They quickly made for the boulderfield Danik had indicated. "Do you think someone's been here?" McCaughlin said. There was a pack rat sticking its nose out of the decayed fabric. "His top hat don't look too good." Rona said. MEANING OF TOUCHE IN ENGLISH FREEThe rubles bought the trapper families some precious supplies like salt in the small free markets in the shadows of the great Soviet forts further east. Hides and furs were exchanged for rubles. The Soviets usually ignored these primitive American communities, which served their purposes because their commanding officers did a brisk trade with the mountainmen who did fur trapping. Moosehead Township was a set of ten or twelve wooden shacks and a tanning shed for hides. It was the area around a small hunter-trapper community called Moosehead. They came upon an area 235 miles south of Colorado Springs Plain that Rockson himself had crossed years earlier. Nothing lasts forever, not even the Hall of Presidents. "No," Rock replied, "The weight of the snow finally got to the roof. I left him - and his notebook of our travels - right where he died." Danik's voice trailed off. I was - was too weak, delirious, frightened. He threw up the food and convulsed and died. It gave me the strength to go on, but Run was sickening from a snake bite he got the sixth day out of Eden. Must have been decades old, but we cut them open and ate the stuff. When Run and I broke open the box, we found some canned goods inside. Some other hapless wanderers must have brought it here - we found disintegrating skeletons on the second floor, next to charred wood on a sheet-metal plate. We found a steel box in here, all rusted and jammed closed. "It should be over there - in the shadows - propped up against the wall. But there was no letup in the cold temperatures, or in the golfball-sized hailstones pounding the hunched-down travelers. Soon they were approaching the old border of Colorado into Arizona. Taking the bearing to the southeast that Dutil's notes indicated, they moved their sleds along at a good thirty miles per hour through icy weather conditions. There is still some heat from radioactive elements in that surface - hence the clicking you hear on the Geiger attached to the front of my sled. You notice that there is no snow on that mile-wide plain either. "The heat of the air-detonated blast melted the sand into that shiny surface. "That's the area that took a nuke bomb hit back in the twentieth century," said Rockson grimly. They came over the ridge and looked down on a glassy-surfaced blackened plain. Hopefully, they would find the next landmark on the route to Eden, the giant teepee that Danik bad described. They headed southward, guided by Run Dutil's notes in the little pad. "It wasn't like that when I was here two weeks ago," Danik gasped. Then they were off on their quest for Eden. He drew estimated margin-of-error lines too - dotted lines that were as much as ten miles to one side or the other of their new route. Rockson drew some pencil marks on the maps, using the meager angles and sun-elevation heights that Dutil had jotted down. They all chanted an amen in unison, and then went back and spread out their maps, and compared them to the notes from Run Dutil's little pad.
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