Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online

My feet had expanded a size or so in the heat, and I couldn't get the boots back on. After some time sitting on the burning ground under the burning sun, it seemed a good idea to keep walking, no matter what. I used my knife to cut several portholes in the canvas to make the boots somewhat wearable.
    Originally, we had planned to sleep during the heat of the day, but our tents tended to concentrate the ground heat and

    baked us until we felt woozy and barely conscious. It was safer to walk.
    So there we were, Nick and I, limping down the western flank of the Panamint Mountains under a cloudless sky at high noon. Nincompoops in the noonday sun. Little else seemed to live on the face of that burning rock and sand.
    To pass the time, we began playing the Game of Living Things. We were moving due west, and Nick had the entire world to the south. The north belonged to me. One living creature was worth one point. I had seen a dull-gray sparrowlike bird in a stand of sage and was way ahead, one to nothing. We had argued fiercely about ants. For the purposes of the game—this was an hourlong debate—a man had to stop and count precisely one hundred ants to make one living thing. This was an uncomfortable process, hot and boring. For all practical purposes ants didn't count in the Game of Living Things.
    Suddenly, a rabbit—more properly, I suppose, a hare— gray as the dull desert rock, burst out from under some sage between us. It broke northwest, nearly crossed my path, then cut south into Nick's world.
    "My point," Nick said.
    "That was my rabbit," I pointed out. I noticed that my teeth were tightly clenched. "I scared him up."
    Half an hour later Nick said, "The rabbit ran south. It's my rabbit."
    Half an hour after that I said, "He ran north first." The tape had come off of my right boot so that the rubber sole flopped annoyingly. My feet were being chafed badly by the holes in the boot, and I was walking in a sore-footed shuffle, rather like Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp except that I had to lift the right foot high above the ground to avoid getting burning pebbles in between the flopping sole and my foot. If I had that shuffling, hopping walk on videotape, I suspect I'd be able to see some small comedy there. As it was, the sun had baked me sour.
    "So it's one to one," Nick said some time later. I could feel the muscles bunching up in my back and found it necessary to shuffle-hop a hundred paces north into my own world and out of easy

    PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 38
    conversational range. An hour later, I heard myself shout, "]UST SHUT UP ABOUT THE DAMN RABBIT!"
    The desert is a lover.
    At dusk, when the sun sets and the sky explodes into gaudy pastels, when shadows mirror the colors of the sky, when the breeze is a cooling purple caress, the desert is beautiful.
    We were eating, Nick and I, laughing a bit about the Game of Living Things. Amazing what the desert does to you: It focuses wants and needs. At noon I had wanted no more than shade and water. It was absolutely all I could think about, and I knew then that if I had a cool place to sit and jug of water, I would be happy.
    Now, with both water and the blessing of night, I felt certain new needs creep into the equation. Nice to have something better to eat than another chili mac. A soft drink would be nice. Well-chilled champagne: If I had that, I would be happy. A chair to sit on. A table with some proper utensils. A white linen tablecloth. A house with a pool. A certain woman . . .
    Before our little stroll through the desert, I had read some books on desert survival and had come across something called The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk. The book is a collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers, men who had gone into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia to meditate: Christian hermits of the fourth century A.D. There was absolutely no desert lore in the sayings of the Desert Fathers: They were concerned