Hassan broke camp before the sun was over the ridge.
"We're going?" Adam said from inside his bag. "You said after lunch."
"I said we'd see."
"Is it because of the hunters?"
"It's because of the weather," Hassan said. "There's snow coming at the end of the week."
That was true, and it was also a lie, and Adam knew both things. He got up without arguing, which frightened Hassan more than an argument would have.
They packed the tent wet and the stove cold. Hassan prayed the dawn prayer in the gray light with the compass on its rock. The needle sat calmly where it had sat both nights, the little arrow pointing north and a little east up the valley. Then he shouldered the pack and they walked out the way they had come in: down the draw to the creek, along the creek trail to the junction marker, then up toward the saddle and the trailhead beyond it.
He was not thinking about Dana's loop. He had decided, somewhere around the junction marker, not to think about it.
It took an hour to reach the saddle. Hassan remembered the place because of a dead pine there, gray and twisted, split by lightning down the middle. They passed the pine. The trail dropped off the far side through scattered timber, the way it had climbed up on Saturday. Hassan walked it with his head down, counting his breathing, thinking about the car and the heater and the gas station in Elko where he would buy Adam whatever he wanted.
The trees thinned. The ground leveled.
They came out of the timber above a long basin of yellow aspen and gray sage with a sheet of white at its far end.
Adam stopped beside him. Neither of them said anything for a while.
"That's the valley," Adam said.
"Yes."
"We went over the top. I watched us. We went over."
"Yes."
"It's what she said. Dana. It's exactly what she said."
Hassan unfolded the map with hands that didn't feel like his. The trail was one dotted line from the trailhead up to the saddle and down into the basin. There was no other line. There was no way to go over the saddle and come down on the same side.
"We missed a switchback," he said. "In the timber."
"There wasn't one."
"Then I missed it."
They turned around and climbed back up. Hassan watched every step this time. He watched the dead pine come toward them and put his hand on it as he passed, and the bark was real, rough and cold. He kept his eyes on the sun, which was behind them and to the right, low in the east, exactly where it should be for a man walking west. The trail dropped through the timber. The trees thinned.
Basin. Aspen. White playa.
Adam sat down in the middle of the trail.
Dana and Theo found them there twenty minutes later, coming down from the saddle with their packs on. Dana didn't say she had told him so. She looked at Adam sitting in the dirt and took off her pack and sat down beside him.
"Four times now," she said. "I thought if we walked out with you it might count for something."
Theo laughed, a short high sound with no humor in it, and then stopped.
Dana had a yellow GPS unit on a lanyard, a serious one, with a stubby antenna. She held it out to Hassan. On the gray screen a line started at their creek camp, ran north to the junction, went up to the saddle and over, and kept going west, down the far side, straight toward the parking area marked with a little car. Then it stopped, as if they'd been picked up.
"According to this," Dana said, "I'm standing at the trailhead. Every time."
"Battery?"
"New this morning. It's not the battery."
Hassan looked from the line on the screen to the basin in front of him. He had felt this once before, in a basement in Homs during the bombing, when the ceiling had stopped shaking and the silence afterward had been worse. It was the feeling of being handled by something that did not care what he thought of it.
"There's a road," Theo said. "From the south. From that town. Sweetwater. The county road comes in from Highway 50."
"That's fifteen miles."
"So we walk fifteen miles."
"Through the town," Hassan said.
Dana looked at him sharply. "You know something about the town?"
"No. I know you think something's wrong with it."
She held his eyes and then looked away down the valley, toward the white playa and the faint gray smudge at its edge that might have been buildings.
They camped together at Dana's creek site, in a stand of cottonwoods with a good fire ring. Theo gathered wood, more than they needed, and stacked it neatly. Dana took notes.
Theo came and sat by Hassan while the light went, with the recorder in his lap. "Can I ask you something weird?" he said. "When you pray. Do you mind if I record it? Not you. Just the sound. The creek and your voice and the trees." He turned the recorder over in his hands. "I collect places. Every place has a sound under the sound. I've got a laundromat in Astoria and a Greyhound station at three in the morning. I've never had anybody praying."
"Record the creek," Hassan said. "If I'm in it, I'm in it."
Theo grinned and set the recorder on a stone by the water with its red light on.
The Brandts came down the creek at dusk with their sleeping bags rolled under their arms and Duke on a short leash. Kurt said a big group was safer from a cat, and a cat wouldn't come at a big fire. He said it twice. Wes said nothing at all. He dropped his bag beside the fire ring and started breaking deadfall over his knee, more than Theo had stacked, and fed it in until the flames stood up past the height of a man.
Hassan prayed the sunset prayer by the creek. When he turned his head to the right for the closing greeting of peace, he saw that Dana had been watching him and that she didn't look away.
"Does that help?" she said, not unkindly.
"Ask me tomorrow."
He lay down in the tent to rest until the night prayer. He had walked eleven miles to arrive nowhere. He was asleep before he had the bag pulled up.
In the dream there was sand.
It went to the horizon in every direction, pale under a white sky. A line of men walked across it with camels, roped nose to tail, the bells on the lead camel's neck going flat and steady. Hassan stood a little way off and watched them pass. After a while they passed him again, the same men, the same bells, from the same side. Then again.
A stranger walked with them now, at the head of the line. He wore clean white and he had a pleasant face, and he was talking to the lead man in a kind voice, pointing ahead. The lead man nodded and followed where he pointed. The circle went on.
One by one the men at the back sat down in the sand. Then they lay down. They did not get up. The stranger looked back at them and smiled, and the smile was very patient, and the line walked on without them.
Somewhere above the sand, on a flat roof, Teta was talking. He couldn't hear the words. He wanted very badly to hear the words.
He woke into the cold.
The tent was black. His breath hung over his face. He put out his hand for Adam and found the bag beside him open and empty, the nylon cold all through, and the tent door unzipped to the night.
Outside, beyond the roar of Wes's fire, he heard his son's voice, calm and clear and close to the trees.
"Okay, Mom," Adam said. "I'm coming."