In the pit the lime had burned her face. Oh, beautiful slime. Covered with, encased, engorged by. They had tossed her on the calf, some calves, so many dead calves. She could hear them up by the tree with the mare. They would run out of beer. They would sleep by the fire thinking Our work is done, not clean and neat, not fair in every stinkin’ way, but clean and neat is for city people. She comprehended it. She even sympathized, part of her. She deserved it and didn’t and did. The pit was deep, cut from the earth with the sharp steel teeth of the bucket forged in a steel mill in Pittsburgh or Akron. How had it come to be there, the bucket? The calves were bony. Nature makes it so. Many can die. Reproduction makes up for it. Reproduction too is natural. She licked her tongue across her lips. Spit on her cuff, rubbed the cuff across her face. Her face burned. Why, she was hardly dead at all. But she would never be lovely again, never beautiful. No men would chase her. She would chase no men. Then she was laughing. She was never beautiful. She was just herself.

“A place just like here,” said Maul, chasing her, gesticulating at the canyons of the Old Swede’s Trail. He’d stopped to rework a diamond hitch. “I flew them in the war.”

“Which war was that?” Saul asked.

“Did you hear how the cowboy got stampeded?” Bowman said, interrupting.

“How did he?” Saul said, not noticing.

“Tightening the nuts on his mustang.”

“Ha.”

Morning. Second day of the search party. Saul and Bowman rode ahead to another joke, and Maul remounted his dun, though couldn’t stop his motormouth.

They followed the cob’s stout hoofprints that vanished over rock and reappeared as deep gouges and half-moon scuffs or less. The tracks had swerved into the Mormoras at the first cairn of the Old Swede’s Trail then ascended the black cleft at a steep uphill, passing to port of the second cairn a quarter mile on, to starboard of the next, and so on. No tricks or evasion, the rider’s filthy fingers perhaps woven through the cob’s mane, the filthy face perhaps burrowed down in coarse hair, sleeping it off, perhaps, not steering the ship at all, perhaps dreaming of the pit since what else could the rider dream? Rooster crowing again, the cock, the herd lowing in the south field fending for itself as animals had done from the beginning of time, crawling over the dead again, across dead, all dead, fingers plunged down in the bowels of a pig, the lady parts, morning coming, because the rider was not dead yet, no, still not dead. And now Ella, too, passed each cairn, but very much upright, perfectly orderly and fair, wide awake, last rider in the pack train for many next rocky miles.