Transportation Of Last Resort

(CBS)  The four-legged rescue workers of Pakistan's Seventy-Second Animal Transport unit can go where nothing else can — up.

Up past the graves of the tens of thousands who died. Up into the wild high country where survivors cling to the mountainsides as they cling to life.

Up through five, seven, even 9,000 feet — and where the trail ends — they make one.

CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports the only way up that high is by mule train. Fresh rock slides overnight, still coming down off these hills from the earthquake. They've got to clear a path every time they come up here.

---

Click here to read Mark Phillips' reporter's notebook on his experience traveling with the mule train.

---

For the mountain people, where the terrain is too steep for helicopters to land, the mule train is their lifeline. In this tiny hamlet where the quake killed 60, winter now threatens the rest.

The destination is this village, called Sat Bani, or what is left of it. The mule train has brought in tents and food. It's fine for now, but in a few weeks there will be high snow and the government says that these people will be much better off down in the valleys, where it can care for them.

Even President Pervez Musharraf has pleaded with them.

"The people in the mountains need to come down to live in tents in the plains," he says.

Musharraf says people need to be temporarily located where help is.

"Not permanently, but for the winter," he says.

But it's advice many are ignoring. The Nassim family of 10 huddles under the lean-to they've built and says they'll stay no matter what. They'd rather take their chances there, they say, than go down to the towns.

And they may be right. The nearest center, Balakot, has been completely flattened and can't cope with its own survivors — let alone with the masses who've thronged down from the hills.

The quake left more than three million people homeless, but especially for those scattered in the mountains, there's now a race against time. Winter will stop even the mule train.

Already the nights are cold. The earthquake was one disaster — winter may be the next.