Before entering the dark underground opening, the four companions attended to their pack animal with the careful care demanded by mountain survival. A survey party that lost its transport in the subalpine crags was an expedition doomed to starve on the retreat.
Behind the dense buckthorn thicket, thirty paces south of the raised stone road, Yseld had located a deep, three-sided fissure in the fiery dark rock. A sheltered natural nook shielded from the howling gorge wind by twelve-foot walls of living stone. There, the dun mule was securely tethered to a forged iron ring-bolt set into the rock. Paxa unhitched the heavy pack baskets, covered the animal with two thick woolen horse-blankets. Then she filled its canvas nosebag with a double ration of dried mountain oats and kibbled peas.
“She will be warm and safe until morning,” Paxa said, smoothing the mule’s coarse grey forehead with gentle fingers. “The rock protects her from the wind. No mountain cat will crawl past that buckthorn thicket. Large animals can’t enter survey parcels in any case. The stone shape rejects unlisted mass, and these ancient underground passages were built for two-legged boots, not iron hooves.”
Leaving the heavy camp baggage cached beneath an oiled canvas tarpaulin weighted down with heavy river cobbles, Kezra, Fellis, Paxa. Yseld returned to the open iron check hatch.
