pass for his own sake.
He had always wondered how people could want to dare ridiculous dangers. This danger was not necessarily ridiculous, but he found a grim desire in him to dare it anyway. It was as if the crossing of the pass was an enemy he was required to seek out and cross swords with, when all his life he had avoided crossing swords with anyone.
After a long moment of sitting undecided where he was, it was that last, unreasonable need that won out.
“Well, Wolf, it looks like we turn west,” he said—and suddenly realized that Wolf had already disappeared into the little patch of trees surrounding them.
He turned the horses. The possibility of death lying in wait for him in the pass went before him still, like a wraith in his path. But his desire to go brushed that wraith aside. Something new was stirring in him. A fatalism, an almost physical desire to gamble. The challenge was attractive in a way he had never felt before. He wished that Wolf was with him. It was as if Wolf would be a catalyst of some sort to test his decision. Still riding, he howled.
Brute and Sally, used now to his making such noises, stolidly ignored him and continued walking.
He howled twice, but there was no answer. It was unlikely that Wolf had gotten too far away to hear him in the short time they had been parted, although sounds sometimes played tricks, particularly with mountains nearby. But then there was no guarantee that Wolf would answer a howl, in any case. Jeebee shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it. It would be up to Wolf, just as he had thought earlier, to find them and go along, if he wanted to.
The decision was then to be Jeebee’s, alone, unhelped. The fatalism held him. He lifted his reins again, rode across the road, and turned north.
He and the horses reached the woods just above a patch of highway 16 near noon. He stopped well out of sight of the road and unloaded both saddle and pack from the two horses, then tethered the horses about ten feet apart.
For himself he laid out the groundsheet covering the gear and unrolled the foam mattress on top of it. Wolf was used to the packload, he hoped, and had lost interest in it. But even if his destructive urges were triggered while Jeebee slept, any tugging on the groundsheet by Wolf trying to get at the gear below him would wake Jeebee instantly. The arrangement did not make the most comfortable of beds, however.
But it would do for a nap. He lay down on it, accordingly, deliberately leaving himself uncovered so that the coolness of the afternoon shadows would wake him. The last few months had developed an internal clock in him that could be preset for the time he wanted to awake. Lying on the packload, he closed his eyes, turned on his side, and almost instantly dropped into slumber.
He woke feeling stiff and chilly. But the feeling did not bother him. Like an animal, he knew that getting up and moving about would warm him quickly.
He had chosen a spot not far from a small stream, and he took the horses there to water before splitting Sally’s load between her and Brute. They would both be packhorses on the slopes ahead, and he would cross the pass on foot, himself.
Above, the sky was still bright with late afternoon. The chill that had woken Jeebee had come from the treed slope behind him, falling into shadow from the rise of the mountain behind it. Even when he had finished watering and loading the horses, sections of the road opening eastward below him were still in sunlight.
Nonetheless, the day was aging.
Without warning, his fear came back on him. It made no sense that anyone would bother to lie in wait for the infrequent travelers who would use such a pass.
On the other hand, if someone did—with the mountain rising on one side of the road and the slope falling precipitously on the other—the traveler had no chance of passing safely.
Now, in the large shadow of the mountains and the indirect light overhead, a thought crept into Jeebee’s mind. He had scrupulously shaved himself all the time he had been at the wagon after that first night. He had kept himself clean shaven because he knew Merry preferred him that way. Now, since he had left the wagon, he had paid no attention, and dark stubble had begun to reconstruct the beard on his face.
The impulse came upon him strongly and suddenly to shave. It was as if his being shaved clean would be a sort of talisman protecting him against anything that would keep him from being reunited with Merry again, eventually. It was a feeling even stronger than the one that had challenged him to cross the pass in spite of his reasonless fear of doing so. But in this moment he found himself believing in it utterly.
He stopped the horses, got his shaving materials out of his pack behind the saddle, and used some of the water from the water bag to make a lather with the soap he carried. Carefully he put to use the straight-edged razor that had been one of Merry’s gifts to him, through Nick—although he had not found that out until a couple of weeks after the first day on which Nick had given it to him. With it, he scraped his face clean.
His face now feeling raw and naked to the cooling evening breeze, he put away the shaving things and went on.
The day aged quickly. But shortly after this Wolf reappeared. He had been gone only a few hours, but his homecoming was as enthusiastic and elaborate as if they’d been separated for weeks. Jeebee remembered how the wagon dogs had mobbed Wolf on his return from the seed farm, and it suddenly occurred to him that Wolf’s greeting might actually be an instinctive act of appeasement. He filed the thought away as something else to check on when—and if—he found the books. Formalities satisfied, Wolf dropped to all fours, gave a wet-dog shake, and stood with a quiet air of expectancy, apparently waiting for Jeebee to mount Brute. He seemed puzzled when Jeebee led off up the road into the pass, the lead ropes of both the now-haltered horses in hand. Once convinced that they were indeed on the trail again, Wolf rejoined them, but about twenty minutes later Jeebee noticed that he had disappeared once more.
Jeebee continued, finding himself held to a slow, if steady pace by the upward angle of the road. It was only beginning to climb, but already on occasion the land on one side of it dipped into a deep valley, thick with stands of pines, where the horses could not have made their way. The road surface was only slightly broken up by weather and lack of care, but the air grew cooler.
Meanwhile, overhead the blue and cloudless sky was beginning to pale in the west while it darkened in the east, and the shadows of the depths beyond the left edge of the road were becoming impenetrable.
Still, it was the time of month near the full moon, and the weather had been clear recently. Jeebee had hopes of moonlight to help most of his crossing.
But it would be a while yet before the moon would rise. Now, in the depths to his left and the rising slopes to his right, lodgepole pines covered the ground as thickly as soldiers standing on parade. Tall and straight as the masts of nineteenth-century sailing ships, as a result of struggling with each other to reach the sunlight above this angular pitched ground, they grew more closely together than seemed possible, with branches only near their tops.
Weighing the fading of the daylight against the darkness already between the trees, Jeebee concentrated on the road surface itself as a guide. There was no sign of any kind of habitation, or of other, recent travelers on the route. In the gathering darkness the asphalt looked more and more as if it had been abandoned for years. It was cracked, with potholes here and there, and a litter of branches and pine needles fallen, or blown across it.
His map had shown a distance of fifty-odd miles from Buffalo to Ten Sleep on the other side of the mountains. He had joined the road at a good distance out of Buffalo and did not have to reach Ten Sleep itself, but still, to reach the lower levels at the far side of the pass in one night’s trek would be a long, hard walk.
It would be particularly hard on the loaded horses, but there was little to be done about that.
They plodded forward and upward. At least, he told himself, he had taken the greater burden off at least one of the animals, since Sally’s load weighed little more than a hundred pounds, and he himself was packing nearly twenty-five with his own pack, weapons, and gear. He had been surprised to discover, when he had weighed himself at the wagon before leaving, that he was now up to one hundred and eighty-four pounds, most of it muscle—a weight and condition he had never expected to achieve in his earlier, adult life. Nevertheless, breathing was becoming more difficult, and despite the high-altitude chill, he could feel the sweat plastering his shirt to his back beneath the pack straps.
After a while the moon did, indeed, come up, and they speeded their progress; at least until Wolf rejoined them, and took Jeebee’s traveling on foot as an opportunity to play games, snatching with his teeth at the flapping
