Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
saddle horn and clamor onto my mule, which is eager to overtake his trotting partner. Clyde is making time, his vile lexis filling the crystalline emptiness, ricocheting to embrace distant, ragged hills ringed in sheer cliffs. This is how we travel, at an uninterrupted trot, gobbling ground greedily in search of saucer-sized depressions in an unbroken sea of deep, flocculent white. Even Clyde has grown silent, his most recent warming blasphemy delivered hours ago, followed by determined silence broken only by whistling wind, creaking saddle leather and the occasional click of stone beneath determined mule hooves. But that general lethargy transforms into something quite the opposite in an instant, as one of those blessed, carefree hounds releases a barrage of joyful screams and yelps that cannot be mistaken for anything less than triumph. Clyde pulls his mule up short and raises one hand like a cigar-store Indian, his way of asking me to behold this beautiful music. Additional howls join the preliminary alarm, choppy and tentative, everything tangible turned to sound and emanating from an isolated piece of ground until it transforms into something primal and urgent that bounces from the bulwarks of smooth Navajo sandstone. He tickles his mule into a ragged gallop, rounding a spit of anchored stone and vaulting into the circle of hounds with agility I would not have attributed him minutes before. The mule ground-stakes and Clyde wades into the fracas bent at the waist, shoving eager hounds aside and staring into the blank snow as if reading a fortune, legs spread in a way of protecting something fragile and precious. He turns as I slide off my mule and I see him smile around his smoke, knowing something Continued on 176 I occupy my saddle enough hours that without a wristwatch it would prove difficult to provide an accurate time estimate, though certainly a measured distance is beyond me now. Each knee joint is an angry protest of numbing pain. We might be very near the truck, or many black hours away. I cannot say for sure. A gnawing wind is slowly rising to move the powdery snow in delicate veils, its edges as sharp as freshly broken glass, seeking the seams of my considerable high-tech clothing so that the day has simply become something to be endured. My only solace comes by way of a sun perceivably slanting westward to signal that this day is not without closing. S P O R T I N G C 119 L A S S I C S