Patience I have learned. The centuries may not give a man wisdom, but he acquires patience or he doesn't live through them: That first morning we found the first spot that was too tight. Oh, someone had blasted there and probably got around that turn. But it was too narrow to be safe, so I blasted some more. Nobody in his right mind takes a wagon into the mountains without dynamite or some such; you can't nibble at solid rock with a toothpick, or even a pickax, without risking being still up there when the snows come.

I was not using dynamite. Oh, anyone with a modicum of chemistry can make both dynamite and 'black powder,' and I planned to do both-later. What I had with me was a more efficient and more flexible blasting jelly-and not shock-sensitive, perfectly safe in wagon and saddlebag.

I placed that first charge in a crack where I thought it would do the most good, set the fuse but did not light it, then walked both mules back around the bend and exerted my histrionic talent to its limit to explain to Buck and Beulah that there was going to be a loud noise, a bang/-but it could hot hurt them, so don't worry. Then I went back, lit the fuse, hurried back to them and was in time to have an arm on each neck-watched my watch. "Now!" I said, and the mountain obliged me with Ka-boom!

Beulah shivered but was steady. Buck said inquiringly, Paaang?

I agreed. He nodded and went back to cropping leaves.

We three went up and took a look. Nice and wide now- Not very level, but three tiny blasts took care of that. "What do you think, Buck?"

He looked carefully up and down trail. "Doo wagon?"

"One wagon."

"Ogay."

We explored a little farther, planned the next day's work; then I turned back at the time promised, was home early.

It took me a week to make a couple of kilometers safe to another little alp, a grassy pocket big enough to turn one wagon around at a time. Then it took all of a long day to move our wagons, one at a time, to this next base. Someone had made it that far; I found a broken wagon wheel-salvaged the steel tire and the hub. It went on that way, day after day, slowly, tediously, and at last we were through the notch and headed-mostly-downhill.

But that was worse, not better. The river I had been sure was there, by photomaps from space, was far below us, and we still had to go down, down, down, and follow it a long way before we would reach the place where the gorge opened out into valley suitable for homesteading. More blasting, lots of brush chopping, and sometimes I had to blast trees. But the nastiest part was rappelling those wagons down the steepest places. I didn't mind steep places going uphill (which we still encountered); a twelve-mule team can drag a single wagon up any slope they can dig their hooves into. But downhill-

Certainly those wagons had brakes. But if the grade is steep, the wagon slides on its tires-then goes over the edge, mules and all.

I couldn't let that happen even once. Not ever risk letting it happen. We could lose one wagon and six mules and still go on. But I was not expendable. (Dora would not be in the wagon.) If that wagon cut loose, my chances of jumping clear would be so-so.

If the grade was steep enough to give me even a trace of doubt that I could hold a wagon with its brakes, we did it the hard way: used that expensive imported line to check it down such pitches. Lead the line out fair and free for running, pass the bitter end three times around a tree stout enough to anchor it, secure it to the rear axle-then our four steadiest mules, Ken and Daisy, Beau and Belle, would take the wagon down at a slow walk (no driver) following Buck, while I kept tension on the line, paying it out very slowly.

If terrain permitted, Dora on Betty would take station halfway down to relay orders to Buck. But I could not permit her to be on the trail itself; if that line parted, it would whip. So maybe half the time Buck and I worked without liaison, doing it dead slow and depending on his judgment.

If there was not a sound anchor tree properly positioned-and it seems to me that this happened more often than not-then we had to wait while I worked something out. This could be anything: a sling between two trees, then rig a fair-lead to a third tree-A bare-rock anchor using driven pitons-I hated these as I bad to do my checking right at the rear axle, walking behind, and God help us all if I stumbled. Then that was always followed by the time-consuming chore of salvaging those pitons-the harder the rock, the better the anchor, but the tougher the job of getting them out-and I had to get them out; I would need them farther along.

'Sometimes no trees and no rock- Once the anchor was twelve mules faced back along the trail, with Dora soothing them while I checked at a rear axle and Buck controlled the progress.

On the prairie we often made thirty kilometers a day. Once we were through Hopeless Pass and had started down the gorge the distance made good over the ground could be zero for days on end while I prepared the trail ahead, then up to as high as ten kilometers if there were no steep pitches that required rappelling down by line. I used just one unbreakable rule: The trail had to be fully prepared from one turnaround base to the next before a wagon was moved.

Minerva, it was so confounded slow that my "calendar" caught up with me; the sow 'littered-and we were not out of the mountains.

I don't recall ever making a harder decision. Dora was in good shape, but she was halfway through her pregnancy.

Turn back (as I had promised myself, without telling her)- or push on and hope to reach lower and fairly level ground before she came to term? Which would be easier on her?

I had to consult her-but I had to decide. Responsibility cannot be shared. I knew how she would vote before I took the matter up with her: Push on.

But that would be simply her gallant courage; I was the one with experience both in wilderness trekking and in childbirth problems.

I studied those photomaps again without learning anything new. Somewhere ahead the gorge opened out into a broad river valley-but how far? I didn't know because I didn't know where we were. We had started with an odometer on the right rear wheel of the lead wagon; I had reset it to zero at the pass-and it had lasted only a day or two; a rock or something did it in. I didn't even know how much altitude we had managed to drop since the pass, or how much more we must lose to get down.

Livestock and equipment: fair. We had lost two mules. Pretty Girl had wandered over the edge one night and broken a leg; all I could do for her was to put her out of her misery. I didn't butcher her because we had fresh meat and I could not do it where the other mules could not see it, anyhow. John Barleycorn had simply upped and died one night-or possibly lost to a loper; he was partly eaten when we found him.

Three hens were dead and two piglets failed to make it, but the sow seemed willing to suckle the others.

I had only two spare wheels left. Lose two more and the, next broken wheel meant abandoning one wagon.

It was the wheels that made up my mind.

(Omitted: approximately 7,000 words which reiterate difficulties in getting down the gorge.)

When we came out on that plateau, we could see the valley stretching out before us. A beautiful valley, Minerva, wide and green and lovely-thousands and thousands of hectares of ideal farmland. The river from the gorge, tame now, meandering lazily between low banks. Facing us, a long, long way off, was a high peak crowned with snow. Its snow line let me guess how high it was-around six thousand meters, for we had now dropped down into subtropics, and only a very high mountain could keep so much snow through a long and very hot summer.