La Chacal

“That was sooner than I expected.” Barrett called back over his shoulder as the two changed direction and began moving in a steady south-west by west direction.

“You don’t think it was the La Chacal and her bandido thugs already?”  Rick mused.  “She couldn’t have known we were coming … could she?”

“The way things have been playing out, it wouldn’t surprise me if we were double humped and La Chacal knew we were coming even before we know we were coming.  HQ seems to have more holes in it than mom’s fancy brass strainer.  That is why we have to play this as unpredictable as La Chacal plays her games.”

“She is one crafty, she-devil of a redbone marauder if there ever was one.  I have never seen anyone who is always four or five steps ahead of chiefs.” Rick said as be began to climb a thirty-foot cliff with Barrett.

“Right now there is no way of knowing who is behind us but I would bet my tail fur it is them.”  Barrett replied as he jumped the last 8 feet of the cliff with easy and peered back into the raining twilight.


Unseen by the two coontail brothers, a figure stood about two miles off on a towering spire of red Navaho sandstone.  His face was hid under a black cowboy hat and the bulk of an thermal imaging scope.  He could see the two brothers heat glowing like a naval flare shot agains a black sky in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  There was no where for these boys to hide!

The figure lowered the optics to reveal hard yellow eyes and a face not even a mother would want to love.  The left side of his face sported three deep ugly scars that ran clean through the back of his left ear along his cheek and out to tip of his elongated nose.  He smiled at the futility of the two fleeing brothers attempt at stealth.                      

This would be easy.  He turned and gave a sharp but deep whistle.  He was calling his pack out for the hunt.

Carcass Canyon

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard!

They had heard that the Carcass Canyon wilderness was said to be beautiful in November.  There just hadn’t been a November this wet in decades.  600 mile to get there in the brothers ’84 CJ-7 Jeep with the windshield wipers not getting a single break from the rain.

Everything was wet.  Their packs were wet, their tarp and tent was wet.  All their clothing was wet, their socks laid out on the jeep’s defroster, attempting to dry out.  All the gear is is one state or another of dampness.

There wasn’t anything around either.  The last real town, or what someone with a sick sense of humor would call a town was two days back.  It was nothing more than a dot on the map with some historic old hotel (only walls were still standing as the roof was long gone and a stunted willow-tree occupied the inside), a tiny one room “general” store and one half-way working gas pump.  They had grabbed what supplies they could, filled the jeep and the spare Jerry cans and headed of into the raining night.

Nothing else on the map for gas or supplies for miles!

They had awoke this particular morning to the promise of only a cloudy day.  But as the brothers continued to follow the right hand ridge of the canyon rain began to fall not long into the morning.  It just made every muddier!  Soon they were slipping and sliding their way in the jeep, inch by careful inch down the canyon.  Red clay was sticking to everything.

By noon the rain had reduced to a steady drizzle.  But potholes were everywhere.

By 5:00 pm Barrett and Rick figured the had reached their next point to head east again and planned to get down to the river below and cross up into the next ridge where they had figured they would find a road and ultimately their target.  Unfortunately, when they got to the edge of the canyon there was no way down!  All they could see was a 400’ wall down to the river for miles in both direct.  So the scouting began as the cloudy skies begin to darken.

Barrett, driving, found a ‘sand slide’ that seemed to match up with a point of the wet map.  It looked tricky but they trusted the jeep’s ability to get them down over the slick rock.  It was a long slide down the red sandstone-dune to a ridge that a cut into a steep wall at the bottom like a knife slicing into an overripe animal carcass.

It was promising until they slipped.

The jeep’s wheels slipped a bit too much to the right and the vehicular equivalent splitting wooden log with a sledgehammer happened.  The jeep plummeted 15’ feet, wrenching the front axle, smoke billowing up from under the hood.
The two brothers were in the middle of some forgotten canyon deep in the desert of enemy territory, wet and stuck and out of luck!