Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [118]
The thin air smelled of stone and snow, the sun came through it and lay warm on her hands and face without warming the air itself. Up, up, up. There was no top to this pass. Oliver said it crested at more than thirteen thousand feet. They were long past all trees, even runted ones. The peaks were close around them, the distance heaved with stony ridges, needles, pyramids in whose shadowed cirques the snow curved smoothly. The horses stopped, pumping for air, and as they rested she saw below a slumping snowbank the shine of beginning melt, and in the very edge between thaw and freeze a clump of cream-colored flowers.
“I’d like to walk a little. Could I?”
“You won’t want to walk far. We’re around twelve thousand right now.”
“Just a little way. I can keep up with you.”
It felt good to use her legs, but she had no wind at all. With a handful of the little alpine flowers in her hand and the whole broken world under her eyes, she puffed on after the democrat, and was glad when it stopped and waited. But when she caught up, Oliver was standing out in front looking closely at the bay horse. The moment she saw the closed expression of his face she knew something was wrong. She looked at the horse, spraddle-legged, dull-eyed, with pumping ribs and flaring nostrils, and heard the breath rattle in its throat.
“Is he sick?”
“I thought for a while he was just dogging it. They’re not pulling any load to speak of, but look at him heave.”
Tableau: tiny figures at the foot of a long rising saddle, snowpeaks north and south, another high range across the west. The road crawled upward toward the place where the saddle emptied into sky. The wind came across into her face with the taste of snow in it, and not all the glittering brightness on the snow could disguise the cold that lurked in the air. In the whole bright half-created landscape they were the only creatures except for a toy ore wagon that was just starting down the dugway road from the summit.
It took an effort to keep her fear from shaking in her voice. “What will we do? Can we walk?”
Watching the horse with a frown, he shook his head without looking at her. “Don’t you feel the altitude?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Anyway, what would we do with your luggage and the buggy? They wouldn’t be here when we got back to pick them up, that’s a cinch. Maybe we could leave the sick one and you could ride the other . . . No, no saddle or anything. We’ll just have to drive him. He might hold out to English George’s.”
Once more Susan looked up at the shelf of road where the ore wagon clung. “At least I can go on walking now. I don’t want that poor sick thing pulling me.”
“I’ll do the walking. You climb up. He’ll be dead by suppertime no matter what you do.”
Unwillingly she rode, while Oliver walked on the off side with the whip and kept touching up the black horse, making it pull the sick one along. The bay stumbled, hung its nose down until the collar half-choked it, wheezed and rattled for air. They had to stop every hundred yards.
“Maybe that wagon can help us,” she said once.
“We’d better make it on our own.”
A long, painful, halting time later, halfway up the dugway, they met the ore wagon, and Oliver scrambled into the seat to negotiate the passage. Sight of what his two hundred pounds did to the gasping bay horse was so painful to her that she barely saw the wagon driver.
“Really, I want to walk a while,” she said when they were past. But she was able to struggle upward only a few hundred yards, with many rests. The thin air burned her lungs, her legs were like wood. And it did seem to make no difference to the horse whether she walked or rode. It went staggering upward a few rods and stopped, was whipped and dragged forward, stopped again. The sound of its breathing was like the sound of a saw.
“All right,” Oliver said after a few minutes. “No more, now. You’ll be sick yourself.” He helped her up into the seat. He was