They wind between boulders, spring up escarpments. They come upon a knob of quartz that rises out of the black granite. The knob is infinitely cracked, as if struck on top by a giant sledgehammer. “Rose quartz,” says Brian, and moves on. Joe stares at the knob, mouth open. He kneels to pick up chunks of the quartz, peers at them. He sees that Brian is moving on. Rising, he says to himself, “I wish I knew everything.”
Suddenly they are at the top. Everything is below them. Beside Brian, Joe stops short. They stand silently, inches apart. Wind whips around them. To the south the range drops and rises yet again, to the giant knob of peaks they saw when they first topped the ridge. At every point of the compass mountains drop away, white folds crumpling to every horizon. Nothing moves but the wind. Brian says, “I wonder where that goat went to.”
Two men sitting on a mountaintop. Brian digs into a pile of rocks, pulls out a rusty tin box. “Aha,” be says. “The goat left us a clue.” He takes a piece of paper from the box. “Here’s its name—Diane Hunter.”
“Oh, buIlshit!” cries Joe. “That’s no name. Let me see that.” He grabs the box out of Brian’s hand and the top falls off. A shower of paper, ten or twenty pieces of it, pops out of the box and floats down to the east, spun by the wind. Joe pulls out a piece still wedged in the box. He reads, “Robert Spencer, July 20th. 2014. It’s a name box. It’s for people who want to leave a record of their climb.”
Brian laughs. “How could anyone get into something like that? Especially on a peak you can just walk right up to.” He laughs again.
“I suppose I should try to recover as many as I can,” Joe says dubiously, looking down the steep side of the peak.
“What for? It’s not going to erase their experience.”
“You never know,” says Joe, laughing to himself. “It very well might. Just think, all over the United States the memory of this peak has popped right out of twenty people’s heads.” He waves to the east. “Bye-bye…”
They sit in silence. Wind blows. Clouds pass by. The sun closes on the horizon. Joe talks in short bursts, waves his arms. Brian listens, watches the clouds. At one point he says. “You’re a new being, Joseph.” Joe cocks his head at this.
Then they just sit and watch. It gets cold.
“Hawk,” says Brian in a quiet voice. They watch the black dot soar on the updraft of the range.
“It’s the goat,” says Joe. “It’s a shapechanger.”
“Nab, Doesn’t even move the same.”
“I say it is.”
The dot turns in the wind and rises, circling higher and higher above the world, coasting along the updraft with minute wing adjustments, until it hovers over the giant, angular knotpeak. Suddenly it plummets toward the peaks, stooping faster than objects fall. It disappears behind the jagged black teeth. “Hawk,” Joe breathes. “Hawuck divvve.”
They look at each other.
Brian says, “That’s where we’ll go tomorrow.”
Glissading down the snow expanse, skidding five or ten feet with each stiff-legged step, the two of them make rapid progress back to camp. The walking is dreamlike as they pump left… right… left… right down the slope.
“So what about that goat” says Joe “I never did see any prints.”
“Maybe we shared a hallucination,” says Brian. “What do they call that?”
“A folie à deux.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.” A pause while they skid down a steep bank of snow, straight-legged as if they are skiing. “I hope Pete got a fire going. Damn cold up here,”
“A feature of the psychic landscape,” Joe says, talking to himself again. “Sure, why not? It looks about like what I’d expect, I’ll tell you that. No wonder I’m getting things confused. What you saw was probably a fugitive thought of mine, escaping off across the waste. Bighorn sheep, sure.”
After a while they can see the saddle where they left Peter, far below them in the rocky expanse. There is a spark of yellow. They howl and shout. “Fire! FIRE!’
In the sandy camp, situated in a dip between slabs of granite, they greet Pete and root through their packs with the speed of hungry men. Joe takes his pot, jams it with snow, puts it on the fire. He sits down beside Peter.
“You guys were gone a long time,” Peter says. “Did you find that goat?”
Joe shakes his head. “It turned into a hawk.” He moves his pot to a bigger flame. “Sure am glad you got this fire going,” he says. “It must have been a bitch to start in this wind.” He starts to pull off his boots.
“There wasn’t much wood, either,” Pete says. “But I found a dead tree down there a ways.”
Joe prods a burning branch, frowns. “Juniper,” he says with satisfaction. “Good wood.”
Brian appears, dressed in down jacket, down pants, and down booties. Pete falls silent. Glancing at Pete, Joe notices this, and frowns again. He gets up stiffly to go to his pack and get his own down booties. He returns to the fire, finishes taking off his boots. His feet are white and wrinkled, with red blisters.
“Those look sore.” says Pete.
“Nah.” Joe gulps down the melted snow in his pot, starts melting more. He puts his booties on.
They watch the fire in silence.
Joe says, “Remember that time you guys wrestled in the living room of our apartment?”
“Yeah, we got all those carpet burns.”
“And broke the lamp that never worked anyway—”
“And then you went berserk!” Brian laughs. “You went berserk and tried to bite my ear off!” They all laugh, and Pete nods, grinning with embarrassed pride.
“Pete won that one,” Joe says.
“That’s right,” says Brian. “Put my shoulders to the mat, or to the carpet in that case. A victory for maniacs everywhere.”
Ponderously Peter nods, imitating official approval. “But I couldn’t beat you tonight,” he admits. “I’m exhausted. I guess I’m not up to this snow camping.”
“You were strong in those days,” Brian tells him. “But you hiked a radical trail with us today, I’ll tell you. I don’t know too many people who would have come with us, actually.”
“What about Joe here? He was on his back most of last year.”
“Yeah, but he’s crazy now.”
“I was crazy before!” Joe protests, and they laugh. Brian pours macaroni into his pot, shifts to a rock seat beside Peter so he can tend the pot better. They begin to talk about the days when they all lived together as students. Joe grins to hear them. He nearly overturns his pot, and they call out at him. Pete says, “The black thing is the pot, Joseph, the yellow stuff is fire—try to remember that.” Joe grins. Steam rises from the pots and is whipped east by the evening breeze.
Three men sitting round a fire. Joe gets up, very slowly, and steps carefully to his pack. He unrolls his groundcloth, pulls out his sleeping bag. He straightens up. The evening star hangs in the west. It’s getting darker. Behind him his old friends laugh at something Pete has said.
In the east there are stars. Part of the sky is still a light velvet blue. The wind whistles softly. Joe picks up a rock, looks at it closely. “Rock” he says. He clenches the rock in his fist, shakes it at the evening star, lofts it skyward. “Rock!” A tear gleams in his eyes. He looks down the range: black dragon back breaking out of blue-white, like consciousness from chaos, an unbroken range of peaks—
“Hey, Joseph! You lamebrain!”
“Space case!”
“—come take care of your pot before it puts the fire out.”
Joe walks to the woodpile grinning, puts more wood on the fire, until it blazes up yellow in the dusk.