Maul was a gobbler. To watch the man chew salami was terrible. Bowman was the opposite, a private eater, fastidious and slow, whereas Dan chewed with uncertain deliberation under his patch secured with a fat green rubber band.

Saul noted the elk in a notebook then stuffed it in his breast pocket. The mules invariably veered toward creeks. The ridges cut black against blue serene, like that rubber band into the skin of Dan’s face. When allowed to drink, the mules plunged their snouts in, lips waggling. They craned and sloshed big-headed and horse-faced, or small-necked or long-bodied or donkey-like with nonmatching pants, wonders of genetics, unnerving. They rode over bare rock a mile, then gleaming white birch a mile, then east a mile, then uphill six. Maul untangled a red mule from a brown.

“Why the pirate outfit then?” he’d asked.

“He speaks English,” Ella said. “Ask him.”

Maul did not. They rode on. The air wasn’t thinning yet. Home was nearly this same elevation. Ella’s nose had stopped bleeding.

Afternoon. A snake stop. “Get me a rope.”

Saul tied a knot at the frayed end. He whipped it back and aimed for the head.

“Why does a cowboy wear buttoned jeans?” Bowman said.

Saul took two swings to kill it.

“I don’t know,” Saul said.

“Because the sheep can hear zippers.”

“I’ve heard that one.”

He flipped the snake still rattling off the trail.

“Why do cowboy hats curl up at the side?” Bowman asked.

She watched Saul laugh.

“I’m going on,” she said, but her paint stood still. “She’s got a twelve-hour jump.”

“Tortoise and the hare,” Saul said.

Bowman skinned the snake for a hatband. It writhed on with neurological life. He left the pink body in its slender cage of bones, avenging the birds for their stolen eggs.

“She’ll cool off,” Saul said.

“Let her run with the line,” Bowman said. “She’ll tire.”

More delays, Ella wrote in the beautiful little diary with marbled inside covers, blowdowns and bottlenecks, new channels made by spring floods, rockslide, detours. When Ginny was a girl she was a pencil in cowboy boots, brand-new black ones (though for Ella it was hand-me-downs from the neighbors (boo hoo)), weeks to break them in, matching holster she said she found in the attic but people knew the truth of the holster.

Then, The mules’ hips sway. And then she stopped herself.

Their steps were ginger, never fully trusting the weights on their backs just wide enough for juts and overhangs. They were not overloaded, the Golden Rule, though their burdens were not light. Maul brought the scale and a marker for daily weight, set coffee on a rump, hung bundles from a hook and scale off a branch, pounds and ounces written on tape. When the gusts died down they talked horses vs. donkeys vs. mules vs. other exotic hybrids, zedonks, zonkeys, zorses. The mules had no shoes.