He Wasn’t at the Meeting Place: A Desert Tale of the Single Shot .

A lone hunter in the canyon at twilight — a desert chronicle of brotherhood, peril, and survival.

 

He Wasn’t at the Meeting Place

They had hunted together long enough that most of it happened without talking. Naser and Ahmed knew the same dry watercourses, the same wind-cut ridges, the same hollows where the gazelle still came down when the heat broke. The desert had taught them caution. It never got around to teaching them fear, and neither of them went looking for the lesson.

One morning they rode out toward a stretch of broken country north of the camp — rock and thorn and old flood channels — a place men still talked about because the game had not left it yet. They started before the sun had any weight in it. By the time it cleared the eastern hills they had come to where two valleys opened out of the same wall of stone, with barely a ridge between them.

“We’ll meet back here before dark,” Ahmed said.

Naser nodded. He was already looking east, the way he did when he had settled a thing before the talking reached it. He took the eastern cut. Ahmed went left. Each of them had a rifle, a falcon hooded and quiet on the wrist, and a Saluki that crossed the loose stone as if the ground had given it private permission.

The hours went the way hours go out there. The rock took in heat and held on to it. The falcon sat and waited. The dog ranged out, came back, went out again. Ahmed cut tracks twice and lost them both times in a stony bed where nothing holds. Around midmorning he sat in the thin shade of a boulder, drank, and watched a lizard go rigid against the rock a few feet from his boot, betting its life on being mistaken for stone. Nothing came into range all morning. He didn’t mind much. There had been a great many days like that.

Then a shot came across the stillness. One, flat and far off.

Far, but not so far that he mistook where it came from. Ahmed found himself smiling before he decided to. Naser had turned something up. He got to his feet, knocked the grit off his sleeve, and went on with his own valley, and luck kept its distance from him the way it sometimes does. By midafternoon he had stopped caring. If Naser had meat for the night, they could try again at first light and call the day even.

He came back to the meeting place with color still in the west. The rocks were giving the day’s heat back. The air had begun to cool in that abrupt way it does out there, as if a door had been opened somewhere. He loosened the girths. He watered the dog from the skin. He waited.

Naser didn’t come.

Ahmed made excuses for him at first, which is what a man does while he is still refusing the other thought. The animal would have been heavy. That eastern valley had the worse ground of the two. Naser had never in his life left a good track before he was finished with it. The minutes went, and then more of them. The light thinned along the ridgeline. The first real unease arrived — small, unwelcome, familiar.

He called out once. The sound went into the mouth of the valley and came back changed, and told him nothing.

He stood there longer than he should have, arguing it out with himself. Going in after a man who was only running late was one kind of foolishness. Sitting in the dark while your friend lay somewhere up that valley was another kind. The second won, as he had known it would from the moment he started counting minutes. He hobbled the horses, took the rifle, and walked in.

The valley closed on him sooner than his memory of it had. The sand still held the warmth of the day under his feet. Between the rocks the air smelled of dust and, faintly, of something drier than dust. He walked a long while. Now and then he stopped — not because he needed to, but because he wanted to hear whatever the place would tell him. A stone ticked somewhere as it cooled. The dog kept close against his leg, which it never did.

He started, without wanting to, to hear that shot differently. Just the one. A man who hits what he aims at fires once. So does a man who doesn’t get the chance to fire twice. He thought about how easily distance lies to you in broken ground, and how fast the light leaves a fold in the hills, and then he was thinking about arriving too late, and he walked faster.

When he found them, he understood right away that the thought had not been idle.

Naser lay on his side in the sand. The ground beneath him had gone dark and wet in a wide, uneven patch, and he was not moving. Twenty paces off, backed against a scatter of fallen rock, a leopard crouched and breathed in fast shallow pulls, one flank laid open in three long cuts. It watched Ahmed with the dull, narrowed attention of an animal that has already spent everything it had and is waiting to learn whether that matters.

Ahmed didn’t think about it. The rifle came up, he fired, and the leopard went down and stayed down.

Naser’s hound was still there, shoved up against its master’s legs, shivering, refusing to give ground even now. Ahmed knelt in the wet sand. For a moment he could not find any breath at all. Then he found it — shallow, ragged, there. His hands started shaking then, which they had not done once on the walk in. He said Naser’s name twice and got nothing, and swore at him quietly anyway, the way a man swears at someone he has just been given back.

He got him up across his shoulders. The weight was worse than he had allowed for and the way out was worse than the way in. Every hundred paces he had to stop, ease him down, change his grip, and listen again for that thin breathing. The light went almost entirely. His shoulders burned and then went numb, which was better. The whole way he kept turning over the same useless thing: that they should not have split up; that a single shot from that far off had never once in his life been only good news; and that he had stood there in the sun and smiled at it.

Clear of the worst of the rocks, he laid Naser down and did what could be done with cloth and pressure and both hands. The bleeding slowed. Night came on properly. Ahmed sat in the cooling sand with his friend’s head against his thigh and waited for enough moon to move by.

Naser came around the way a man does after a fall — muddled, then all at once entirely present. There was almost nothing behind his voice.

“What happened? Ahmed asked.

Naser was quiet a while, putting it back together. “It came out of the rocks,” he said. “Closer than anything should get. I shot. I thought I’d taken the heart.” He breathed. “I hadn’t. After that there was no time for the rifle. I had the dagger. I kept using it, and after a while I couldn’t tell which of us was finishing first.” He shut his eyes. “I heard you. I think I heard you.”

“You heard the rifle.”

Naser’s mouth moved toward a smile and didn’t quite arrive. “Praise God you came.”

They reached camp long after dark. Ahmed cleaned the wounds by lamplight and stayed awake that night and the next, until the fever broke and Naser’s voice came back into its ordinary shape and he started complaining about the coffee. The desert took no notice of any of it. The same wind went over the same stone. In the morning Ahmed walked out to where the horses were standing and looked a while at the mouth of the eastern valley. Then he went back and made the coffee again, properly this time.