The Glass Mountains by Cynthia Kadohata Page A

within hearing. It almost made one feel that this whole expedition was hopeless before it had even got started. I waited for my family so that I wouldn’t have to stand so near the woman.  
    Walking with my backpack had already grown dreary. Usually when we traveled we didn’t take much, and our pets happily carried everything. But the pack on my back weighed me down. I couldn’t believe how heavy a few robes could feel. I thought of abandoning a robe, but I never considered leaving Artie’s chew-rock behind. At the same time I was starting to feel optimistic and excited at what we were doing. I dreamed this was Maruk’s and my chance to get to Artroro. Anyplace new already had started to seem nearer than my old home had. My dreams occupied me while I walked all day. Sometimes that day Tarkahna and I fantasized together.  
    “And then I’ll marry an Artroran man as big as a tree,” I would say while she giggled.  
    “And he should have a pool as big as a house for you to luxuriate in,” she would answer.  
    “We mustn’t marry anyone without a big pool.”  
    Families from my village surrounded me, their dogs dragging sleds piled high with possessions. A couple of people had piled their sleds a bit higher than ours, and a couple had piled them lower. But no one seemed to have taken too much or too little. To take too little might mean starvation or dehydration, and to take too much was to strain the dogs so that they wouldn’t be able to drag anything. My parents had taken enough food and water, they hoped, for the trip to the first lake. At the first lake, we hoped, we would find more food and water. Hope! That was all there was. Of course, if we caught animals along the way, they would provide more moisture for us. And even I understood an unspoken part of the plan: Some people would die, leaving more dogs to carry supplies for those who lived. We all accepted this part of the plan.  
    The dogs toiled obediently. Even the small ones, barely larger than furrtos, carried or dragged something, and even the smallest children, if they could walk, hauled a package on their backs. The Bakshami are hard workers and the weather has made us stoic.  
    At the height of the afternoon heat we stopped near a tree. It was just one tree in the dust, but it was the first we’d seen in a while, and it felt refreshing to be able at least to see the slight shadow the green leaves threw on the ground and to imagine the roots reaching deep into the earth in search of water. We clustered around the tree in a circle, the dogs sitting as usual on the outside, too hot to play or fight except for an occasional short growl or truncated wrestling match. We ate dried meat and sipped water. Unlike people in other sectors, we perspired little and so needed less water. Our temperatures regulated themselves somewhat differently than people from cooler climates. Otherwise we wouldn’t have survived.  
    The woman who’d been wailing sat quietly with her four children. Her hair, hanging in a braid out the front of her hood, was so light it was not really black but brown, and one of her children had distinctly brown hair. She was a tall girl about Maruk’s age, the only one of the children not crying.  
    Everyone started to rise after we’d eaten. The dogs began to bustle, and one person began trudging, then another, until all but a few stragglers remained. As I got up I heard a slight hum and saw a ship in the distance behind us. Everybody stopped and watched as it caught up and flew over and past us. It was very disappointing to see how easily the ship covered ground when our walking had already grown so tiresome. But I knew from experience that a long journey was first hard, then easier, then twice as hard as it had ever been, then you grew immune to its difficulties, and then you were there.  
    At nightfall, when the moons first began to push their way over the peaks of the small sand hills before us, we stopped and pitched tents