Bowman limped to the old chestnut and spoke into one huge chestnut eye. He tied him to a branch that hung from nowhere into the cone of headlamp light. When Bowman turned, the cone sliced across his barrel chest, his knee, a buckle, a brass loop, into the fog until the fog turned the light back as if it hit a wall where the light balled in swirl and probed no further, hovered until Bowman bent to tasks again, whereby lit the root of a tail, a steel jug with fingers gripping it, etc. Dan looped the yellow horse’s rope around a separate branch. The buds were very late. The crown would not be full in August. The two branches had no relationship. They were disconnected intersecting props dropped down from some man-made rigging. A tug on one would not matter to the other. Why not? No way to know what this valley actually contained. A cabin, maybe. A silent and lightless city. A set of cliffs just behind the branches: be careful where you step! Anything was possible.

Saul pulled bags from packsaddles. Ella stood and counted horses, mules, and men, a slow-thinking-girl, a cartoon-girl. The cones of their four headlamps flew about and clashed and banked in the fog in separate and intersecting radii. Lowest Valley, therefore, was entirely a guess, as all things are, an apparent valley only. Tomorrow, in the sun, there might be no cliffs, no flat, no branches in a new kind of land they’d never seen.

“I said, where’s Maul?”

The mules were unpacked and now the four cones of light made the little room for them to work in, to sleep in, a manger of light and fog, a very small private and dripping place, snow becoming slush becoming mud already by hooves and boots and the concussion of bags and bundles falling, getting soggy. Parts of faces, a knee in soggy pants, a hat, a spoon on canvas rolled out. Unfinished leaves appeared still curled up, tender green things built for snow in May. They disappeared when a head turned a fraction. This is fact: the effect of a fraction. And it was always true!