On the ridgetop Maul was too winded to assist the trackers. He parked himself with the horses, talked to them between panting, supervised Saul and Bowman crawling and puzzling over boot prints in the disturbed scree. Blood. He told the horses sweetly how the Old Swede had served out his boyhood on the Lucinda, Bristol to Edgartown to Gloucester to Glasgow, Hudson Bay to see the great white bears, deckhand on the Porpoise, back to Terneuzen, that sentinel on the sea’s brink guarding the ancient heart of Zeelandic Flanders, on foot to Amsterdam when there was no other way, no horse, no cart, and he walked the marshes in the urgent wind, along the dunes it formed, from windmills that harnessed it to stables that hid the horses from it to windmills again, island and marsh to the streets along brick canals, barges moored nose to tail, red lights in the windows at night, fresh round cheeks pressed to the glass, to the Canaries on the Valentina, to Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope to the Galápagos on the Kate before they were even Darwin’s Islands, back to Buenos Aires on the estuary of the Río de la Plata as first mate of the Sophia. He had a son who died in Paris, it was whispered. He went to jail in Mainz, it was said for some small theft, a great injustice. Chicago, in time, by way of Great Lakes aboard the Pearl, prototype of the first notion of a submarine. The Eska, on the Yukon, a decommissioned paddleboat from the Mississippi, south again as a hand on a cattle drive to Calgary. Kalamazoo by a prairie schooner he called the Gisele in letters back to Stockholm, then from there, a mule—Rosalyn—to St. Cecilia. He had the best bowl of soup made by the girls in the kitchen at the Mission School.

“They say a human will walk in circles,” Maul puffed, “if left in a land with no landmarks.”

“The Titanic’s route,” Saul said and plucked up the spent shell.

The horses frothed, sniffed at the day ahead. Saul handed the shell to Bowman.

“Only roughly,” Bowman said. “The Titanic’s port was never Glasgow.”

“The North Sea is the North Sea,” Saul said.

“Those Dan’s boot prints?” Bowman asked.

“I was watching him,” Maul said. “He was asleep the whole time.”

Bowman pocketed the shell. “Maybe you were too.”

“Not his caliber,” Saul said.

Camp was only a smudge far below. The rising scent of breakfast. They rode on over the ridgetop after one set of tracks.

“Find our gal?”

This from Dan, tipping an imaginary hat, as the men returned from their charge up the slope to the rifle shot and beyond. Fluttering aspen leaves, gunshots. (They don’t call them Quaking Aspen for nothing! he almost said.) The sorrel and bay drank long after their fruitless chase.