Then they were climbing up through a pass and the basin that held the summertown was behind them. The number of vehicles dropped sharply. The character of the landscape changed. The farmland that had been all around them was now gone. The road they were on hugged a cliff, high above a gorge. Far below a good-sized river ran, sculptured by rapids and boulders.
“I thought we were taking the sheep out to pasture,” she offered.
“The flock had to leave at daybreak. By now they’re thirty or forty kilometers down the pike, almost to the graze. I got a friend of mine to start them off for us. We’ll take over when we catch them.”
She nodded, looking around. Once through the hills the landscape had flattened out again, but there were no farms here, nothing but meadow and scrub as far as she could see.
When she commented on that to Blundy he explained, “It’s the river, Mercy. The first thing that freezes in the winter is Sometimes River, and then the ice blocks its channel. So the whole basin behind the ice dam fills up, fifty or sixty meters deep, and then that freezes, too. So all the silt comes out and makes the soil better there. On this side of the hills, not as good. Good enough for pasturing sheep, though-see?”
And ahead of them she did see, a long, plodding line of stone-colored animals, with a dozen dogs loping back and forth along them to keep them in order. At the head of the line a tractor-trailer was leading the way, its pace creeping no faster than the sheep. Blundy pressed a button on the steering wheel and a horn blared; a moment later an arm stretched out from the cab of the tractor and waved. “She sees us,” he said. “We’ll catch up in just a minute-”
And in not more than a minute they had. The tractor had pulled a few dozen meters ahead of the flock; Blundy and Mercy MacDonald were out of their car and Blundy was heaving their bags into the tractor cab at once.
That part was all right. The part that wasn’t all right was that the driver of the cab turned out to be the skinny little teen-aged girl who was named Petoyne.
“I thought we were going to be alone,” MacDonald couldn’t help saying, but Blundy didn’t hear; he was already climbing into the cab himself, sliding behind the wheel.
“Come on, Mercy,” he ordered. And then, leaning out of the cab, he waved to the girl, who was standing with one hand on the door of the little car they had chased her in, looking at the two of them with a hard stare. “Thanks, Petoyne,” he called. “See you in a month or so.” And, the leaders of the flock already beginning to catch up with them, he started the tractor crawling forward again as soon as Mercy MacDonald’s feet left the ground.
So it was just as well he hadn’t heard, MacDonald thought as she settled herself in, although what she also thought was that the way Petoyne looked at her suggested something Blundy hadn’t seen fit to mention. How many lovers could this man handle, she wondered.
It was not a serious question, though. For the next few weeks, anyway, the answer would surely be: one. For there wasn’t going to be anyone else around.
Never once before in all of her life had Mercy MacDonald been so remote from the society of others. In this place there was simply no one at all. Outside the shell of the tent they lived in (imagine living in a tent!) there was not a single living creature she could see for many miles in any direction, except for the herd of snuffling, grunting ewes and the dogs that watched over them. . . .
And except, of course, for Arakaho Blundy Spenotex.
It was almost dark before she realized that she didn’t feel lonely at all, and that the reason was Blundy. He seemed to take up a great deal of space in her life, enough for multitudes. He was inescapably, but not at all oppressively, there.
When they had reached the grazing grounds, bumping slowly over open ground for several hours till they reached the stream he had been looking for, Blundy turned off the radio beacon, hauled great bulky packages out of the back of the trailer and began setting up their quarters. He waved at the sun, still high in the sky but beginning to lower. “We want to get all set up before dark,” he said, “so let’s get on with it.”
Within the first hour he had made them a home-no, they had made it; she did as much as Blundy did. He showed her how to set the first tent peg in at the proper angle, then left her to drive the others in, in the pattern he marked out for her, while he unrolled the fabric itself. They put it up together, sweating and grunting. Blundy lugged in the stuff too heavy for her to carry, or too awkward, but her bag, his own, the cooking utensils, the one airbed, the folding furniture-all that he left for her to sort out and shift into position. While he dug the sanitary pit and moved the trailer down to the stream, she opened cartons and tried to figure out where everything went.
That wasn’t easy. Tents didn’t seem to have built-in lockers. MacDonald had never even seen a tent before, much less lived in one. The only time she’d come across the word was in books, where the things seemed mostly associated with armies. She spent a long time, that first long afternoon, wondering what she had got herself into.
But then things began to pick up. When she came out of the tent with sandwiches she saw that Blundy had single-handed pitched a smaller tent over the sanitary hole (she had wondered about that). They ate companionably, if rapidly, while Blundy outlined to her the other things they had to do that day. “It’s clouding up over there,” he said, waving to the west, “so I think we’ll have rain tomorrow. And we want as much as possible done before that.”
She nodded. The sheep were scattered all around now, without the radio beacon to keep them in order, individual animals spotted across the landscape, munching away. “Don’t you have to worry about the herd?” she asked.
“What for? All they have to do is roam around and eat. The dogs won’t let them stray too far, and the rest they can handle by themselves. Let’s get the pipes strung.” And so the two of them ran a flexible hose from the tractor at the banks of the stream; a pump in the tractor sucked water out of the stream, the idling engine warmed it and it came out of a nozzle at the top of a pole: a shower. “We’d better only use it in the daytime,” Blundy said, “because the nights are still a little chilly.” But it wasn’t quite dark yet when they had finished, and MacDonald insisted on trying it out, which is when she discovered the interesting possibilities when two people showered at once. When they came damply out of the shower, wrapped in towels, into the still warm evening, it was full dark. She looked up and caught her breath.
“I told you about the stars,” Blundy said, his arm around her.
But no one could have. Although the western edge of the sky was clouded black, most of it was still clear; and stars seen through Nordvik’s vision plates were nothing like stars spread over your head on a warm spring night. There was nothing in the heavens to compete with them. Slowyear didn’t have a moon; Slowyear’s sun certainly had a family of planets, but the distances between them were great and none were very bright from the surface of Slowyear; the stars had Slowyear’s sky to themselves, and they filled it. Here, away from the lights of the summer city, the sky was black and pearl, sprinkled with diamonds. The Milky Way spread across one whole corner of the sky like a lunar mist.
Mercy MacDonald leaned against Blundy’s warm arm, her head back, eyes filled with the starry splendor. It was not only dark, apart from the faint glow that came through the fabric of their living tent, it was silent. All she could hear was small snuffling noises from sleeping sheep. She could smell them-not an offensive odor, just a natural one. One of the dogs woke up enough to amble over to investigate them, then lay with its head on its paws to watch them.
This was what solitude was like, MacDonald thought. A little scary. But fine.
Blundy stirred and pointed. “That’s where the Earth is,” he said. She tried to peer along his index finger. “You see those two lines of stars-three in a row, and then four in a row just above them? Well, right between those two lines-“