Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,39
car when he noticed a puzzling thing about the skeleton. Nearly all the ribs were broken.
That really was odd, when you thought about it. The scavengers could separate the individual bones as the connective tissues deteriorated, but their breaking anything as strong as the ribs of one of these small desert mules was out of the question. He wondered what could have killed it. The only North American predator with the power to smash in the chest that way would be a grizzly, and there were no grizzlies in the desert or probably anywhere nearer than Yellowstone.
He shrugged. Strange it might be, but not very important. It could have been hit by a car or truck out on the road and then brought in here to be disposed of. He turned away and started back to the car, idly watching the ground for tracks. He’d taken only a few steps when he saw the piece of metal. He picked it up. It was a small aluminum cap, and even as the tingle of excitement began to spread along his nerves, he saw the other thing on the ground—a thin slice of wood veneer the same length as one of the Upmann cigars. It was flat now instead of curled, and somewhat bleached by the sun, but there was no doubt what it was.
What in God’s name had the old man been doing out here by the carcass of a burro—assuming the carcass had been here then? And where was the tube itself? He began a search then, slowly, systematically, covering every inch of the ground in a widening spiral outward from the burro. Several times he saw heel prints, but the ground was too hard to tell whether they were all made by the same pair of shoes. The sun beat down relentlessly, and the smell was disagreeable until he began to get farther away. It was obvious now the burro hadn’t been dragged in here or unloaded from a truck because no vehicle had been near the place at all, but this interested him only slightly at the moment. It was a full ten minutes before he found anything else, and then it wasn’t the cigar tube—he already knew he wasn’t going to find that, and why.
It was a small strip of brown plastic or wax-impregnated cardboard a little more than an inch long and varying from a half inch to an inch in width, jagged of outline and looking as if it had been scorched. It was slightly curved as though it had once been part of a cylinder, and it was crimped at one end. The only images he could evoke from this much of it were of a shotgun shell or a stick of dynamite, but it couldn’t be either of these because of the markings. At one end, where it had apparently been crimped, was a plus sign, and at the other, where it was torn and scorched, the two lower-case letters: fd. Was there a word in the English language that ended in fd? He couldn’t think of one, and if he’d ever seen anything resembling this, he couldn’t remember it. He put it in the pocket of his shirt.
The three beer cans made even less sense. He found them as he was completing his last circuit, now a good fifty yards away from the burro. They were almost that far again beyond him, toward the house, but sunlight glinting off one of them caught his eye and he went over. They were shiny and new, emptied only recently, and were strung together with short lengths of soft copper wire as if somebody had fashioned a homemade toy for some toddler to drag around. He pulled them from the clump of sage in which they were caught, looked at them blankly, and shook his head.
Their being linked together with the wire seemed too pointless even for speculation, and their only significance was the proof that there had indeed been people here within the past few weeks and that, contrary to the evidence so far, they weren’t a new species of man subsisting off the surrounding air in the manner of lichens and orchids, both of which he’d already established when he found the cap to the cigar tube. He tossed them back into the bush, went out to the car, savagely turned it around, and drove back to the house. There were only two possibilities. Either they’d carried everything away with them, in which