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Fielding stripped the horses and watered them, brushing their wet, shiny backs with a burlap bag. He picketed two horses and belled the rest, then set the packs in a row with saddles on top and the pads draped over, wet side up to dry. Later he would cover the provisions and gear with the tent as a tarpaulin.

He had to walk along the slope quite a ways to gather firewood, but it was a peaceful job. He meandered in the lengthening shadows, keeping an eye out for snakes as well as deadfall, and casting an occasional glance at the horses.

The smoke from the campfire came in thick, pungent puffs until the blaze took hold. When the sticks burned down to coals, Fielding set the skillet on a triangular layout of rocks. As he often did, he had brought fresh meat for the first night out, so he enjoyed the sound and smell of searing steak as he sat on his bedroll and waved away wisps of smoke. Camping by water in this part of the year meant mosquitoes, and it was worth enduring a little smoke to keep the whiners away.

Before going to bed, Fielding went out to check on his picket horses. They were both doing all right, and he could hear the four different bells of the horses that were grazing farther out. The moon was up, growing to a half-moon, and the night was clear. Fielding had a sense of where he was. Cogman’s Hole ran about twenty miles west to east and fifteen miles south to north. He was on the western edge, roughly halfway along the rim that curved around.

As he walked back toward camp, the shadow of a large bird passed over and beyond him, and as his heart jumped he heard the soft flap of wings. The surge of alarm came from deep within, and his head felt vulnerable. Then his rational half came back into control. He had his hat on. It was just a bird of the night, must have been an owl, looking for small furry creatures beneath the prairie moon.

Back in camp, he set up the tepee tent with its jointed pole. He could hear the bells on the horses as he rolled out his bed, and he did not worry about much of anything as he closed his eyes.

Morning broke fresh and clear as Fielding sat on his bedroll and drank his coffee. He figured he had about ten miles to go until he came to Wald’s sheep camp. If he got there early enough, he could turn around and come part of the way back the same day.

He gathered the horses, rigged them, and put on the packs. He was sweating by the time he mounted up, but a light breeze cooled his shirt and his cocked hat as he set out on the day’s ride. Relaxed, he heard the song of a meadowlark rise above the prairie as the horse hooves clomped and swished through the grass.

Fielding and his string rode into the sheep camp in early afternoon. Wald himself lived up by Fort Laramie, so he had a couple of hired hands at this place—a camp tender as well as a herder—and the tender was usually at camp alone. As Fielding rode into the dusty site, a long-haired black-and-white dog came out of the shade and barked until the tender emerged from the tent and rasped a couple of words.

Fielding recognized the tender as Prew, a beardless person with a bulldog face and a trunk that went down like a barrel from the shoulders to the hips. Fielding had heard of women who worked and lived their whole lives as men, among men, without anyone knowing the difference, and he wondered if Prew was one of these. The camp tender was not unfriendly, just offish in an intangible way, so Fielding preferred to unload the supplies and be gone.

“Whatcha got?” asked Prew, in the same harsh voice.

“Salt in the first one, grain in the second, provisions in the other three, my stuff on top.”

Prew said, “Get out of the way” to the dog, then came around to stand by as Fielding untied the knots.

In a few minutes, Fielding was emptying the panniers. The camp tender handled fifty-pound sacks of salt and sixty-pound sacks of grain with no trouble, and the process moved right along. When Fielding had all the camp goods unloaded, he distributed his own gear and got things tightened down again.

He looked at the sun, which had moved over but was not slipping yet. “Plenty of time left,” he said. “If I can water these horses, I can get started back.”

“Good enough,” said Prew. “Glad you made it. Sheep was runnin’ low on salt.”

As Fielding put the sheep camp behind him, he was glad to be on his way. He didn’t mind sheep, though sometimes the tallowy smell hung in his nostrils, and he didn’t mind sheepherders. They worked for their living, and they took good care of their horses, fed them well and hardly ever pushed them to more than a fast walk. All the same, he was relieved to have this job done and to be traveling light.

He made good time and was able to camp in the same spot as the night before. He didn’t get the horses picketed until sundown, and when he did, he paused to appreciate the yellow-and-orange sky above the rim as the shadows laid a velvet softness on the rocks and grass and trees along the slope.

He fed the last of his own grain to the horses in the morning, and he had them all watered and loaded before the day had warmed up. With the sun at his back, he led the pack string out of camp. Before long the trail curved so that the sunlight fell on his left side, and without the benefit of a breeze, he continued sweating. He hoped for a breeze up on top.

Without dismounting he rested the horses for a couple of minutes before starting up the grade. The trail was not very steep to begin with, but after the first quarter-mile stretch it made a turn and began to climb at a sharper pitch. The horses behind him snorted and blew, and their hooves crunched in the hard, grainy path as the party moved uphill in order.

Fielding gazed at the sandstone wall he was traveling through. Tiny ledges supported tufts of grass and small bushes. Cedar trees grew in narrow clefts. Up where the trail turned again, the rock that had seemed like a gateway loomed on the right. If a man watched the land close up for too long, things seemed to move on their own, so he let his eyes rove around. He looked across empty space at other sections of the wall. He shifted in the saddle and watched the horses and their packs laboring up the slope behind him. His eyes came back to the trail ahead, and still a rock seemed to move.

He stopped the buckskin, a habit of second nature when he saw something out of place. He had a full awareness that this was a poor place to stop the horses, where they would have to stand leaning forward and work to keep from slipping on the loose surface. But rocks did not move.

He slid from the saddle, wrapped the lead rope around the saddle horn, and lowered the reins to the ground. The trail was barely wide enough for him to walk sideways past the horses, but he needed to get to the second set of panniers. The movement he had seen was up the trail on his right, beyond the turret-shaped rock. If someone had ducked out of sight, the person would have a hard time seeing what the delay was. He would have to wait.

Fielding reached into the pannier and pulled out a burlap sack. After making sure that it was open at both ends, he edged back to the first packhorse, the gray one. Crouching, he lifted the front left foot of the horse and slipped it through the open sack. Bunching the burlap so that it resembled a sash or large band, he twisted it once, twice, three times, then fitted the other hoof through the opening at the other end.

With the horse hobbled, he backed out and stood up. He let out a long breath and hoped everything held. The buckskin was good at staying ground-hitched, and between the lead rope and the hobbles, Fielding hoped to have this train pretty well stalled where it was.

He unstrapped his spurs and put them in the pannier where he had taken out the burlap sack. Feeling around, he laid hold of a length of quarter-inch rope. With it in his hand, he made his way to the end of the line and tied the sorrel to the back end of the dark horse. Then he went around the sorrel and crossed the trail. After drawing his six-gun, he moved to the base of the rock tower and peered over. A small canyon fell away, steep but not impossible. If he could get around the formation without dislodging too much loose rock, he might be able to come up on someone. Meanwhile, he hoped nothing would spook the horses.