The Hunters

In that Bitter Cold, water turns to dry dust for the lightest breath of air to play with. There is no landscape and there are no landmarks. A hillock of powdered snow ripples and flattens; the ripples coil and convolute, and all in half an hour you have a head of hair, a brain, the helix of a freakish ear, a diagram of unearthly trajectories, and at last a pure valley virginally ridged.

Here, 29 of the 32 winds blow from the south toward the Pole, and they make chaos. Hence, when day broke, the man called Josef who had been stalking his enemy around the base of a high hill discovered that he was lying opposite him at the rim of a bowl of ice 500 yards in diameter, scooped even and delicately stippled and burnished by some whim of the night wind.

Josef, though one of those born marksmen who point a gun as an ordinary man might point a finger, was somewhat nearsighted. He aimed by a certain combination of intuitions rather than by vision, as all great shots must do at long range: They must perceive rather than see; they must sense where the target is likely to be by the time a plated pellet no bigger than a cigarette butt has traveled its ordained distance. Josef knew that the eye is fallible. He depended upon a sort of diagnostic guesswork. Although he wore thick (continued on page 156)Hunters(continued from page 143) spectacles, tinted blue against the snow blink, and used a rifle with nothing but a common aperture sight, he was almost inevitably deadly even at twice the distance that separated him from the other man. If that man kept still for only three seconds, Josef knew that he could drop his bullet somewhere between the man's shoulders as he lay prone on the ice.

Even in clear weather a man half a thousand yards away and standing upright is scarcely a quarter of an inch tall, looked at down a rifle barrel over open sights. At a thousand yards that same man is a conjecture. Josef, a theoretician of the long shot, could pinpoint this conjecture; pick it out and cool it off. He knew, as he laid his aim, that in a few moments the speck that was a man in the distance would jerk, sprout limbs, and go kicking down the ice, looking remarkably like a little startled spider as it seems to climb down the air at the end of its invisible filament. But even as he squeezed off his shot, something cracked like a dog whip close to his right ear, and a bullet, cutting into the ice less than a foot from his head, spattered him with tiny ice splinters. Seconds later he heard, like the beating of stupendous wings, the flapping reverberation of his enemy's shot.

Josef knew that he must have fired high and wide and that in this still cold air the smoke of his own shot must hang blue against the snow. So he let himself slide downward a little way and then became still. Familiar with this terrain and, after ten days of this hunting, knowing something of the man he had to kill, he guessed that this man would stay where he was for a few seconds. The fact that Josef had only four cartridges left perturbed him little, if at all. In his singularly arranged mind there was no room for doubt. His man was as good as dead.

Visualizing a certain point a hairbreadth below and to the left of where the faint smoke of his enemy's last shot clung to the air, he fired again, and then lay flat. But he had miscalculated. His fire was returned. A bullet cut ice and rock a bare six inches from his thigh. The other marksman had not kept still; he had climbed upward and was shooting down. Now Josef held his fire. The morning was growing lighter and the sun was at his back. Furthermore, with the dawn a mist was rising out of the ice bowl and he knew that he could, by his peculiar sense of orientation, feel his objective at the other side of this mist, let it offer him ever so slight a sign. His white clothes froze to the ice; he became still as a man of ice, watching. Four hundred yards away, perhaps a yard to the vertical he saw a tiny dot of orange light and felt a bullet striking two feet above his head. The claque of the echoes gave the shot a tremendous round of applause. Now Josef reasoned, He argues that, having slid down, I will slide farther down yet, after I have returned his fire. So he invested rather than gambled another bullet in another exquisitely calculated shot and then scrambled, not down, but upward, for a distance of about 50 feet.

The next shot, when it came, puzzled Josef. It came not from the diameter of the bowl, but from a nearer curve. This meant that his enemy was climbing to come level with him. Two more bullets struck close by--perilously close. One screeched off ice, one whined off rock, and the bowl howled and whistled and gibbered before it was quiet again. Not far away some piled body of ice and shale shifted with a tremendous mutter and went rolling down. The great gray surfaces flung back the noise of its fall again and again, and there came up from below such a billowing of frosty vapor that Josef felt for the moment like some beetle packed in white wool and frozen for dissection. But his ears were too clever to be deceived by even this overwhelming noise. He knew that the shots had come from his right, somewhat above him. Very swiftly, being a lean and agile man trained to the mountains, he clambered in that direction. Now, apart from a faint, fitful whispering of wind in the crags and a certain hissing of dry snow, there was quiet. Very quietly, very deviously, he climbed eastward. But it seemed that the other man had got between him and the sun, for another shot, which seemed to come right out of the eye of the dawn, came so close that it tugged at his sleeve. He fired at the flash and lay still, assuming that the other man would guess that he had slid to his left. His assumption was right. A bullet splashed where his shoulder would have been if he had moved.

It was evident that if he had been maneuvering himself to within dead-certain killing distance of his enemy, his enemy had been playing the same game with him. But the mist, Josef reckoned, was his ally. As he watched, waiting, a brumous swirl of air sent down a tumble of loose frost which covered him like a blanket. He remained motionless. Ten minutes passed, twenty minutes. And now, at last, his enemy came into full view, less than two hundred yards away--a man in a white parka, big as a bear; a perfect target, something impossible to miss. Josef almost sighed with pleasure under his covering of frost. His sights were on the big man's solar plexus. Josef could have hit him in the eye, if he had so chosen; but since this was his last bullet, he decided to deny himself this little private indulgence in sharpshooting. And then, even as he involuntarily dug his toes into the snow and squeezed his trigger, the ground fell away from under him. He cursed himself as he saw the big man's hood snap back as the bullet flicked the tip of it--caught a glimpse of a great red face stubbled with blond beard--and then he was falling feet first over the ice. He let his empty rifle slip away, and fell as it seemed for a hundred years over the rim of the ice bowl and down and around in an awful vortex, helpless as a fly flushed away in a lavatory basin. Stone and ice fell with him. By some chance an enormous boulder skated away and, falling more directly, went down ahead of him. Otherwise he would have been crushed like an egg. As it was, he found himself, dizzy but unhurt, at the bottom of the newly formed crevasse. Glancing around, he saw that this short crevasse was shaped somewhat like a brandy snifter. The mouth was only half as wide as the bottom, and the sides were smoothly curved as if by a glass blower's pipe. Josef said to himself, without emotion, There is always the incalculable. I have failed. So I must die. But then, a hundred feet above, he saw the big man's head, and heard him say, in broken Russian, "Can you hear me? I don't want to shout. Vibration can start rockfall--avalanche--nyel?"

"I can hear you," said Josef, in good but stilted English. "You had better speak your own language--your accent in mine is execrable." Execrabable ... execrabable ... execrabable ... grumbled the echoes. He went on, "You have won. I will keep perfectly still if you will have the kindness to shoot me through the head."

"Be glad to oblige, but have used my last bullet. Anyway, things aren't done that way. If you want to shoot yourself, of course, that's your affair."

"I have no pistol."

"Have you a rope?"

"Yes. But I think my wrist is broken."

"Well, keep still and I'll haul you out."

"Why? We have been trying to kill each other for ten days."

"That's a different matter from leaving you to die in the ice."

"I see." Now the big man warily explored the lip of the bowl, until he found a kind of rocky excrescence split by the cold as if by a wedge. He had picked up Josef's rifle and noted that it was empty. It was a beautiful weapon, a Männlicher, which must have cost some sportsman every penny of $1500. He observed that the butt bore a baronial coronet inlaid in silver, and the monogram B von B. He wondered, in passing, who the Baron B von B had been, and (being a sentimental man at bottom) hoped that he had died easy. Then, with a sigh, he began to ram the Männlicher's barrel into the crack, using his own heavier rifle for a hammer. He thus improvised a smooth, strong peg to which he attached (continued on page 266)Hunters(continued from page 156) one end of the 50-foot rope which he carried coiled between hip and shoulder. He called down into the bowl, "Get your rope ready. How long is it?"

"About twenty yards."

"That ought to do it."

The big man tied the other end of the rope about his waist and then, paying out the slack, lowered himself into the bowl. The sides had more curvature than he had calculated. For half a minute he hung, spinning dizzily until, noticing a ragged crack in the ice, he swung inward and gripped it with one hand. He carried with him an alpine ice ax. With this he began swiftly and dexterously to cut hand- and footholds.

Josef, from the bottom, watched him with blank curiosity. When the big man was 40 feet down he said, "Mind your head, down there--I'm going to let myself slip." Then, supporting himself on the rope with one hand, he unhitched the loop which held him and came sliding down. Josef's face relaxed in a half smile of amusement. "If you want my rope, you will please take it for yourself. My right hand is quite useless. What are you going to do?"

"Well, first I'll catch my breath." He fumbled in an inside pocket and found cigarettes and a lighter. "Do you want a cigarette?"

"Thank you, no, I am a nonsmoker."

The big man lit a cigarette and un-slung a canteen. "I've got some whiskey here if you'd like a drink."

"Normally I do not drink alcohol, but I will take a little for quick energy." Josef swallowed a mouthful with a grimace, handed back the canteen and said, "I can assure you that if it is your intention to try to extract information from me by means of torture, it will be a wasted effort. I know nothing of value to your people--"

"--It is my intention," the other man said, imitating Josef's clipped accent, "to take this rope, cut a few footholds up to my rope's end and join the two by making a knot called a sheet bend. Then it is my intention to tie this end around you under the arms, climb back up to the top and haul you up. Your wrist is broken, you say? Well, you've got your feet, I guess, and one good hand to help yourself with."

"And then?" the little man asked.

"I don't know about 'then.' Do as you're told now." So saying, the big man went to work with his ice ax. The bowl sang like crystal. An hour passed before the ropes were joined and Josef made fast. "Let's hope that gun barrel holds," the big man said, "or things might get a bit difficult ... As a matter of curiosity, shrimp, don't you ever say thank you?"

"If it pleases you to hear the sound of the words--thank you. I have told you that there is nothing for you to gain by what you are doing. Either you are very stupid, or you act with some motive too deep for me to fathom. I have said thank you. Are you satisfied?"

The big man shrugged and began to climb hand over hand. Watching, Josef thought that the thin rope must inevitably snap under that vast bulk. But for all his size, the big man seemed to have something of the spider about him. Four times he swung to catch invisible fissures and promontories. At last, at the top, he hung, clinging to the rope with feet and knees alone while he cut a place for his fingers in the ice at the brim. Then he was over and gone.

At the top he paused for another breathing spell and smoked another cigarette. Then, calling out, "Take it easy and grab the notches in the ice," he braced his feet against the split rock and began to haul, grunting. The little man came up with surprising ease. In ten minutes the two were sitting side by side on the rock, the big man smoking and Josef nursing his right hand in his left armpit.

The big man was the first to speak. He said, "Goddamn you, do you know the meaning of the American expression 'in a jam'?"

"It is, I believe, a slang word meaning 'predicament.' Are you in a predicament? If so you have nobody to blame but yourself. I am at a loss, however, to know the nature of this predicament."

"You talk like a goddamn schoolteacher."

"Not at all. I am literate, you are not. That is all."

"You are a saboteur, a spy and a killer," said the other, looking at him with mixed wonder and dislike. Then he said, slowly, "There's something about your kind of people I'll never understand. I understand how a point of view can change. I understand how you can be educated to look at things in such and such a way. But there are certain fundamentals, surely?"

"Such as?"

"Well, say common gratitude. I could have left you to die down there on that ice."

"But you did not. Why did you not? I will tell you why. You decided to 'save my life,' as you would put it. To gratify an outmoded and decadent taste for the romantic. I have no such taste. My conceptions and my outlook are materialistic. In the past ten days we have been hunting each other. We must have exchanged fifty shots apiece. Ten times you have come within an inch of killing me. In passing let me compliment you on your marksmanship. It was your duty to shoot me just as it was my duty to shoot you if I could."

"I know. I've killed men. But we balk at leaving a man alone to die in the ice. Incidentally, I am not illiterate. For your information, I am a master of arts ... So, as I said, I find myself in a jam or predicament."

Josef said, with a thin smile, "Now you see just why your system is bound to fall, and upon what false moralities your way of thinking is based. There is no reality in you, no sense of proportion. You live in a fairy tale. I see you over my rifle sights at five hundred yards, you are a speck; I see you at five feet and you are a huge lump of protoplasm. Either way you are execrable to me. I spit upon the pathos of nearness! What if, under the microscope, the germ of a disease is magnified to the size of a dog; am I to caress it and let it lick my face? I walk through the streets of one of your decadent cities, and rub shoulders with a million of your kind--talk with them, eat with them, if the impulse moves me sleep with them. They are no less obnoxious in that I can see the whites of their eyes. But you--I know your kind. In you, propinquity breeds sentiment, and your sentiment stinks. Seen from the air a city looks like a bit of animal tissue, with the arterial roads like nerve cells, et cetera, and the bursting of a stick of bombs strikes your poetic imagination as looking like the blossoming of little flowers. Eh? Hypocrite, where is your predicament?"

The big man said, "I concede that there is a certain something in what you say. And still it seems to me that in certain circumstances when you magnify your awareness that a man is a man you sharpen your perception of the difference between good and evil. I detest you, and everything you stand for. But I cannot leave you to die alone in the ice. And here's the predicament--civilized people sometimes find themselves in such predicaments. It will be hard for you to understand. If I had put a bullet through your head--and I wish to God I had--I should have said, 'Mission accomplished,' and thought no more of the matter. But now that I've saved your life, in some mysterious way I feel morally indebted to you; in a way grateful to you. And my predicament is that I don't know what to do with you."

Josef said, "As you say, this is something I would not understand, and I should hope that I would have no desire to understand it. Let me help you out of your predicament. You are rendered impotent to hurt me because you have saved my life. But I, whose life you saved, find in my heart no trace of mercy toward you on that account."

"No. You'd be consistent in that, I'd guess. 'The end justifies the means'--that's what you'd say."

"And what would you say?" Josef asked.

"I'd say that every means is an end in itself. Like, say, a span in a bridge. Your bridge won't stand up."

"And your imagery is as banal as your reasoning is puerile. You bore me. Let us return to your 'predicament,' and have done with this tomfoolery. Have you a pistol?"

"No."

"Ah, but I have--" Josef's right hand came out from under his armpit holding a small black revolver. He fired straight into the big man's face. Quick as he was, the big man had been quicker, his great hand moving fast and automatically as an eyelid blinks, and it closed over the other man's little fist, pistol and all. The bullet grazed his ear. Bone snapped. The revolver fell into the snow.

Then, with something like tenderness, the big man said, "I thank you kindly. This puts matters back on the old footing. It simplifies everything."

He picked Josef up by the neck and one leg, raised him above his head and, handling him like a dry branch, broke his back on the edge of the rock. "You talk too much," he said. "You should have shot me before. Vanity is the downfall of your kind; you materialists have no sense of reality--"

Then he stopped, for he was addressing a dead man.

He kicked the body into the ice bowl. An avalanche of shale chased it down. The big man stood for a minute, thinking. Then he re-coiled his rope, slung his empty rifle over his shoulder, and went back down the hard trail southward and westward.