Sometimes he walked his dun at the front of the whole party. He was their king, and with power comes the responsibility to understand the plight of underlings. At night, for his watch, Maul used a trick he’d learned from the Old Swede’s prison in Mainz in the Eternal Sweden of the Mind. He set bundles of broken gear on the chair and dropped Dan’s poncho over the pile, stuffed the hood to fill the head, no eye patch. He privately referred to this serene replacement of himself for Third Watch as “Poncho Man” and got some shut-eye. Dan had given him the poncho. Dan didn’t care about living now. He was thin and angry and the patch was permanent. Ella held a pen and never wrote a word. Poncho Man was fine. No one was coming. It was what the others didn’t know. Sometimes they rested in the lee of the many huge jagged pumice towers. He thought of the devil often, how the devil’s actions didn’t, at first blush, seem devilish. It was part of his trick, his power. Lucifer. Beelzebub. Mr. Scratch.

“Beelzebub was the henchman,” Bowman said. “He wasn’t the devil himself.”

“I dispute you,” Maul said.

He loved saying it to that man.

Third day on the ridges Ella offered ham slices from a last and overlooked package. She cut green off. Dan refused meat now, part of his version of “change,” of his new “manitude,” as Bowman called it.

“How’s that leg?” Maul said.

“This leg,” Bowman said, “is perfect.”

It was Maul’s turn for Dan’s share. He claimed the green ham and Ella forked green ham and he stuffed green ham in his ever-loving mouth. Saul spat and the spit flew away horizontal. A great blue peak stood off south and someone asked the name. Old Rip. Old Poker. Old Splitfoot, since the devil was a kind of goat.

“Slander to goats,” Ella bleated. “Slander to goats.”

Tiny spiny split footprints appeared soon after in the snow. A tail dragged behind.

“The Black Spy,” Bowman said.

I hate you too, Maul would have liked to say. He would. He would.

The Long Red Twisted Ridge Ride, Maul would call it later, for the rest of his life, meaning this: a Long Ridge, a Red Ridge that was a Gold Ridge at a different time of day. Twisted. And this: the Green and Purple Ranges had backbones of green and purple. They laughed, he and Dan, as the others glowered. Dan’s mood swung and swung back. Him and Dan. Dan and him. Ella was a satellite only. They discussed the future as a ridge ever forking, ever T-ing, humping up, dipping down, fractured but not “malformed.” A ridge was a Muscle-and-Bone place, the backbone of the world. They were sorry for the lesser mountain places, the low ugly tangled-up gristle places.

“We didn’t eat the cob. Why not?”