"Sure, if you want."
Stu rather expected "Jingle Bells" or "Frosty the Snowman" sung in the off-key and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of "The First Noel," sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.
"The first Noel," Tom's voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, "the angels did say... was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay... In fields... as they... lay keeping their sheep... on a cold winter's night that was so deep..."
Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom's but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:
"Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel... Christ is born in Israel... "
"That's the only part of it I can remember," Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.
"It was fine," Stu said. The tears were close again. It would not take much to set him off, and that would upset Tom. He swallowed them back. "We ought to get going. Daylight's wasting."
"Sure." He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. "It's the best Christmas I ever had, Stu."
"I'm glad, Tommy."
And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.
They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.
Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the, shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.
Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.
"The wolves are still his," Tom said. "They always will be."
Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy. Stu suddenly realized what it was: Tom had fallen into that eerie state of hypnosis again.
"Tom... is he dead? Do you know?"
"He never dies," Tom said. "He's in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He's blind like them."
"Will he be back?" Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.
Tom didn't answer.
"Tommy..."
"Tom's sleeping. He went to see the elephant."
"Tom, can you see Boulder?"
Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.
"Yes. They're waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet."
"Can you see Frannie?"
Tom's face brightened. "Frannie, yes. She's fat. She's going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy's going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except..." Tom's face grew dark.
"Tom? Except what?"
"The baby..."
"What about the baby? "
Tom looked around uncertainly. "We were shooting wolves, weren't we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?"
Stu forced a smile. "A little bit, Tom."
"I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?"
"Yeah." What about the baby? What about Fran?
He began to suspect they weren't going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.
The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both - even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.
"Can we push on soon, Stu?" Tom asked hopefully.
"I don't know," Stu said. "I hope so. If we'd only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that's all it would have taken. Damn!" He sighed, then shrugged. "Well, maybe it'll just be flurries."