Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and
felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it
thunked into a tree behind him.
He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders
and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the
rifle up to automatic.
He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a
thing to see. The hula-trees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the
thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three
stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away.
"Sipar!" he whispered.
"Here, mister."
"Keep low. It's still out there."
Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot.
Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his
throat. A hell of a way for a man to die--out at the tail-end of
nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading
back for home as fast as it could go.
He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled
around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on
higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from
which the arrow must have come.
He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no
sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway.
He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point
driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow
free.
"You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around."
The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if
it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The
arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry
creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but
pliant inner bark of the hula-tree.
"You recognize this?" he asked Sipar.