At a dip in a ridge, Maul led the little gray behind a jagged pumice tower, lava-looking or coral-seeming, maybe a shark inside it, maybe a moray eel frozen in time. This had all been water once. Now it wasn’t. Not much use, in times like these, thinking of sharks swimming here, or eels whipping their serpent bodies along a ridge in the sky submerged.

The lead line looped slack. Kind words. The other mules shouldn’t see it. Mules could count he’d assured the skeptical. The three mules watched, the buckskin, the tall mule, the black, all funnel-ears twisted forward to capture every sound for miles, a coyote fart, mice playing checkers, a ghost-deputy shuffling cards. These horse-people were very superior. He and the little gray dropped out of sight. The horses shifted in their saddles and bit flies that weren’t there.

They ate mule that night and the next cubed for stew. All but Dan. He looked on in disgust as they filled their bellies.

“Now is the winter of our discombobulation,” Maul said, flinging a rib.

They left before dawn.

The boot tracks no longer followed sensible purpose. No cairns. The tracks forked from ridge to ridge, dipped to saddles, postholed through snowfields—sadistic, cruel—only to double back the other way, to a high white peak and around it, skirting immense cracks into ice-blue oblivion, looping around the other way.

Bowman pressed snowballs to his knee sometimes.

“You’d cut it off before complaining,” Maul said.

“Where’s the coffee?”

Why abide? When Maul spoke, he spoke to the wind. No answer. No answers. He spoke to his mules. They were powerless. They hurt no one. If the mules were made king, what then? It was cold the first few days on the ridges. The ridgetops were snowy or bare though far below somewhere was green. The tracks cut three ways across snow. Which way? The tracks were having fun. Maul pointed this out. Not even a nod. The water jugs gonged on the mules’ ribs. The posse drank tea since there was no coffee. Saul sat in the blue chair. He said his knees were hurting but that wasn’t why.

The second evening on the ridges, Dan said, given all, he deserved more potatoes. “If others relish mule flesh,” he said, “my percentage of potatoes should rise accordingly.”

“A sound argument,” Saul said.

Bowman said Dan’s meals were his private business. “I, for one, want my due of taters.”

Ella tore her potato in two and offered half to Dan. Maul wolfed his quick before the discussion concluded.

“A man’s got to live with choices made freely,” Bowman said. “No one’s forcing him to refuse mule flesh.”

“Agreed,” Saul said.

“Can’t shunt his anti-mule preferences onto innocent others,” Bowman said.

“All right,” Saul said. “All right.”

“Innocent,” Dan guffawed, “who’s that?” He finished Ella’s half.

“It’s pro-mule,” Maul added. “Not anti-mule.”