The Pistol by James Jones Page B

The only way to rest was to dig a dirt ledge with the shoeheels and set the can upright and squat around it, because to let go of the can at all would be to lose it entirely.
    At the very top, in the saddle itself, the slope lessened considerably until it was no more than twenty degrees, before it plunged itself abruptly over the other side into sheer rock. They left the fourth can there and went cautiously back down after the third can at the bottom of the chimney, and brought it up. Then they went all the way, almost to the bottom, for the other two cans, and repeated the first two climbs. All of the other gear, the cases and boxes and the machine guns and their tripods, was brought up in the same way, in stages, but nothing that they had to carry was as awkward and dangerous and nearly impossible to handle as those first four round milk cans of water. On every trip, all the way up to the chimney, tree roots and branches caught at them throwing them off balance on the slippery rocks, and when they got above there where they could have used them, they ceased. It was as if the mountain itself had a personal enmity for them. They worked all that afternoon until dark, and worked all the entire next day, and worked the entire morning of the following day.
    It was bruising, grueling, killing work. But if the work was killing, it was nevertheless forgotten and made to count as nothing by what they saw that very first time they came up into the saddle of the pass with that first milk can of water. And each time they climbed exhaustedly back up with some new piece of gear, the experience was repeated as if it had never happened, refreshing them. Each time it was as if they had not seen it before.
    The view was literally breathtaking. The whole of the Kaneohe Valley lay spread out before them in all its patchwork, verdant floorplan, running on to the north between the mountains and the sea until it lost itself in the mists of distance, looking much the same (except for modernizations) as it must have looked to Kamehameha’s men when they first climbed to the Pali. Standing up here in the unobstructed winds of the upper air, which made them acutely aware of the height, they had spread out for them at their feet in a way which gave them a peculiar feeling of proprietorship, almost a fifth of the entire island. From the white surf of the beaches which they could see to the east, to the cloud-draped mountains in the west, it was their personal possession because they stood above it. As they stood and watched that first time, a B-18 bomber took off from Bellows Field in the valley below and climbed to its chosen height and began to practice maneuvers. It was still over a thousand feet below them, and they stood and looked at it first with astonishment, and then with superiority.
    To be here, to be the first men to be stationed here if not actually the first to be here, and to live here for a week or ten days, these were to all four of them more than worth the heartbreaking work of getting their supplies up. During their stay (actually it was seventeen days, before their relief arrived) they did not once set foot on level ground, and walking on slopes became so natural that they were surprised to find flat earth when they finally came down. The pass itself, its saddle funneling all the winds as it did, was far too turbulent to pitch their sheltertents in, or stay in, except for the one man who was supposed to stay on post at the guns. But after exploration they found another comparatively level slope around the corner of rock beside the saddle, and here they pitched their two puptents, rigged up a rock-lined firepit, and made their camp. Here they cooked, heated water with which to shave, washed themselves when they felt like it which was seldom, and lived. They slept always on a slant. But they had been smart enough in the beginning to pitch the little sheltertents so that they opened down the slope with the closed ends up, in order to