1 CHAPTER 1
*... and the government of the United States of America is herewith
suspended, except in the District of Columbia, as of the emergency. Federal
officers, including those of the Armed Forces, will put themselves under
the orders of the governors of the various states or of any other
functioning local authority.* By order of the Acting President. *God save
the people of the United States....*
*Here is an announcement which has just come in from the Bay Area Emergency
Council. The West Oakland Hospitalization Center has been abandoned. Its
functions, including burials at sea, are now concentrated at the Berkeley
Center. That is all....*
*Keep tuned to this Station, which is the only one now in operation in
northern California. We shall inform you of developments, as long as it is
possible.*
Just as he pulled himself up to the rock-ledge, he heard a sudden rattle,
and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand;
turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing. It was not a large
one, he noted, even at the moment when he raised his hand to his lips and
sucked hard at the base of the index-finger, where a little drop of blood
was oozing out.
*"Don't waste time by killing the snake!"* he remembered.
He slid down from the ledge, still sucking. At the bottom he saw the hammer
lying where he had left it. For a moment he thought he would go on and
leave it there. That seemed like panic; so he stooped and picked it up with
his left hand, and went on down the rough trail.
He did not hurry. He knew better than that. Hurry only speeded up a man's
heart, and made the venom circulate faster. Yet his heart was pounding so
rapidly from excitement or fear that hurrying or not hurrying, it seemed,
should make no difference. After he had come to some trees, he took his
handkerchief and bound it around his right wrist. With the aid of a twig he
twisted the handkerchief into a crude tourniquet.
Walking on, he felt himself recovering from his panic. His heart was
slowing down. As he considered the situation, he was not greatly afraid. He
was a young man, vigorous and healthy. Such a bite would hardly be fatal,
even though he was by himself and without good means of treatment.
Now he saw the cabin ahead of him. His hand felt stiff. Just before he got
to the cabin, he stopped and loosened the tourniquet, as he had read should
be done, and let the blood circulate in the hand. Then he tightened it
again.
He pushed open the door, dropping the hammer on the floor as he did so. It
fell, handle up, on its heavy head, rocked back and forth for a moment, and
then stood still, handle in the air.
He looked into the drawer of the table, and found his snake-bite outfit,
which he should have been carrying with him on this day of a days. Quickly
he followed the directions, slicing with the razor-blade a neat little
criss-cross over the mark of the fangs, applying the rubber suction-pump.
Then he lay on his bunk watching the rubber bulb slowly expand, as it
sucked the blood out.
He felt no premonitions of death. Rather, the whole matter still seemed to
him just a nuisance. People had kept telling him that he should not go into
the mountains by himself--"Without even a dog!" they used to add. He had
always laughed at them. A dog was constant trouble, getting mixed up with
porcupines or skunks, and he was not fond of dogs anyway. Now all those
people would say, "Well, we warned you!"
Tossing about half-feverishly, he now seemed to himself to be composing a
defense. "Perhaps," he would say, "the very danger in it appealed to me!"
(That had a touch of the heroic in it.) More truthfully he might say, "I
like to be alone at times, really need to escape from all the problems of
dealing with people." His best defense, however, would merely be that, at
least during the last year, he had gone into the mountains alone as a
matter of business. As a graduate student, he was working on a thesis: *The
Ecology of the Black Creek Area.* He had to investigate the relationships,
past and present, of men and plants and animals in this region. Obviously
he could not wait until just the right companion came along. In any case,
he could never see that there was any great danger. Although nobody lived
within five miles of his cabin, during the summer hardly a day passed
without some fisherman coming by, driving his car up the rocky road or
merely following the stream.
Yet, come to think of it, when had he last seen a fisherman? Not in the
past week certainly. He could not actually remember whether he had seen one
in the two weeks that he had been living by himself in the cabin. There was
that car he had heard go by after dark one night. He thought it strange
that any car would be going up that road in the darkness, and could hardly
see the necessity, for ordinarily people camped down below for the night
and went up in the morning. But perhaps, he thought, they wanted to get up
to their favorite stream, to go out for some early fishing.
No, actually, he had not exchanged a word with anyone in the last two
weeks, and he could not even remember that he had seen anyone.
A throb of pain brought him back to what was happening at the moment. The
hand was beginning to swell. He loosened the tourniquet to let the blood
circulate again.
Yes, as, he returned to his thoughts, he realized that he was out of touch
with things entirely. He had no radio. Therefore, as far as he was
concerned, there might have been a crash of the stockmarket or another
Pearl Harbor; something like that would account for so few fishermen going
by. At any rate, there was very little chance apparently that anyone would
come to help him. He would have to work his own way out.
Yet even that prospect did not alarm him. At worst, he considered, he would
lie up in his cabin, with plenty of food and water for two or three days,
until the swelling in his hand subsided and he could drive his car down to
Johnson's, the first ranch.
The afternoon wore on. He did not feel like eating anything when it came
toward supper-time, but he made himself a pot of coffee on the gasoline
stove, and drank several cups. He was in much pain, but in spite of the
pain and in spite of the coffee he became sleepy...
He woke suddenly in half-light, and realized that someone had pushed open
the cabin door. He felt a sudden relief to know that he had help. Two men
in city clothes were standing there, very decent-looking men, although
staring around strangely, as if in fright. "I'm sick!" he said from his
bunk, and suddenly he saw the fright on their faces change to sheer panic.
They turned suddenly without even shutting the door, and ran. A moment
later came the sound of a starting motor. It faded out as the car went up
the road.
Appalled now for the first time, he raised himself from the bank, and
looked through the window. The car had already vanished around the curve.
He could not understand. Why had they suddenly disappeared in panic,
without even offering to help?
He got up. The light was in the east; so he had slept until dawn the next
morning. His right hand was swollen and acutely painful. Otherwise he did
not feel very ill. He warmed lap the pot of coffee, made himself some
oatmeal, and lay down in- his bunk again, in the hope that after a while he
would feel well enough to risk driving down to Johnson's that is, of
course, if no one came along in the meantime who would stop and help him
and not like those others, who must be crazy, run away at the sight of a
sick man.
Soon, however, he felt much worse, and realized that he must be suffering
some kind of relapse. By the middle of the afternoon he was redly
frightened. Lying in his bunk, he composed a note, thinking that he should
leave a record of what had happened. It, would not be very long of course
before someone would find him; his parents would certainly telephone
Johnson's in a few days now, if they did not hear anything. Scrawling with
his left hand, he managed to get the words onto paper. He signed merely
Ish. It was too much work to write out his full name of Isherwood Williams,
and everybody knew him by his nickname. .
