The Cache Read Online Free Page B

of that lumbering bear, he will tell him the same thing I’m telling you. If I know Joel, the idea of so much glory will be irresistible. He’ll go on to the East, too.”
    “Perhaps. Why didn’t the Council think of this before?”
    “Then we wouldn’t have to be tracking you down? As I said, it was decided suddenly. It was ridiculous doing it so impulsively and so late. But a suddenly made-up mind moves quickly, and Wako told us to track our sons down if we could and ask them.”
    Benoni envisioned the older ones frantically chasing down the young men to give them a last-minute message. He did not know whether to feel sick or to laugh. All the dignity and importance of the ceremony was gone; he doubted the wisdom of the Council, which he had looked up to all his life. His father, as if he had read his thoughts, said, “Yes, I know. It’s ridiculous, but when you take your place on the Council, son, you will find yourself doing just such stupid and hasty things.”
    “I don’t know about this exploration trip, father,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it later. Now, I’m going to be too busy keeping alive.”
    Suddenly, tears appeared in his father’s eyes; the moonlight glinted off them. And his father put his arm around him and said, “God go with you, son. And bring you back home as soon as possible.”
    Benoni was embarrassed. It was bad enough for his mother to weep. She could be excused because she was a woman. But his father . . .
    Nevertheless, after gently saying good-bye to his father and watching him disappear into the boulder strewn hills, Benoni felt better. He had not known that his father cared so much for him. Men took so many pains to conceal emotions, to deny they even had any. Besides, no one had seen them, it was not as if his father had broken down in public.
    Benoni headed toward the northeast, keeping the towering bulk of the Superstitions, twenty miles away, to his right. His goal was the beginning of the Pechi Trail, the path of the uplands and Navaho country. To get there, he had two choices. Take the easy but much longer road which curved southeast and then back north just at the foot of the Superstitions. Or cut straight across the country or rock strewn, wash-gashed, hilly country. The easier path meant that he would have to pass by farms and the fortress-town of Meysuh. Even though his going would be at night, he would be in danger of being shot by his own countrymen or having dogs set upon him. The naked youth on his first warpath was taboo. A man’s hand was lifted only to strike a blow at him, to send him more swiftly on his way. There had been cases where boys had taken the easier road, were detected, and killed or crippled. Nobody felt sorry. A youth who was captured was obviously unfit to be a warrior of Fiiniks.
    Benoni cut across the desert. He climbed the steep walls of several cut washes. One of which, so said legend, was an irrigation canal dug centuries before white men had ever come to this land. Hohokam, the ancient Indians were called. Their descendants were the Papago and Pima, long since absorbed into the white majority in the Valley of the Sun.
    He skirted several small mountains where he could, climbed where he could not go around. Near dawn, he had covered about ten miles.
    Then, thirsty and hungry, he thought of hunting. First, he needed a knife. That meant finding a piece of chert or some satisfactory substitute. He would be lucky if he found even chert. There was no better grade of flint in this area. And, after an hour of straining his eyes in the moonlight and picking up many rocks and rejecting them, he found a chert. This, he chipped away at, though he hated to make any noise. And he fashioned a crude cutting tool, one that would be refined when he had more time.
    After choosing two small stones for throwing, he looked for jackrabbits, cottontails, kangaroo rats, pocket mice, or anything else that he might see before it saw him.
    After an hour of