darkness made further progress impossible.
Tip slept inside his jacket, curled up against his chest, while the wind blew raw and cold all through the night. He was on his way again at the first touch of daylight, the sky darker than ever and the wind spinning random flakes of snow before him.
He stopped to look back to the south once, thinking, If I turn back now I might get out before the blizzard hits.
Then the other thought came: These hills all look the same. If I don’t go to the iron while I’m this close and know where it is, it might be years before I or anyone else could find it again. He went on and did not look back again for the rest of the day.
By midafternoon the higher hills around him were hidden under the clouds and the snow was coming harder and faster as the wind drove the flakes against his face. It began to snow with a heaviness that brought a half darkness when he came finally to the hill he had seen through the glasses.
A spring was at the base of it, bubbling out of red clay. Above it the red dirt led a hundred feet to a dike of granite and stopped. He hurried up the hillside that was rapidly whitening with snow and saw the vein.
It set against the dike, short and narrow but red-black with the iron it contained. He picked up a piece and felt the weight of it. It was heavy—it was pure iron oxide. He called Schroeder and asked, “Are you down out of the high hills, Steve?”
“I’m in the lower ones,” Schroeder answered, the words coming a little muffled from where Tip lay inside his jacket. “It looks black as hell up your way.”
“I found the iron, Steve. Listen—these are the nearest to landmarks I can give you … ”
When he had finished he said, “That’s the best I can do. You can’t see the red clay except when the sun is low in the southwest but I’m going to build a monument on top of the hill to find it by.”
“About you, Howard,” Steve asked, “what are your chances?”
The wind was rising to a high moaning around the ledges of the granite dike and the vein was already invisible under the snow.
“It doesn’t look like they’re very good,” he answered. “You’ll probably be leader when you come back next spring—I told the council I wanted that if anything happened to me. Keep things going the way I would have. Now—I’ll have to hurry to get the monument built in time.”
“All right,” Schroeder said. “So long, Howard … good luck.”
He climbed to the top of the hill and saw boulders there he could use to build the monument. They were large—he might crush Tip against his chest in picking them up—and he took off his jacket, to wrap it around Tip and leave him lying on the ground. He worked until he was panting for breath, the wind driving the snow harder and harder against him until the cold seemed to have penetrated to the bone. He worked until the monument was too high for his numb hands to lift any more boulders to its top. By then it was tall enough that it should serve its purpose.
He went back to look for Tip, the ground already four inches deep in snow and the darkness almost complete.
“Tip,” he called. “Tip—Tip—” He walked back and forth across the hillside in the area where he thought he had left him, stumbling over rocks buried in the snow and invisible in the darkness, calling against the wind and thinking,
“
He raked the snow off his jacket and unwrapped Tip, to put him inside his shirt next to his bare skin. Tip’s paws were like ice and he was shivering violently, the first symptom of the pneumonia that killed mockers so quickly.
Tip coughed, a wrenching, rattling little sound, and whimpered, “Hurt—hurt—”
“I know,” he said. “Your lungs hurt—damn it to hell, I wish I could have let you go home with Steve.”
He put on the cold jacket and went down the hill. There was nothing with which he could make a fire—only the short half-green grass, already buried under the snow. He turned south at the bottom of the hill, determining the direction by the wind, and began the stubborn march southward that could have but one ending.
He walked until his cold-numbed legs would carry him no farther. The snow was warm when he fell for the last time; warm and soft as it drifted over him, and his mind was clouded with a pleasant drowsiness.
