To drink, he pumped creek water through a filter, a charcoal ring, plastic. Feathers of moss at pools’ edges. Clear water magnified color so that the pebbles were more beautiful than any gem. His mother never had one, a ring. As the horses drank he dug the prettiest from the riffles. He’d line them up that evening. When dry, the stones would be chalky and dull, he knew. Moss, near electric green, filled cracks where the sun only dreamed of reaching, if the sun dreamed. Why would it? The sun had everything already: the whole world once a day. The fungi erupted and was throttled by gravity in one hour, melted to filthy slime. He wondered why he felt pity. Fungi may be quite satisfied. Even smug.

The two horses snorted between themselves sometimes, excluding him, and sometimes the mountains themselves made him weep. The Big Window was real. He was in it.

His boots were always wet. He wondered, sometimes, if she was watching him from that cliff up there. You’re not havin’ fun ’til your boots are wet, she’d said once at the Crop and Carrot. Would she remember him? Howdy, Ginny, he practiced. Hello, Ma’am. Fine day. No woman was perfect, he knew. And he was the kind of person who usually made one mistake too many.

“Heels down,” said the yellow horse. “No groaning. Only greenhorns groan.”

He passed a fire ring, slid off to investigate the butt ends of old charred cordwood. He sniffed an aluminum can in ash. He kicked a second log away. The can scuttled down a crevasse. No splash. A good rain should wash the site away.

He swung his knee over the saddle, horse’s right side.

Now the air thinned. He breathed hard and felt sorry for his lungs. Cigarettes. He turned his back when he smoked, but to what? He’d smoked in Verona at the lake at the bottom of Hathaway Lane. He wondered if anyone was wondering where he was. He saw a dog, once, ahead in the rocks, or a coyote that was very red. He called the dog and it disappeared. His cuffs and socks were soggy as his boots. He stopped to pull his boots off, wring his socks out, and hang them from the packsaddle to dry. He stuffed his bare feet back in. No worry of blisters. He’d packed Band-Aids.

At least he was not over-chatty, the number-one giveaway in a greenhorn.

The trick to Cowboys was Keep to the Literal—

“Does the packhorse ever speak?” The deputy nodded back at it.

“No,” said the yellow horse.

The deputy had had a five o’clock shadow when he ran into the posse that morning, but now it was the beginnings of a beard. He turned often to measure progress, altitude, and lateral distance. From a perch above their boulder field, the toe of tumbled rock had been a postage stamp. A society run out of ideas.