From the very first moment we’d “met Morley he’d kept emitting sudden yodels in keeping with our venture. TMs was a simple “Yodelayhee” but it came at the oddest mo-ments and in oddest circumstances, like several times when his CMnese and German friends were still around, then later in the car, sitting with us enclosed, “Yodelayhee!” and then as we got out of the car to go in the bar, “Yodelayhee!”

Now as Japhy woke up and saw it was dawn and jumped out of the bags and ran to gather firewood and shudder over a little preliminary fire, Morley woke up from his nervous small sleep of dawn, yawned, and yelled “Yodelayhee!” which echoed toward vales in the distance. I got up too; it Was all we could do to hold together; the only thing to do was hop around and flap your arms, like me and my sad bum on the gon on the south coast. But soon Japhy got more logs on the fire and it was a roaring bonfire that we turned our backs to after a while and yelled and talked. 

A beautiful morning-red pristine shafts of sunlight coming in over the hill and slanting down into the cold trees like ca-thedral light, and the mists rising to meet the sun, and all the way around the giant secret roar of tumbling creeks probably with films of ice in the pools. Great fishing country. Pretty soon I was yelling “Yodelayhee” myself but when Japhy went to fetch more wood and we couldn’t see him for a while and Morley yelled “Yodelayhee” Japhy answered back with a simple “Hoo” which he said was the Indian way to call in the mountains and much nicer. So I began to yell “Hoo” myself.

Then we got in the car and started off. We ate the bread and cheese. No difference between the Morley of this morn-ing and the Morley of last night, except his voice as he rat-tled on yakking in that cultured snide funny way of his was sorta cute with that morning freshness, like the way people’s voices sound after getting up early in the morning, something faintly wistful and hoarse and eager in it, ready for a new day. Soon the sun was warm. The black bread was good, it had been baked by Sean Monahan’s wife, Sean who had a shack in Corte Madera we could all go live in free of rent some day.

1. Entitlement

Japhy, kneeling there studying his star map, leaning for-ward slightly to peek up through the overhanging gnarled old rock country trees, with his goatee and all, looked, with that mighty grawfaced rock behind him, like, exactly like the vision I had of the old Zen Masters of China out in the wilderness. He was leaning forward on his knees, upward looking, as if with a holy sutra in his hands. Pretty soon he went to the snowbank and brought back the chocolate pudding which was now ice cold and absolutely delicious beyond words. We ate it all up.

2. Itinerary

As the fire stopped roaring and just got to be red coals, but big ones six feet long, the night interposed its icy crystal feel 1 more and more but with the smell of smoking logs it was as delicious as chocolate pudding. For a while I went on a little walk by myself, out by the shallow iced creek, and sat meditating against a stump of dirt and the huge mountain walls on both sides of our valley were silent masses. Too cold to do this more than a minute.

3. High Expectations

As I came back our orange fire casting its glow on the big rock, and Japhy kneeling and peering up at the sky, and all of it ten thousand feet above the gnashing world, was a picture of peace and good sense. There was an-other aspect of Japhy that amazed me: his tremendous and tender sense of charity. He was always giving things, always practicing what the Buddhists call the Paramita of Dana, the perfection of charity.