After a silence filled by the squeak of snow and the crick of boot against snowshoe, Pete says, “I don’t understand why I’m getting so tired, I’ve been playing full-court basketball all winter.’
“Mountains aren’t as flat as basketball courts.”
Joe’s pace is a bit faster than Pete’s, and slowly he pulls ahead. He looks left, to the tree-filled valley, but slips a few times and turns his gaze back to the snow in front of him. His breaths rasp in his throat. He wipes sweat from an eyebrow. He hums unmusically, then starts a breath-chant, muttering a word for each step:
animal
,
animal
,
animal
,
animal
,
animal
. He watches his snowshoes crush patterns onto the points and ridges of the pocked, glaring snow. White light blasts around the sides of his sunglasses. He stops to tighten a binding, looks up when he is done. There is a tree a few score yards ahead—be adjusts his course for it, and walks again.
After a while he reaches the tree. He looks at it; a gnarled old Sierra juniper, thick and not very tall. Around it hundreds of black pine needles are scattered, each sunk in its own tiny pocket in the snow. Joe opens his mouth several times, says “Lugwump?” He shakes his head, walks up to the tree, puts a hand on it. “I don’t know who you are?” He leans in, his nose is inches from bark. The bark peels away from the tree like papery sheets of filo dough. He puts his arms out, hugs the trunk. “Tr-eeeee,” he says. “Tr-eeeeeeee.”
He is still saying it when Peter, puffing hard, joins him. Joe steps around the tree, gestures at a drop beyond the tree, a small bowl notched high in the side of the range.
“That’s Lake Doris,” he says, and laughs.
Blankly Peter looks at the small circle of flat snow in the center of the howl. “Mostly a summer phenomenon.” Joe says. Peter purses his lips and nods. “But not the pass,” Joe adds, and points west.
West of the lake bowl the range—a row of black peaks emerging from the snow—drops a bit, in a deep, symmetrical U, an almost perfect semicircle, a glacier road filled with blue sky. Joe smiles. “That’s Rockbound Pass. There’s no way you could forget a sight like that. I think I see Brian up there. I’m going to go up and join him.”
He takes off west, walking around the side of the lake until he can go straight up the slope rising from the lake to the pass. The snow thins on the slope, and his plastic snowshoes grate on stretches of exposed granite. He moves quickly, takes big steps and deep breaths. The slope levels and he can see the spine of the pass. Wind blows in his face, growing stronger with every stride. When he reaches the flat of the saddle in mid-pass it is a full gale. His shirt is blown cold against him, his eyes water. He can feel sweat drying on his face. Brian is higher in the pass, descending the north spine. His high shouts are blown past Joe. Joe takes off his pack and swings his arms around, stretches them out to the west. He is in the pass.
Below him to the west is the curving bowl of a cirque, one dug by the glacier that carved the pass. The cirque’s walk are nearly free of snow, and great tiers of granite gleam in the sun. A string of lakes—flat white spots.—mark the valley that extends westward out of the cirque. Lower ranges lie in rows out to the haze-fuzzed horizon.
Behind him Lake Doris’s bowl blocks the view of the deep valley they have left behind. Joe looks back to the west; wind slams his face again. Brian hops down the saddle to him, and Joe whoops. “It’s windy again,” he calls.
“It’s always windy in this pass,” Brian says. He strips off his pack, whoops himself. He approaches Joe, looks around. “Man, for a while there about a year ago I thought we’d never be here again.” He claps Joe on the back. “I’m sure glad you’re here,” he says, voice full.
Joe nods. “Me, too. Me, too.”
Peter joins them. “Look at this,” calls Brian, waving west. “Isn’t this amazing?” Peter looks at the cirque for a moment and nods. He takes off his pack and sits behind a rock, out of the wind.
“It’s cold,” he says. His hands quiver as he opens his pack.
“Put on a sweatshirt,” Brian says sharply. “Eat some food.”
Joe removes his snowshoes, wanders around the pass away from Brian and Peter. The exposed rock is shattered tan granite, covered with splotches of lichen, red and black and green. Joe squats to inspect a crack, picks up a triangular plate of rock. He tosses it west. It falls in a long arc.
Brian and Peter eat lunch, leaning against a boulder that protects them from the wind. Where they are sitting it is fairly warm. Brian eats slices of cheese cut from a big block of it. Peter puts a tortilla in his lap, squeezes peanut butter out of a plastic tube onto it. He picks up a bottle of liquid butter and squirts a stream of it over the peanut butter.
Brian looks at the concoction and squints. “That looks like shit.”
“Hey,” Peter says. “Food is food. I thought you were the big pragmatist.”
“Yeah, but…“
Pete wolfs down the tortilla, Brian works on the block of cheese.
“So how did you like the morning’s hike?” Brian asks.
Pete says, “I read that snowshoes were invented by Plains Indians, for level places. In the mountains, those traverses”—he takes a bite—”those traverses were terrible.”
“You used to love it up here.”
“That was in the summers.”
“It’s better now, there’s no one else up here. And you can go anywhere you want over snow.”
“I’ve noticed you think so. But I don’t like the snow. Too much work.”
“Work,” Brian scoffs. “The old law office is warping your conception of work, Peter.”
Peter chomps irritably, looking offended. They continue to eat. One of Joe’s nonsense songs floats by.
“Speaking of warped brains,” Peter says.
“Yeah. You keeping an eye on him?”
“I guess so. I don’t know what to do when he loses it, though.”
Brian arches back and turns to look over the boulder. “Hey, Joe!” he shouts. “Come eat some lunch!” They both watch Joe jerk at the sound of Brian’s voice. But after a moment’s glance around, Joe returns to playing with the rocks.
“He’s out again,” says Brian.
“That,” Peter says, “is one sick boy. Those doctors really did it to him.”
“That
crash
did it to him. The doctors saved his life. You didn’t see him at the hospital like I did. Man, ten or twenty years ago an injury like that would have left him a vegetable for sure. When I saw him I thought he was a goner.”
“Yeah, I know, I know, The man who flew through his windshield.”
“But you don’t know what they
did
to him.”
“So what did they do to him?”
“Well, they stimulated what they call axonal sprouting in the areas where neuronal connections were busted up—which means, basically, that they grew his brain back!”
“
Grew
it?”
“Yeah! Well some parts of it—the broken connections, you know. Like the arm of a starfish. You know?”
“No. But I’ll take your word for it.” Peter looks over the boulder at Joe. “I hope they grew back everything, yuk yuk. He might have one of his forgetting spells and walk over the edge there.”
“Nah. He just forgets how to talk, as far as I can tell. Part of the reorganization, I think. It doesn’t matter much up here.” Brian arches up. “Hey, JOE! FOOD!”
“It does too matter,” Peter says. “Say he forgets the word
cliff