say it’s sacred.” He was missing a front incisor and a couple of fingers, but somehow his name was Lucky.
They set out before dawn, but even in the dark the horses knew the way to the trail. There were five horses for the riders and two mules to carry the tent and sleeping bags and food for a week. Neither Teddy nor Helen had ever been on a horse before, and Teddy’s feet couldn’t reach the stirrups, but that was all the more reason, in Henry’s opinion, that they should undergo this experience. He was heedless of Lucky’s cautions about the bears and moose and poisonous weeds and timber wolves, a catalog of perils that had drawn Henry here in the first place. Jill, however, was paying attention, and the prospect of being left alone in the mountains, completely cut off from civilization, surrounded by unfamiliar perils, filled her with foreboding. She could not fathom Henry’s obsession, and as the horses lurched up the steep trail through forests of spruce and fir and lodgepole pine, her anxiety mounted, along with her anger at Henry for placing their children in danger. The fact that Lucky carried a pistol also made her nervous, both because she didn’t like being around guns and because they wouldn’t have one themselves, if it were actually needed. After several hours she was saddle sore and had to dismount and walk beside her horse. Henry knew Jill well enough not to try to placate her.
Henry studied Lucky and his easy way of sitting in the saddle, his familiarity with nature, his pleasant absorption in every moment. By contrast, Henry was still on the run from his duties. He longed to fully escape his distraction and give himself over entirely to the joy of the adventure and the love of his family. Surely that was also part of his drive to plunge deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
They stopped for lunch beside an artesian spring spilling out of a rock. Lucky showed Teddy how to cradle his head in the moss and drink from it. Teddy wanted to do everything the way Lucky did it, so he let the water cascade over his face and came out giggling, then Helen had to try it, and soon everyone had been refreshed by the frigid spring, and the wilderness did not seem quite so menacing. The pure cold water was like a baptism into another life.
When they remounted, Lucky put Jill in the lead, followed by her children, and then he followed behind Henry so that he could have a quiet word with him.
“Even I get a little spooked out here by myself,” Lucky said. “A week is a mighty long time.” Henry recognized that Lucky was giving him good advice, but he had an arbitrary marker in his mind that a week in the wild was the exact dose of adventure required to save his family from…whatever.
“I could pick you up in three days and give you a discount,” Lucky offered.
Henry thought about it, then said, “Five days, I think.”
“Yessir, that’d be a good amount. All you’d need.”
Henry hoped Jill would be mollified by his willingness to compromise.
When the kids turned restive, Lucky began to sing. He had a low, pleasant voice, and the song was vaguely familiar to Henry.
Over hill, over dale
As we hit the dusty trail,
And the caissons go rolling along.
In and out, here them shout,
Counter march and right about
And the caissons go rolling along.
“What’s a caisson?” Teddy asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” Lucky admitted. “It’s just a song we used to sing when I was in the Army.”
“I think it’s an ammunition wagon,” said Henry.
“Yessir, you’re likely right,” said Lucky. He sang it again a couple times, and then Teddy joined in, imitating Lucky, and in a bit they were all singing, making the time pass, shooing away the apprehension that threatened to defeat Henry’s great experiment.
* * *
—
HENRY NEVER KNEW his father’s parents, and frankly he didn’t care to know any more about them. They had never supported him in any manner. He had grown up in the home of his maternal grandparents, Ilona and Franz Bozsik, Hungarian refugees from the 1956 revolution that the Soviets had so savagely crushed. Franz had carried Henry’s mother, Agnes, who was two, on his shoulders through a minefield into Austria. He believed the definite loss of freedom was worse than the possible loss of life.
Everything Ilona and Franz had, except Agnes, was lost. They learned other languages, moved through