in the opposite direction, after a small semilevel bit, he might be tired, but he had a lot of walking left in him.
Nonetheless, he estimated that they had already covered more than twenty miles from their starting point. If he could make another twenty—if they all could make another twenty—he calculated that they should be into Ten Sleep Canyon and be able to pull off the road and find a place where they could camp and rest up.
Shortly thereafter, Wolf was suddenly back with them again, moving out ahead of Jeebee in his customary position when they traveled together.
They slogged along. The moon was now descending to the dark rim of the canyon as they plunged down into the depths beyortd the pass. Slowly the hours went by. Jeebee dared not stop except for the short rests, for fear of putting ideas into the heads of the three with him. Once Wolf abruptly fell back, and Jeebee turned and saw the dark furry shape lying on its side on the road behind him. The meaning of the action could not have been more obvious. Wolf was calling an end to his share in the trip.
Jeebee turned his head forward again and kept on going. There was an emptiness inside him. For the first time in a long time he seriously considered the chance that he had driven Wolf away from him, permanently.
But what drove him from within gave him no choice, and the two horses following him were given no choice. They went on.
But they went on alone for a good fifteen minutes and more before Jeebee’s ears caught, once again between the soft beat of the horses’ hooves on asphalt, the scratch of claws on that same surface. He kept on going without looking back, and a moment later Wolf caught up with them once more, passed them, and assumed his usual position in the lead.
From under his eyelids, as he focused on the road immediately before him, Jeebee saw Wolf glancing back over his shoulder at him. But Jeebee refused to meet those glances. He merely kept going with his gaze on the road surface just ahead of him. So they went on, with only the sounds of their feet on the road, and the moon sank lower and lower to the dark line of the rock topping the canyon wall. Just before it disappeared completely, Wolf whined, once.
Jeebee looked up at him, then, and for a long second gazed into Wolf’s night-hidden face, with the color of its eyes now lost in the darkness. Jeebee said nothing. He did not even change his own expression, but looked away again and continued, leaning into the halter ropes to pull the weary horses along with him.
The four of them continued. Now that the moon had disappeared, the road had become only a dark blur, visible for no more than a half-dozen feet before them, in the starshine overhead. Jeebee was too worn out now to be grateful for the fact that the night was cloudless, so that there could be at least enough light to keep them from walking off the cliff edge of the road.
They went on. The moon had been down so long, Jeebee had almost forgotten what the road had looked like in its light. He and the horses stumbled from time to time, unable to see the breaks in the road surface. But his feet were able to tell by themselves if he wandered off the asphalt, and they kept him on the road.
The time seemed endless. Finally, the sky began to pale slightly from its utter blackness between the points of starlight. Certainly, the slope of the road was less now, even if only slightly so. At his most optimistic guess they had been descending now for somewhere close to fifteen miles, since they had left behind the highest point of the pass.
They were still among the rock walls and precipitous slopes, and even as the sky lightened above, the darkness pooled below. Still, soon they should be moving into territory where it would be safe to try to leave the road and find a place to camp. It might have to be a dry camp; but at least the horses, Wolf, and he would be able to rest. But there was not yet enough light to see if their surroundings were improving in this way.
It seemed that the sky overhead would never brighten, day would never come. Jeebee’s pack felt as if it was stuffed with bricks as he forced one foot in front of another. He was conscious that the horses, and even Wolf, moving ahead of him still, would be equally tired, but he could find no energy left over in him to sympathize with them.
All his attention now was concentrated on keeping his legs moving. They seemed to weigh a ton, each of them. Still, as he kept them going, one step at a time, all the rest of him moved with them.
A fury rose in him that his body was not more capable of going farther and faster and so covering more ground. He tempted and encouraged that fury to make him forget his sore feet and weary body. Surprising himself, he cursed at Wolf, unexpectedly, when it seemed the other would get in the way of his own moving legs.
The words were hardly out of his mouth before reaction set in. He stared at Wolf, braced for whatever reaction Wolf might show. But the other’s eyes, golden again now in the beginnings of the dawn light as the sky whitened overhead, merely looked back at him briefly, and away again. They went on.
Suddenly, without warning it seemed, he became aware that it was day. The sun was not yet above the rock walls about them. But the sky was bright now with morning, and the day star itself would be clearing the mountain rock very soon. Around Jeebee everything was fully visible. It seemed to have become so all at once. Either that, or else he had simply been walking without noticing while things brightened about him, tired as he was. He remembered once reading about World War I and how whole regiments of men had marched into towns in France on forced march after forced march, all in column all together and all asleep on their feet as they walked.
At the time of reading that, he had found it impossible to believe. But could he have fallen asleep, just now, walking? Possibly. Or, maybe he just had not been noticing—too out on his feet to be aware of the moment-by- moment change in illumination around him. At any rate, day had come and now they could find a stop, a place to camp and rest.
He raised his head and looked about. The canyon walls had opened out, and ahead they began to spread far apart. He had become used to the two overtowering walls of vertical rock, seemingly only a couple of hundred yards apart, with a plunging depth between them that descended so steeply he could not see to the bottom of it. Only occasionally had he been able to hear the rush of river water far below. Now, this had suddenly become the same two walls opening out into a wide area, between them. An area in which the land rolled in gigantic waves, like a wild sea of tidal waves gone mad and working against each other, in every direction.
But the waves were unmoving, solid slopes of earth, largely covered by lodgepole pines.
He was through the pass and into the Ten Sleep Canyon, at last.
Their own road still clung to the side of the vertical rock that had been on his right. At his left, however, he could now look out on the vista of black-treed slopes brightening in the new daylight. Into this more open space, the morning sun was reaching brightly here and there, although as yet it had not reached as far as the four of them.
But now, the road was on another small, momentary rise. It had tended generally downward since they had crossed the highest point of the pass, with little rises like this only now and then, as if the road itself was about to change its mind. This, like the earlier rises, would ordinarily hardly have been noticeable, but now they were all close to exhaustion from the night’s trek. The extra effort of going upslope, even for a short distance, seemed like a heavy burden. Jeebee’s legs were like rubber, and they gave as he leaned into the upslope of the road.
This rise was large enough to block out sight of the further road beyond it. The horses were still behind Jeebee at the length of their halter ropes. Ahead of him was Wolf, still moving lightly if perhaps a little gingerly, on feet that must be sore.
As he watched, Wolf reached the crest of the rise and moved all at once into the full illumination of the advancing sunlight, and there was a second that became a picture frozen in Jeebee’s memory forever.
It was of Wolf, leading them upward into the sunlight, with the rest of them still toiling in darkness, but mounting also, steadily behind him.
Jeebee’s heart bounded with a new burst of happiness within him. Suddenly he remembered what he had forgotten. Somewhere during the dark hours he had lost it, his apprehension about crossing the pass, and his superstitious fear that if he did, he would never see Merry again.
Now both things together were swept away in the sunlight that suddenly spread golden fire around Wolf. It was over. Jeebee had made the crossing. He had won.
True enough, he had won over nothing more than shadows within him. Still, there was that same feeling that he had had after he had come successfully up through the cellar and past Wolf with the canned food in his arms, and the feeling following that evening in which Wolf had come to him in a new, strangely submissive manner. In both cases, he had known a feeling that he had passed some kind of watershed in his life. That feeling was in him now, very strongly.
He had made another step up the ladder. He was different in this moment than he had ever been before. He
