He could take no chances now, when no one would be coming to help him.
He found a hardware store. The door was massive and strongly locked; so he smashed a window with the hammer and went in. He took three large canteens, and filled them at a faucet from which water was still running, though feebly. He added a gallon jug of red wine from a grocery store. Still he was not satisfied, and the thought of the desert weighed heavily on him. He drove back along the main street, not just sure what he was seeking, and then his eyes fell on a motorcycle. It was black and white, one of those used by the Highway Patrol. Through all his depression and fear he still felt qualms at stealing a motorcycle belonging to a traffic cop. It was the height of the incredible.
Yet after a minute he got out, fiddled with the motorcycle, found it workable, and rode slowly down the street and back.
After an hour's work in the heavy heat of the late afternoon, using some planks to build a ramp, he managed to wheel the motorcycle up, and to lash it securely on the lowered tail-gate of the station-wagon. Now he was not only like a sailor in his own boat, but he had a tender in which he could take refuge if the boat itself should sink. Even so, he felt more apprehensive than ever, and found himself now and then glancing over his shoulder.
The sun set, and he was fired. He made himself a cold and unsatisfactory meal, and ate it dispiritedly, still feeling the fear. He even considered what he would do if the food gave him indigestion. When he had finished eating, he found a can of dog-food in a grocery store, and fed it to the beagle. She accepted the offering as only her due. Having eaten, she curled up in the front seat. He drove the station-wagon to the best-looking tourist-court in town, found the door of a room unopened, and went in, the beagle following. Only a dribble flowed from the faucets. Apparently the water supplies of this small town were not as automatically adjusted as were those of the city. He washed as well as he could; then went to bed. The dog curled up on the floor.
The fear gripped him hard, and he could not sleep. The dog whimpered in a dream, and he started violently. The fear moved in more tightly. He got out of bed, and tried the door to be sure that he had locked it, although he did not know who or what he should be fearing, or against whom or what he should lock a door. He thought of going to find a drug store and getting some pills to make him sleep, but even that idea frightened him. He thought of trying the brandy, but that too had sinister implications as he remembered Mr. Barlow. At last he slept, but restlessly.
In the morning his head was heavy, and in the crisp heat of the desert forenoon he still flinched at starting across the waste. He considered turning back; he considered going south toward Los Angeles, telling himself that it would be a good idea to see what had happened there. But all these ideas, he knew, were excuses, mere flinchings from the carrying-out of his original plan, and he still had enough pride in himself to keep from needlessly turning back or swerving from the course which he had laid out. But he temporized at least to this extent, that he would not start across the desert until nearly sunset. That, he argued, was merely an ordinary precaution. Even in ordinary times many people drove the desert at night just to escape from the heat.
He spent the day restlessly in Mojave—oppressed by the fear, and trying to think of more things which he should do for safety. When the sun was about to touch the western hills, he started, the dog beside him on the seat.
He had scarcely gone a mile before he felt the desert closing in around him. The low sun cast the Joshua trees into strange long shadows. Then the shadows were gone, and soon twilight fell. He turned on his lights, and the high beams illuminated the road before him—empty, always empty. In the rear-view mirror he never saw the far-off twin lights which would mean that some car was overtaking him.
Then it was full darkness, and his anxiety grew deeper and deeper. He thought of all that might go wrong, even though the engine purred steadily along. He drove slowly and still more slowly, thinking of blow-outs, thinking of an overheating engine, or of oil that might fail to flow and leave him marooned, far alone. He even lost confidence in the motorcycle which he carried as insurance. After a long time—he was driving slowly—he passed one of the little desert stations where one might at least expect to get gasoline or a spare tire or something to drink. Now it was dark, and he knew that there was no help. He went on beyond that, the white beams cutting out the road clearly ahead of him; the engine still purred smoothly, but he wondered what he would do if it should stop.
He had gone a long way. At last the dog on the seat beside him began to whimper and stir restlessly. "Shut up!" he said sharply, but still she whimpered and stirred. "Oh, all right!" he said, and pulled the car to a stop, not bothering to turn aside off the pavement. He got out, and then held the door open for the dog. She ran about for a moment, whimpering, and then without stopping to relieve herself, she suddenly lifted her nose, let out a bay tremendous for such a small creature, and struck out at full speed into the desert. "Come! Come back!" he shouted, but the dog paid no attention, and her bay went off into the distance.
There was a sudden deep silence as she ceased giving tongue, and in the silence he suddenly started, realizing that another noise, too, had stopped. The idling engine had stalled. In quick panic he leaped back into the car and pressed the starter-button. The engine resumed its steady purring. Yet, he was shaken. Feeling suddenly conspicuous, as if things might see him and he could not see them, he turned out the lights and sat in the darkness. "What a mess!" he said to himself.
Faintly, far off now, he heard again the baying of the beagle. The note rose and fell as she circled somewhere behind the quarry. He considered going on, and abandoning her. After all, he had not wished to take her along in the first place. If now she chose to abandon him in the desert and go off after the first chance rabbit, what debt had he toward her? He slipped the car into gear, and drove ahead. But he stopped after only a few yards. It seemed too mean a desertion. The dog would probably find no water in the desert, and that would be a horrible end. In some way he had aheady incurred obligations to the beagle, even though she seemed to be using him for her own ends. He shivered in his loneliness and depression.
After a while, a quarter of an hour perhaps, he was suddenly aware that the beagle had returned. He had not heard her; she had merely appeared. She lay down panting, her tongue hanging out. He felt sudden uncontrollable anger against her. He thought wildly of all those vague dangers to which her foolishness seemed to expose him. If he could not leave her to die of thirst in the desert, at least he could put her to a quick end. He got out of the car carrying the shot-gun.
Then, as he looked down, he saw the dog lying with its head between its forepaws, panting still from the run. She did not bother to move, but he could vaguely see her large eyes lifted up toward him with the touch of whites along the bottom. Having had her fun chasing the rabbit, she had now come back to her man, the one she had adopted and who had proved extremely useful to supply tasty food out of cans and to transport her to a lovely country which supplied real rabbits for chasing. Suddenly Ish relaxed, and laughed.
With the laughter, something broke inside of him, and was as if a load had rolled away. "After all," he thought, "what am I afraid of? Nothing more than my death can happen. That has come to most people already. Why should I be afraid of that? It can be nothing worse than that."
He felt infinite relief. He strode half a dozen steps down the road, springily, giving his body a chance to express what his mind felt.
And surely this was more than the dropping off of any momentary burden. This was a kind of great Declaration of Independence. He had boldly stepped up to Fate, and slapped Fate in the face, and dared Fate to do the worst.
Thereupon he resolved that if he was to live at all he would live without fear. After all, he had escaped a nearly universal disaster.
With a quick decision he hurried to the rear of the car, undid the lashing, and dumped the motorcycle. No longer would he take all these overcautious precautions. There might not be any Fate which objected to people playing the game too safely. But, even if there were not, such playing was too much trouble. He would take his chances from now on, and at least enjoy life without fear, as long as he lived it. Was he not living, as they said, on borrowed time?
"Well, come on, Princess," he said ironically, "let's get going." And as he said it, he realized that he had at last named the dog. That was a good name; its very triteness seemed to connect him with the old days, and at least she was The Princess, always expecting him to take care of her with the best of service, repaying him only incidentally, in so far as she took him away from thoughts of himself.
Yet, reconsidering, he did not go any farther that night. With his new-found sense of freedom he rather enjoyed merely taking additional chances. He pulled the sleeping-bag out. Unrolling it, he lay on the sand under the slight shelter of a mesquite bush. Princess lay beside him, and went soundly to sleep, tired from her run. Once he awoke in the night, and lay calm at last. He had passed through so much, and now he seemed to know a calm which would never pass. Once Princess whimpered in her sleep, and he saw her legs twitch as if she were still chasing the rabbit. Then she lay quiet; he, too, slept away.
When he awoke, finally, the dawn was lemon yellow above the desert hills. He was cold, and he found Princess close up against his sleeping-bag. He crawled out just as the sun was rising.
This is the desert, the wilderness. It began a long time ago. After a while, men came. They camped at the springs and left chips of stone scattered about in the sand there, and wore faint trails through the lines of the mesquite bushes, but you could hardly tell that they had been there. Still later, they laid down railroads, and strung up wires, and made long straight roads. Still, in comparison with the whole desert, you could hardly tell that men had been there, and ten yards asidefrom the steel rails or the concrete pavement, it was all the same. After a while, the men went away, leaving their works behind them.
There is plenty of time in the desert. A thousand years are as a day. The sand drifts, and in the high winds even the gravel moves, but it is all very slow. Now and then, once in a century, it may be, there comes a cloudburst, and the long-dry streambeds roar with water, rolling boulders. Given ten centuries perhaps, the fissures of the earth will open again and the black lava pour forth.
But as the desert was slow to yield before man, so it will be slow to wipe out his traces. Come back in a thousand years, and you will still see the chips of stone scattered through the sand and the long road stretching off to the gap in the knife-like hills on the horizon. There will be little rust, and even the iron rails may be there. As for the copper wires, they are next to immortal. This is the desert, the wilderness—slow to give, and slow to take away.
For a while the speedometer needle stood at 80, and he drove with the wild joy of freedom, fearless at the thought of a tire blowing out. Later, he slowed down a little, and began to look around with new interest, his trained geographer's mind focusing upon that drama of man's passing. In this country, he saw little difference.
When he came to Needles, the gasoline-gauge stood nearly at empty. Electric power had failed, and the gas-pumps would not work. With a little search he found a gasoline depot at the edge of town, and filled his tank from one of the drums. He went on.
Crossing the Colorado River, he entered Arizona, and the road began to rise up among sharp, rocky crags. Here, at last, he saw cattle. Half a dozen steers and two cows with their calves stood in a draw near the road. They raised their heads, idly, when he stopped the car to look them over. These desert cattle, unless when grazing near the road, scarcely saw a man from one month's end to the other. Twice a year, the cowboys came out to round them up. The passing of man would make no difference here, except that actually the herds would breed more rapidly. After a time, perhaps, they might have troubles with overgrazed range, but before then the long-drawn howl of the lobo wolves would re-echo again through these ravines, and there would be a new means of control of numbers. In the end, however, he had no doubt that the cattle and the wolves would strike off some unconscious balance and that the cattle, bereft of man, would continue to thrive.
Farther on, near the old mining-town of Oatman, he saw two burros. Whether they had merely been wandering about the vicinity of the town at the time of the catastrophe, or whether they had been some that had gone wild, already, he did not know, but they seemed well contented. He got out of the car, and tried approaching them, but they scampered away, keeping their distance. Returning to the car he loosed the yapping Princess and she made a wild dash at the two strange animals. The jack laid down his ears, and charged upon her with lips drawn back from teeth and lashing forefeet. Princess turned sharply and scuttled to the car and the protection of her man. The jack, thought Ish, would be more than a match for any wolf, and even a mountain-lion might well regret pressing an attack.
He passed the summit above Oatman, and well down the other side he came for the first time to a partial block in the road. At some time during the last few days a fierce desert thunderstorm must have swept across this edge of the mountains. When the water came tearing down the wash, the culvert had plugged and water had streamed across the road, carrying sand. He got out to investigate. In ordinary times, a road-crew would soon have been along. They would have cleared the sand from the road and opened the culvert again, and everything would have been as before. But now, the culvert remained plugged, and the few inches of sand remained on the road, and when he looked at the lower side of the pavement he saw that the washing water had already cut out half a foot of dirt from under the lower side of the concrete. Now, at the next storm, still more sand would wash across, and still more dirt would be cut away from the underside. In a few years the concrete might begin to crack away from where it was undercut, and the sand and gravel would pile up still higher on the road itself. Now, however, there was no serious question of passability. He drove the car over the sand.
"A road is as strong as its weakest link,", he thought, wondering how long it would be possible to travel as he was traveling now. That night he slept again in a bed, helping himself to a place in the best tourist-court in Kingman.
The cattle, the horses, the asses—through thousands of centuries they lived their own lives, and went their own ways in forest and steppe and desert. Then man grew strong, and for a while he used the cattle, and the horses, and the asses, for other ends. But after that was finished, they went their own ways again.
Fastened with their stanchions in the long barns, the dairy cattle bawled thirstily for a while and then lay still. Penned in their paddocks, the long-limbed thoroughbreds died slowly.
But on the ranges, the white-faced Herefords looked out for themselves, and even on the farms, the cattle broke through the fences and wandered freely. So too, on the ranges, with the horses and the asses....
The asses seek the desert, as in the ancient days. They sniff the dry east wind, and gallop on the dusty lake beds, and step daintily on the boulder-strewn hills; with their hard mouths they eat the thorny bushes. Their companions are the big-horn sheep.
The horses take the dry open plains. They eat the green grass of spring, and the grass-seed of summer, and the dry grass of autumn, and in the winter, shaggy-coated, they paw the snow, for the dry grass beneath it. With them the herds of the pronghorn pasture.
The cattle seek the greener lands and the forests. In the copses the cows hide the new-born calves until they can follow the mothers. The bison are their companions, and their rivals. The great bulls battle mightily, and in the end, perhaps, the heavier bulls will prevail, and the bison move out over all their old domain. Then the cattle may be pushed deeper into the woodland and there find their haven.
Electric power had failed at Kingman, but the water was still running. The stove in the kitchenette at the tourist-court was supplied from a tank of liquefied gas, and the pressure was at normal. Since there was no electric refrigeration, he could have neither eggs, nor butter, nor milk. But he took his time, and after a raid on a store prepared an excellent breakfast—canned grapefruit, canned sausages, flapjacks, syrup. He made a large pot of coffee, and had it with sugar and canned milk. Princess enjoyed her usual can of horsemeat. After breakfast, to get gasoline, he took the hammer and a cold chisel, and plugged a hole in the tank of a truck. Setting a five-gallon can beneath the spurt of gasoline, he filled it, and then transferred the gasoline to his own tank.
There were dead bodies in the town, but in the dry Arizona heat they had mummified instead of decaying, and though they were not pretty to look at, they made no assault upon the nostrils.
Beyond Kingman he soon came to where the compact little pifion pines stood evenly spaced across dry rolling country. Except for the highway, man had left little mark anywhere. No telephone line followed the road, and often there were no fences—just the rangeland stretching off on both sides, green because of the summer rains, dotted with the little trees. Actually, he knew that overgrazing had changed the grass and shrubs over all this country, and that with man gone there would now be more changes. Perhaps, with the slaughter-houses no longer at work, the cattle would become more numerous than ever; before their predators could increase sufficiently to control their numbers, they might eat the grass to the roots and start gullies and change the whole face of the country. No, just as likely, he reconsidered, hoof-and-mouth disease would work in across the now open Mexican border, and cattle might almost disappear. Or perhaps he underestimated the rapidity at which wolves and mountain-lions would multiply. All he held fairly certain was that in twenty-five or fifty years some kind of moderately stable situation would result and that the land then would steadily get to look more and more like what it had been before the white men came.
On the first two days, he had felt the fear; on the third, he had speeded wildly in reaction. But today, again in reaction, he felt a great calm and restfulness. The quiet of everything impressed him. In spite of having spent so much time in the mountains, he had just taken it for granted that mountains were quiet, and had not realized how much of the noise in the world was man-caused. There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: "The noise-producing animal." Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little town no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace.
He drove slowly, though not from fear. When he wished, he stopped to look at something. At every halt he made it a game to discover what he could hear. Often, after he had turned off the engine, he heard nothing at all, even in a town. Sometimes there was the chirp of a bird or the faint humming of an insect; sometimes the wind made a little rustling. Once he heard with a sense of relief the muffled pounding of a far-off thunderstorm.
By that time it was afternoon, and he had come into a higher country of tall pines with a snow-capped peak looming up to the north. At Williams a shiny streamlined train stood in the stationyard, just as the engineer had left it; he saw no one. At Flagstaff, much of the town had been burned; he saw no one.
Just beyond Flagstaff he came around a bend of the road and some distance ahead saw two crows leave something in the road and flap heavily away. He feared a little to come up and see what they had been eating, but it was only a sheep. The body lay tight upon the concrete of the highway, a red smear of blood showing from the torn throat. When he looked around, he saw that there were other bodies of sheep lying close to the road, and on both sides he could see still more. He walked a little way off the road, and counted twenty-six.
Dogs or coyotes? He could not tell, but he could easily reconstruct the scene—the harried sheep driven across the meadow, those on the outside pulled down or separated from those who clung closely toward the center of the flock.
Soon afterwards, out of whim, he turned in at the little road which led toward Walnut Canyon National Monument. He came to the neatly built Superintendent's house which looked down into the deep canyon with its ruined houses of the Cliff Dwellers. There was an hour's daylight left, and he found a grim amusement in walking around the narrow path, looking at what was left of those houses of that old people. He came back, and slept the night in the house at the lip of the canyon. Already there had been a summer thunderstorm, and a little water had run under the door. Since no one had cleaned it up, it had lain in a pool there and damaged the floor. Other rains would come; year by year, their effect would increase until after a while the neat house at the lip of the canyon would fall into ruins, and be not much different from those old houses sheltering along the cliffs. Here the ruin of one civilization would pile up on the ruin of another.
For a while the flocks, too, will remain. Even though the killers kill merely in the rage of the blood-lust, nevertheless millions of sheep are not to be wiped out in a day, or in a month, and thousands of new-born lambs will be dropped. What are fifty or one hundred slain out of millions? Yet not without reason, as symbol of a perishing people, men have said "sheep without a shepherd." In the end they will vanish....
They wander helplessly in the blizzards of the winter, and in the summer they stray far from water and are too stupid to find their way back; they are caught in the spring floods, and the bodies wash down by the hundreds; they stampede stupidly over cliffs, and lie in corrupting masses in the depths of the ravines; and always there are more of the killers—the dogs run wild, the wolves and coyotes, the mountain-lions, the bears. After a while, the great flocks are broken into a few frightened scurrying fragments; in the end, there will be no more sheep.
Thousands of years ago they accepted the protection of the shepherd and lost their agility and sense of independence. Now, when the shepherd has gone, they too must go.
On the next day he was crossing the wide high plains of the continental divide. This was rich sheep country, and again he saw more bodies where coyotes had harried the flocks. Once, on a far-off hillside, he saw what seemed to be scattered sheep running wildly, but he could not be sure.
Again, however, he saw an even stranger sight; in the rich meadow along a stream, he saw a flock of sheep grazing peacefully. He looked around, half expecting to see the wagon and the sheepherder himself; but instead, he saw only two dogs. The shepherd was gone, but by long habit the dogs were continuing their task, keeping the sheep together, maintaining them in the good pasture along the water of the stream, doubtless fighting off the marauders that came sniffing in the night. He stopped the car and watched, keeping Princess beside him on the seat, so that she would not disturb the situation. The two sheep-dogs grew excited when they noticed the car; they barked excitedly, and rounded up a few stragglers. They kept their distance, a quarter-mile away, and seemed hostile. Just as in the cities the electric power was still pulsating through the wires after man had passed, so here upon the far stretches of the grass lands, the dogs watched the sheep for a little while. But, he thought, it could not be for long.
The road led on across the wide spaces; U.S. 66 read the signs beside the pavement. It had been a great highway, he remembered, in the old days, the road of the Okies to California; there had been a popular song about it; now, it lay empty. No bus roared by with Los Angeles imprinted on its front; no truck came from east or west, no jalopy piled high with the household goods of some migrating fruitpicker, no sleek car of tourists going to the Indian dances, not even a Navaho wagon with a bony horse pulling it by the side of the pavement.
He dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande, crossed the bridge, and went up the long street of Albuquerque. This was the largest town he had seen since leaving California; he honked his horn as he went, and waited for a response. He heard nothing, and he did not wait long.
He slept that night at a tourist-court on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, from which he could look back down the long slope toward the town. It was all in darkness; here the power had failed already.
In the morning he went on through the mountains, and came out on the other side into a country of scattered buttes with broad plains between. A frenzy of speed came upon him again, and he drove the car at its limit on the straight roads. The buttes fell away behind; he crossed the state line, and was in Texas, in the flat country of the Panhandle. The day was suddenly blazing hot, and around him lay endless stubble fields from which the wheat had already been cut before the death fell upon the harvesters. That night he slept on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.
In the morning he skirted the city by a by-pass, and went on. He followed 66 toward Chicago, but after a few miles a tree across the road blocked him. He got out to consider the situation. There had obviously been one of those sudden wind storms which sweep the plains country. A tall poplar standing before a farm house had tipped and gone over, hiding the whole highway in a clutter of leaves and branches. It would be a labor of a half a day to chop any kind of passage through the tangle. Then suddenly he realized that here was a significant scene in that great drama which he had set himself to watch. Highway 66, that famous road! Here it was, blocked by the chance falling of a tree! A man might cut his way through this obstruction, but there were, or would soon be, others. In the thunderstorms, mud would wash across the road and earth slide from the cuts; a bridge would go in the surnmer freshet; in a few years, to take a car from Chicago to Los Angeles on Highway 66 would be a task for a pioneer in a covered wagon.
He thought of detouring through the fields, but the sod was soft and mucky from recent rains. Consulting his road-map, he saw that he could go south ten miles and strike another paved road, which would bring him back to the highway. He turned the station-wagon around, and started back.
But when he reached the other road, he saw no real reason why he should return to 66. The secondary highway led on directly toward the east, and so far as he could tell, that direction was just as good as another. "Perhaps," he thought, "that fallen tree has changed the whole future course of human history. I might have gone on toward Chicago, and something might have happened there. Now something different will happen."
So he went eastward through Oklahoma, the country empty everywhere. On the rolling hills the scrubby oak-growth looked just as it must have looked before. On the level cultivated stretches, corn and cotton were growing. The corn stood high, head above the weeds; it would bear a fairly good crop. But the cotton was rapidly being choked out.
The full heat of surnmer was upon him now, and was breaking down more of his remnants of civilization. He still shaved daily, more because he felt comfortable that way than for any sense of his appearance, but he had not had his hair cut, and it hung shaggily about him. He hacked at it with a pair of scissors. He had reverted merely to a pair of blue jeans and an open-necked shirt. He threw the shirt away every morning, and put on a clean one. Somewhere he had forgotten his gray fedora, and from an Oklahoma general store he picked up a cheap straw hat, the kind that any tenant farmer might wear in the summer.
That afternoon he crossed into Arkansas, and though he knew that state lines were only imaginary, he suddenly became conscious of another change. Here all the dryness of the plains country was left far behind, and the weather was hot and humid. As a result the growth was everywhere pushing in upon the roads and buildings. Runners from vines and climbing roses already dangled across windows and hung swinging from eaves and porch roofs. The smaller houses looked as if they were shrinking back shyly and beginning to hide in the woods. Fences also were being obscured. There was no longer a sharp line between the road and the surrounding country. Grass and weeds were showing green at every little crack in the concrete; blackberry shoots were pushing in from the shoulders, breaking the clean white line. In one place the long runners of some vine reached clear to the white line in the middle of the pavement, and met others advancing from the other side.
Peaches were ripe, and he varied his diet of canned food by raiding an orchard. His entry scared off a few hogs which had been eating the fallen fruit. That night he slept at North Little Rock.
The prize boars will die in their well-kept pens, and the fat brood sows will wander about, squealing for their mash, but on many a farm, the shoats will run wild without restraint of fences. They need nothing from man. In the heat they seek the swamps by the river, and root there, and lie in the mud, grunting happily. When the air grows cool, they wander the oak woods and feed on the acorns. After a few generations, they grow slimmer of leg and thinner of body and longer of tusk. Before the fury of their boars, even the wolf and the bear hurry aside. Like man, they eat flesh or fowl or tuber or nut or fruit. They will live.
An hour on the road next morning, at the edge of a small town, he started, as his eyes fell upon the unaccustomed sight of a well-weeded and tended garden. He stopped, went to investigate, and found for the first time what might, by generous interpretation, be called a social group. They were Negroes—a man, a middle-aged woman, a young boy. By the obvious look of the woman, there would soon be a fourth member.
They were timid. The boy kept in the background, curious but frightened, scratching at his head in a way that suggested lice. The woman stood, stolidly silent except to direct question. The man took off his straw hat and stood fingering its broken rim nervously; beads of sweat, from nervousness or the heat of the morning sun, ran down his shiny black forehead.
Ish could hardly understand the thick dialect, rendered more unintelligible by embarrassment. He made out, however, that they knew of no one else in the neighborhood, and in fact knew very little of anything, not having been beyond walking distance from the spot since the disaster. They were not a family group, but merely a chance association of survivors—three, against the law of chance, having survived in one small town.
Ish soon realized they were suffering not only from the shock of the catastrophe but also from the taboos carried over from before it. They talked with diffidence in the presence of a strange white man, dropping their eyes.
In spite of their obvious reluctance, Ish looked around their place. Although all the houses of the town must have been open to them, they still lived in the crude cabin where the woman had lived before the disaster. Ish did not go in, but through the open door he saw the rickety bed and chairs and the sheet-iron stove, and the oil-cloth-draped table with the flies buzzing about the uncovered food. The outside looked better. They had a luxuriant garden and a good corn-patch, and were actually tending a small field of cotton, although what in the world they expected to do with the cotton was more than Ish could figure out. Apparently they had merely carried on, doing the things that people in their world were supposed to do, and thus gaining a sense of security.
They had chickens in a pen, and some pigs. Their painfully naive embarrassment when Ish saw the pigs was only too plain advertisement that they had appropriated them from some farmer's pen and now felt that the white man would hold them accountable.
Ish asked for some fresh eggs, and for a dozen gave them one of his dollar bills. They seemed to be delighted with the exchange. After a quarter of an hour, having exhausted all the possibilities of the situation, Ish got into the car, much to the relief of the reluctant hosts.
He sat in the front seat for a moment, thinking to himself, "Here," he reflected, "I might be a king in a little way, if I remained. They would not like it, but from long habit they would, I think, accept the situation—they would raise vegetables and chickens and pigs for me, and I could soon have a cow or two. They would do all the work that I needed to have done. I could be a king, at least, in a little way."
But the idea was only fleeting, and as he drove on, he began to think that the Negroes had really solved the situation better than he. He was living as a scavenger upon what was left of civilization; they, at least, were still living creatively, close to the land and in a stable situation, still raising most of what they needed.
Of half a million species of insects only a few dozen were appreciably affected by the demise of man, and the only ones actually threatened with extinction were the three species of the human louse. So ancient, if not honorable, was this association that it had even been used as an argument for the single origin of man, anthropologists noting that all isolated tribes scratched and picked at the same parasites and therefore inferring that the original ape-men must have carried the original insect-ancestors outward with them from their point of dispersal.
Since that first departure, throughout hundreds of millennia, the lice had adjusted their life nicely to their world, which was the body of man. They existed as three tribes, taking as their domains, respectively, the head, the clothing, and the private parts. Thus, in spite of racial differences, they amicably maintained a tripartite balance of power, setting for their host an example which he might well have followed. At the same time, becoming so exactly adapted to man, they lost the capacity of existing upon any other host.
The overthrow of man was therefore their overthrow. Feeling their world growing cold, they crawled off in search of some new warm world to inhabit, found none, and died. Billions perished most miserably.
At the funeral of Homo sapiens there will be few mourners. Canis familiaris as an individual will perhaps send up a few howls, but as a species, remembering all the kicks and curses, he will soon be comforted and run off to join his wild fellows. Homo sapiens, however, may take comfort from the thought that at his funeral there will be three wholly sincere mourners.
He came to the long bridge across the great brown rolling river, and a truck was stalled, blocking the narrow single lane which led across to Memphis.
Feeling like a bad boy, who is doing something forbidden and will be punished for it, he went against all the traffic signs, took the narrow single lane on the lefthand side of the railroad tracks, and headed across toward Tennessee on the road which should lead to Arkansas.
But he met no one, and before long he came to the Tennessee side, and drove out (still in the wrong direction) through the bridge approach. Memphis was as empty as other cities had been, but a south wind was blowing, and it brought a fetid reek from what had been the teeming districts around Beale Street. If this was any indication of what Southern cities would be like, Ish wanted no more of them. He headed fast toward the country again.
Before he had gone far, however, the south wind brought steady rain. Since driving became dull and wearisome, and since he was certainly in no hurry to get anywhere, he holed up in a tourist-court at the edge of a small town, the name of which he did not even bother to ascertain. The gas pressure was still working at the stove in the kitchenette, and he made the fresh eggs his chief dish for dinner. They were a real treat, and yet he ended by being in some way still unsatisfied. "I wonder," he thought, "if I'm getting all the things I should to eat." Perhaps he should raid a drug store for some vitamin tablets. Later, he let Princess out for a run, and she suddenly vanished into the rain with a long yapping which ended in a bay as she struck on the trail of some animal. He was disgusted, since he knew that he might have to wait up an hour for her pleasure to return. She was back sooner, however, smelling woefully of a skunk. He shut her in the garage, and she complained bitterly with her yapping, at the disgraceful way she was being treated.
Ish went to bed, still with the unsatisfied feeling. "Must be suffering from shock more than I realize consciously," he thought. "Or else the loneliness is getting me, or maybe good old sex is raising its ugly head."
Shock could do strange things, he knew. He remembered hearing the story of a man who had seen his wife killed before his eyes in an accident and who had felt no desire for months.
He thought of the Negroes whom he had seen that day. The woman—middle-aged, far gone in pregnancy, no beauty at any time—could scarcely have thus disturbed him. When he thought of the incident, his memories turned chiefly to the way in which they had found a kind of security by keeping close to the soil. Then Princess bayed from the garage, and he cursed her, and went to sleep.
In the morning he still felt unsatisfied and restless. The storm was not yet over, but at the moment no rain was falling. He decided not to leave, but to take a walk down the road. Before going he looked into the station-wagon, and saw the rifle lying on the middle seat. He had hardly touched it since leaving California; now, without any definite thought, he took it, tucked it under his arm, and walked down the road.
Princess followed him a few yards, then discovered a new trail, and in spite of the last night's experience was off upon it, vanishing over the hill in a series of delighted yelps and bays. "Better luck this time!" he called after her.
Ish himself walked along with no more definite idea than to stretch his legs a little or perhaps find a tree with ripe fruit. He was scarcely thinking of anything when he saw a cow and a calf in a field. There was nothing remarkable in that; he could see a cow and a calf in nearly any field in Tennessee. The remarkable fact was that now the loaded rifle was under his arm, and suddenly he knew what must somewhere have been in his mind.
Carefully resting the rifle on a fence-post he saw the sights come clearly into line with the redness of the calf's shoulder. The range was butcher's distance. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle spoke and kicked back against him. As the sound died, he heard the calf give a long choking wheeze; it stood with legs braced but shaky, a thin stream of blood bursting from the nostrils. Then it collapsed and fell.
The cow had run a few yards after the shot, and now she stood and turned uncertainly. Ish did not know what she might do in the defense of her calf. Taking good aim again, he put a bullet just behind her shoulder. He fired twice more, for mercy, as she toppled.
He had to walk back to the cabin for the hunting-knife. When he returned, he carried the reloaded rifle. He felt his own reaction as curious. Before this time he had never thought much about weapons, but now it was as if he had declared war upon creation and should look for retaliation upon himself. Yet, when he came to where the cow and the calf were lying, and climbed over the fence, he met no resistance or opposition. The calf, to his dismay, was still breathing. Not liking the job, he cut its throat. He had never been a hunter, and had never butchered an animal; so he made a bad haggling job of it. Getting himself well bloodied in the process, he managed to hack out the liver, when he had got it, he realized that he had no way to carry it, except in his hand. He had to lay the bloody mass back among the entrails of the calf, and go back again to the cabin to get a pan. When he returned to the calf, a crow was already at work upon the eyes.
When he finally had the liver safely at the cabin, he was so covered with blood and dirt that he had lost all desire to eat it. He washed as well as he could at the cabin, and waited around listlessly, since the rain had again begun to fall. Princess returned, and demanded entrance. Since she had, by this time, lost most of the skunk's smell, he admitted her. She was wet and scratched with briers, dirty and foot-sore. She lay on the floor putting herself into shape with her tongue; he himself lay on the bed as if spent by emotion, yet in some way satisfied at last. Outside, the rain fell steadily, and after an hour, for the first time since it all happened, Ish realized that he had a new sensation—he was merely bored.
He looked around at the cabin, and found a six-months-old magazine; he settled down to read a story which dealt with the old boy-meets-girl theme, taking its particular slant from the problems which arose to hinder true love as the result of a housing shortage. It was all as far away, Ish concluded, from his present situation, as if it had been a story about building the Pyramids. In the course of the morning, he read three stories, but he found the advertisements much more fascinating. Not one in ten of them seemed to have any relation to his present situation, because they were not aimed at man, the individual, so much as at man, the member of a group—for instance, you should avoid bad breath, not because it might be a symptom of approaching toothache or digestive discomfort, but because if you had bad breath the girls would not like to dance with you or your boy-friend would not propose.
Yet the magazine had the good effect, at least, of taking him out from himself again. By noon, he was hungry, and when he looked at the liver now lying peacefully in a pan, he found that the memory of the bloody and dying calf had passed out of his mind. He fried a fine succulent piece of it for his lunch, and enjoyed it greatly. A bit of fresh meat, he concluded, was what he had been wanting. He gave a piece to Princess, also.
As he sat quietly after lunch, he had a new feeling of satisfaction and release. To shoot a calf was certainly no feat of sportsmanship, and it was not getting very close toward the production of one's own food. Yet it was a little closer to reality than the opening of a can. He seemed to have moved one step away from a mere scavenging existence, and to be getting a little closer to the state in which the three Negroes were living. To put it that an act of destruction had been an act of creation might seem a paradox, but he felt of it as something of that sort.
A fence was a fact, and a fence was also a symbol. Between the herds and the crops, the fence stood as a fact, but between the rye and the oats, it was only a symbol, for the rye and the oats did not mingle of themselves. Because of fences the land was cut into chunks and blocks. The pasture changed to the plowed land sharply at the fence, and on the other side of the plowed land, at the line of the fence, went the highway, and beyond the highway was the orchard, and then another fence with the lawns and the house beyond it, and again at a fence, the barnyard. Once the fences are broken both in fact and in symbol, then there are no more blocks and chunks of land and sharp changes, but all is hazy and wavy, and fades from one into the other, as it was in the beginning.
After that, he lost track of the time still more. He did not travel far in any day because there was much rain, and the roads were not as smooth and straight as they had been in the West. Moreover he had lost his sense of hurry. He worked northeastward through the hills of Kentucky, then struck the Ohio River bottomland, and went on into Pennsylvania.
He foraged more for himself. He gathered green corn from the weed-grown corn-patches. There were ripe berries and fruit. Now and then in a garden he found a head or two of lettuce which had not been ruined by worms. Frequently, he pulled up carrots, and ate them raw, since he was very fond of raw carrots. He shot a young pig. He used the shotgun to bag two partridges. Again, with Princess shut in the car and protesting loudly, he spent a happy two hours slowly stalking a flock of turkeys which always scurried off just before he was within range. At last, however, he managed to get close enough to knock over a gobbler. Some weeks ago it must have been a tame turkey, but now it had gone wild, and from constant necessity of dodging foxes and wild cats had become almost as wary as if it had lived all its life in the woods.
Between rains the weather was warm, and when he felt like it, he stripped and swam in some likely looking stream. Since the water from faucets began to seem stale, he drank from springs and wells although by now, he judged, even the larger rivers should be free of sewage and factory refuse.
He became used to the look of the towns, and could generally tell whether they were entirely empty or whether by searching he might somewhere find a survivor or two. The liquor-stores were often looted. The other buildings usually undisturbed, although occasionally there had been tampering with the banks—people apparently still putting trust in money. In the streets there would be an occasional pig or dog, less often, a cat.
Even in this once more thickly inhabited part of the country he saw comparatively few bodies, and there was less stench of death than he had feared. Most of the farms and many of the smaller towns apparently had been left deserted when their last inhabitants withdrew to larger centers for medical care or else fled into the hills, hoping to escape infection. On the outskirts of every larger town he saw the piled-up dirt where the bulldozers had worked even in the last days. At the end, necessarily, many bodies must have been left unburied, but these were usually in the areas around hospitals which had been concentration-points. At the warning of his nose he avoided such spots or drove rapidly past them.
The surviving people, he found, were generally singles, occasionally couples. They were anchored firmly in their own places. Sometimes they seemed to wish that he would stay there with them, but they never wished to accompany him. He still did not find any of them with whom he wished to share the future. If necessary, he thought, he could return.
The country in some ways showed more change than the towns, although one would hardly have imagined so to begin with. But in the country the crops were growing up rankly with weeds. In this part, the wheat had not been cut at the time of the disaster, and now it was heavy in the head and the grains in some places had started to fall. The cattle and horses wandered about, and fences were obviously starting to go. Here and there a field of corn would remain undisturbed when the fence was tight, but more often the animals had forced an entrance.
Then, one morning, he crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey, and realized that he could reach New York by early afternoon.