Half an hour, and then across to the cart-?track up to Saint-?Jean de l’Albere. Up and up, the moon clearing the forest ahead of them after the first hour; and with the coming of the moon the first breaths of a sirocco from the Spanish plains, a waft from an opened oven-?door.
Up and still up. After the last barn the track dwindled to a ribbon and they had to walk in single file; Jack saw Stephen’s monstrous bundle - a dark shape, no more -moving steadily a pace or two in front of them, and something like hatred glowed around his stomach. He reasoned: ‘The pack is heavy; it weighs fifty or sixty pounds - all our possessions; he too has been going on all these days, never a murmur; the straps wring his back and shoulders, a bloody welt on either side.’ But the unwavering determination of that dim form, moving steadily on and on, effortlessly, it seemed, always too fast and never pausing - the impossibility of keeping up, of forcing himself another hundred yards, and the equal impossibility of calling for a rest, drowned his reason, leaving only the dull fire of resentment.
The path meandered, branching and sometimes disappearing among huge ancient widespread beeches, their trunks silver in the moon, and at last Stephen stopped. Jack blundered into him, stood still, and felt a hand gripping him hard through the skin: Stephen guided him into the black velvet shadow of a fallen tree. Over the soughing of the wind he heard a repeated metallic sound, and as he recognized the regular beat - a patrol making too much noise - all notion of the unbreathable air and the intolerable state of his body left him. Low voices now and then, a cough, still the clink-?clink-?clink of someone’s musket against a buckle, and presently the soldiers passed within twenty yards of them, moving down the mountain-?side.
The same strong hand pulling him, and they were on the path again. Always this eternal climb, sometimes across the leaf-?filled bed of a stream, sometimes up an open slope so steep that it was hands and knees: and the sirocco. ‘Can this be real?’ he wondered. ‘Must it go on for ever?’
The beech-?trees gave way to pines: pine-?needles under foot, oh the pain. Endless pines on an endless mountain, their roaring tops bowing northwards in the wind.
The shape in front had stopped, muttering ‘It should be about here - the second fork - there was a charcoal burner’s lay - an uprooted larch, bees in the hollow trunk.’
Jack closed his eyes for a great swimming pause, a respite, and when he opened them again he saw that the sky ahead was lightening. Behind them the moon had sunk into a haze, far down in the deep veiled complicated valleys.
The pines. Then suddenly no more pines - a few stunted bushes, heather, and the open turf. They were on the upper edge of the forest, a forest ruled off sharp, as though by a line; and they stood, silently looking out. After two or three minutes, right up there in the eye of the wind, Jack saw a movement. Leaning to Stephen he said ‘Dog?’ Soldiers who had had the sense to bring a dog? Loss, dead failure after all this?
Stephen took his head, and whispering right into the hairy ear he said ‘Wolf. A young - a young female wolf.’
Still Stephen waited, searching the bushes, the bare rocks, from the far left to the far right, before he walked out, paced over the short grass to a stone set on the very top of the slope, a squared stone with a red-?painted cross cut into it.
‘Jack,’ said he, leading him beyond the boundary mark, ‘I bid you welcome to my land. We are in Spain. That is my house below - we are at home. Come, let me get your head off. Now you can breathe, my poor friend. There are two springs under the brow of the hill, by those chestnuts, where you can wash and take off the skin. How I rejoice at the sight of that wolf. Look, here is her dung, quite fresh. No doubt this is a wolf’s pissing-?post: like all the dogs, they have their regular . .
Jack sat heavily on the stone, gasping inwards, filling his starved lungs. Some reality other than general suffering returned. ‘Wolf’s pissing-?post: oh, yes.’ In front of him the ground fell suddenly - almost a precipice - two thousand feet below there was Spanish Catalonia spread out in the morning light. A high-?towered castle just below them on a jutting rock - a lobbed stone would reach it; the Pyrenees folded away and away in long fingers to the plain; square distant fields, vineyards green; a shining river winding left-?handed towards the great sweep of the sea; the Bay of Rosas with Cap Creus at the far northern end - home water, and now the hot wind smelt of salt.
‘I am happy you were pleased with your wolf,’ he said at last in a sleep-?walker’s voice. ‘There are - they are uncommon rare, I dare say.’
‘Not at all, my dear. We have them by the score - can never leave the sheep by night. No. Her presence means we are alone. That is why I rejoice. I rejoice. Even so, I think we should go down to the spring: it is under the chestnuts, those chestnuts not two minutes down. That wolfess may be a fool - see her now, moving among the junipers - and I should not wish to fail, just when we have succeeded. Some chance cross-?patrol, douaniers rather than soldiers, some zealous sergeant with a carabine. Can you get up? God help me, I hardly can.’
The spring, Jack wallowing in it, cold water and grit sweeping off the crass, the stream running filthy, but coming fresh and fresh straight from the rock. Jack luxuriating, drying in the wind, plunging again and again. His body was dead white where it was not cruelly galled, bitten, rasped; his colourless face puffy, sweat-?swollen, corpse-?like, a tangled yellow beard covering his mouth; his eyes were red and pustulent. But there was life in them, brilliant delight blazing through the physical distress.
‘You have lost between three and four stone,’ observed Stephen, appraising his loins and belly.
‘I am sure you are right,’ said Jack. ‘And nine parts of it is in this vile skin, a good three stone of human grease.’ He kicked the limp bear with his bleeding foot, damned it once or twice for a son of a bitch, and observed he must take the papers out before setting it alight. ‘How it will stink - how it does stink, by God. Just hand me along the scissors, Stephen, pray.’
‘The bear may serve again,’ said Stephen. ‘Let us roll it up and thrust it under the bush. I will send for it from the house.’
‘Is the house a great way off?’
‘Why no,’ said Stephen, pointing to the castle. ‘It is just there below us, a thousand feet or so - to the right of the white scar, the marble quarry. Though I am afraid it will take us an hour to get there - an hour to breakfast.’
‘Is that castle yours, Stephen?’
‘It is. And this is my sheepwalk. What is more,’ he said, looking sharply at the cowpats, ‘I believe those French dogs from La Vaill have been sending their cattle over to eat my grass.’
