"You think this' Buck Pass, or that other one?" Adrian asked, shooting his light around as if looking for clues.

"Hard to say." It was all I could manage. "You cold?"

"As an icicle."

"Maybe we should start a fire," I said after fighting off a fit of shivers.

"Fifteen minutes. Then we push on. We can't be too far," he said, waiting for an answer maybe. "Right?"

"I'll find some wood."

Those 15 minutes turned into an hour, but I was thawed and in better spirits. Adrian suggested that perhaps we should push on. I had to agree. There was nothing to be gained sitting there. We stomped out our fire and kicked dirt over its top and climbed back into our saddles. I could perceive my horse's growing fatigue. He seemed to stumble more often, his gait measured and plodding. But we pushed on, the hours passing like time spent in a dank prison cell.

We reached the next high point and could see those mysterious city lights once more. A wicked wind had gathered and my teeth chattered, my hands not working at all. This might be Buck Pass and it was easy to see we couldn't carry on. We were still hours from camp. I called a halt. We stood our horses, letting them blow, too stiff and tired to climb out of the saddle.

"I can't believe this is it," Adrian said when I guessed our position aloud. "Maybe we got off on a different--" I knew what he was thinking and didn't answer. This certainly wasn't the only trail in this vast wilderness.

"We have to stop," I said finally. "But we can't stay up here. That wind's gnawing me."

We stopped at a fir grove after losing maybe 700 feet of elevation. The wind grew, seeking seams in my clothing, my body too numb for even shivering. We slid off our horses without comment, Adrian working to build a fire in a sheltered place while I worked to unsaddle horses. I found the picket ropes in the saddlebags and tied the horses off near a burbling brook. I watched them greedily gulp water then turned to drag saddles and blankets to the beginnings of a fire started against truck-sized boulders. I held my hands against the flames and began to moan from the growing pain as they came back to life.

I arranged the saddles to create a makeshift windbreak and placed the sweated pads beside the reflective rock. Adrian was busy hauling wood to add to an enormous pile; anything he could get his hands on, big or small. I remembered the tightly packaged emergency space blanket I'd carried for years and unfolded it, securing its edges to create a Spartan bivy.

And that's where we slept, the two of us under that stingy piece of silver trash sack, drifting off in snatches, awaking to toss more wood on our fire that stood as our only defense against biting cold. I can't say I actually slept, simply slipped off into a form of exhausted suspension. I only know I slept because I dreamt of home, the burning wind somehow transformed to perceivable heat in that dream. It was a night with no end, the sun taking its time in coming.

With daylight we achingly saddled the horses and started down the trail. The place we'd arrived was in fact Buck Pass, sleep deprivation and hypothermia the only explanations for any doubt that had formed in our minds. Still, it was another three hours of hard riding before camp came into sight; a welcome relief. We lazed around camp the remainder of the day discussing those big bucks and the possibilities of that far country. We spoke of a pack-trip attack the following year, trailering additional horses from Kansas to make that possible. We certainly didn't discuss returning immediately; too saddle sore, the memory of that biting cold too fresh.

We climbed into bed early that night, talking briefly as we allowed sleep to easily overtake us, struggling with a viable plan for tomorrow. We reached no conclusions, only knew another assault of those far bowls was physically out of the question. Sleep took us and I dreamed of those bucks; dreamed of stalking them without the prerequisite riding. It was a nice dream. And tomorrow was another day.