The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [319]
"Listen, I'll tell you what," Goldstein said, "after Stanley gets up you can catch us, and give some help. That'll be fine, huh?"
"Okay, leave it that way," Brown said. Both of them knew that would not happen.
"Let's be movin'," Ridges said. He and Goldstein got at opposite ends of the stretcher, lifted it painfully and staggered off. After twenty yards they set it down again, stripped off all but one pack and one rifle. "You bring that stuff in, all right, Brown?" Goldstein asked. Brown nodded.
They labored off again, advancing at a painfully slow pace. Even stripped of equipment, the litter with Wilson on it weighed more than two hundred pounds. It took them almost an hour to cross a low ridge a half mile away.
. When they were out of sight, Brown took off his shoes and massaged the blisters and sores on his feet. They had almost ten miles to go. Brown sighed, and slowly kneaded his big toe. I oughta turn in my stripes, he thought.
But he knew he wouldn't. It'll just go on and on until I get busted. He looked at Stanley, who was still lying on the ground. Aaah, the two of us are just alike. He'll be havin' my worries soon.
10
Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march. They never even thought about it any more.
Croft himself did not know the reason. He would never have been able to explain what prompted him when he was circling a bluff to decide on an upper or lower ramp when both spiraled up the walls of a cliff. He knew only that the one he had not chosen would end in a sheer fall. The lower might narrow into nothing, or the upper ramp lose itself in an isolated knoll or outcropping. A geologist with years of study and field experience might have chosen as well, but it would have taken him longer; there would have been a pause while the man raced through his jargon, weighed the factors, estimated the intangibles, correlated all the graphs of growth and decay, expansion and decrease, and then the geologist would have been uncertain. There were too many elements, after all.
Croft felt the nature of rock and earth, knew as well as he knew the flexing of his muscles how in an age of tempest the boulders had strained and surged until the earth had shaped itself. He had always a feeling of that birth-storm when he looked at land; he almost always knew how a hill would look on the other side. It was the variety of knowledge that felt intuitively the nearness of water no matter how foreign the swatch of earth over which he was traveling.
The aptitude might have been innate, or perhaps it was developed in all the years he had worked on land driving cattle, all the patrols he had led, all the thousand occasions when it had been important for him to know which route to take. In any case, he led the platoon up the mountain without hesitation, scrambling upward from ridge to ridge, branching from defile to defile, halting against his desire to wait for the others to catch up with him and regain their wind. Each halt annoyed him. Despite all the exertion of the preceding days, he was restless and impatient now, driven forward by a demanding tension in himself. He had the mountain in his teeth as completely and excitedly as a hound which has picked up the scent. He was continually eager to press on to the next rise, anxious to see what was beyond. The sheer mass of the mountain inflamed him.
He had brought the platoon up the first clay gully in the cliffs, and at the top he had paused for a moment and then filed off to the right to climb a steeply rounded slope of kunai grass which abutted a rock wall thirty feet high. He bore back to the left again, and found a series of slabs up which they could climb. Above that was a tumble of rocks which issued into a sharp ridge-line zigzagging toward the middle slopes of the mountain. He led the platoon along it,