Folks always talk about travel through the wilds as if there's some menacing creature behind every rock and around every bend in the path, and that's what the journey is about. Thing is, the wilds are mostly empty, and wild critters have more important things to do than bother folk passing through. You might get eyed by a bear at a distance, but they're like to avoid you afore you can even avoid them. No, the real hardship of travel is the discomfort.
I been sleeping in a bed most nights for a couple months now. Maybe I should gone back to sleeping on the floor for a bit, to ready for the journey. You spend a day riding, a day what seems to just go on and on and on, with nothing but room in it for your thoughts. We talk some, but it seems like the open spaces swallow our words and we run out of things to say fair soon, and then the sun's hardly moved and the road just keeps filling up the world in front of us.
The day of riding makes you tired and maybe a bit sore, then you spend the evening making camp. It's good that we can have hot soup, as that restores the heart, but you still got a lot of work in gathering firewood, making a fire, setting up a camp, making sure it's safe -- if wild critters are going to bother you it's most like to be at night -- and then all you get for your trouble is a cold night on the hard ground with what few blankets you could carry. So you wake up not well rested, and you start it all over again. The first day ain't nothing, the second day you still feel fine, but little by little, not sleeping so good, and being tired from the passing of the leagues beneath your horse's hooves, wears you down. And when you get tired, you get tempted to cut corners, to not take all the precautions, to not be as careful. That's where the critters start to be a threat.
The first few days we went through lands I been through a few times, when I come over the High Pass last year, and then when me and Miss Adri went to Imladris, but once we reached the Loudwater instead of fording it we turned to follow it south. The hills got more rugged and there was some hard climbing for a while. The weather turned cold for a day there and we passed one night on a long slope above the river, shivering and not getting much sleep. Then we came out of the woods into Hollin, which is a gentle land, somehow welcoming, almost like the Lone-lands and the Trollshaws had been telling you to go away, but Hollin says, come on in, sit down, have some tea. Spring already come here; there's leaves on the trees, berries and flowers growing, birds singing as they make nests. All at once the leagues felt less wearisome, and we slept fair well that night. Even when it started raining the next day, it were a gentle rain, and though it were a chill one, it didn't dampen our spirits; it felt like the kind of rain what makes things grow, healthsome and cleansing.
The mountains loom over it all, staring down from peaks crowned in clouds, and especially the three highest, clustered together, looking like we're errant children and they're gazing disapproving down at us, not saying nothing, but you can see how disappointed they are in us, hear it in the silence of the things they don't say. Though we never been in Hollin afore now, the path to those peaks, and the pass of Carrot-thras, was plain as can be. There's trees almost to the top, so we won't got to build near as much a stockpile of firewood as I planned on. Still, I can see that up above us, the gentle rain that's in my hair now turns to snow. All the hardships of the road behind us will be nothing compared to those as we cross this pass.
