by Blake Crouch
Oatha climbed down from the horse, and Dan screamed at the animal, “Go on! Get!”
“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said. “We need ‘em.”
“For what?”
“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck out—”
“I ain’t eatin my horse.”
“Circumstances like this ain’t the time to make declarations a what you will and won’t
do.”
It was snowing again by nightfall, and it didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.
Oatha could tell by the brightness of the tarp that the sun was out.
McClurg snored.
Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said, “He left.”
“Who?”
“Who ain’t here?”
Oatha saw where the wall of snow had been broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown and sagging.
“Where are the horses?” Oatha asked.
“Dan took one. The other’n keeled.”
Oatha’s head was hurting again—dehydration instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger. He’d eaten the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.
“We botched it,” Nathan said. “Should’ve walked out after the first storm. Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve froze, but we’d of had a chance.”
“You don’t think we got one now?”
They butchered the calico that had just died, cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them over a low fire. The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of what little fat there was burning off gave Oatha a charge of energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.
The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it and slept for the rest of the day.
“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later as they roasted the last of McClurg’s horse. “God’s been waitin for this, and I know he’s enjoyin ever minute of it. You just had the misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my ass.”
“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or Silverton,” McClurg said.
“I hope he’s froze. Don’t mention his name again.”
“He might come back and save us.”
“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings toward the man.”
“So tell me,” Oatha said, “you boys weren’t going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”
Nathan glanced at McClurg, let slip a little smirk. “Let me put it this way. This horrible weather saved your life.”
“I don’t get your meaning.”
“Sure you do. You was gonna try and take your leave of us your first chance. If I’m wrong, you can have my portion a Barney the horse.”
“You was gonna kill me?”
“Dan would of done the honors, him bein our resident cutthroat.”
Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over the horse’s leg.
“Why?” Oatha asked.
“For whatever money you had. For your horse. Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take you apart.”
Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever been in his life.
“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.
“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a luck, we’re in it together now.” Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife. “Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”
Two days hence, their eleventh in the shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen straight through. He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their reentry into civilization.
Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.
Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”
“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.
“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”
The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.
He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.
At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.
The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill. Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.
In the dusky silence, he thought about what Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of some deep virus in the fabric of his character.
Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.
Damn if he hadn’t been right about something.
Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long dead on a Virginia hillside.
After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning bright, the snow soft. Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the agony behind his eyes.
There passed periods of sleep, stretches of consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked up, the sky stood empty.
The next day, no one left the shelter, the men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of color.
“We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.
Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in wonderment.
“Ya’ll hear that?”
“What?” Nathan said.
“Dan’s come back.”
Oatha cocked his head. “I don’t hear nothing.”
“He’s callin out for me.”
“You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said. “Ain’t a soul out here but us. Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze. Saw him two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it, but there you go.”
“That’s sad,” Marion said.
“No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of the situation. Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”
“Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha asked.
“Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever done.”
Oatha lay there considering it, decided Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the strength to stand, much less walk the rem
aining ten or however many miles it was into Abandon. And for the first time, lying there with the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t seem so bad.
Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of his mind.
When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through the opaque membrane of the canvas.
“I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this unending misery.”
McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin. His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.
“You awake, Marion?” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Ask you something…you believe in God?”
“Don’t reckon. You?”
“Sometimes.”
“How you figure you’ll come out if in fact he’s runnin this show?”
“Don’t know. Ain’t been particularly good or bad. Just sort a plodded my way along. I was friends with a Navajo when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Man named Sik’is. He was always talking about walking on the good, red road.”
“Ain’t heard of it. Where’s it at?”
“Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you know? Way a living. Balance and harmony—”
“This some spiritual bullshit?”
“It’s like walking the path where you’re the best version of yourself. I don’t know. Always sounded nice to me. Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out. Start living right, you know?”
“Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of a injun. You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”
“Me and my brothers fought against the Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”
“I kilt five, two in fair fights. Three was plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles City. Young man. We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit kickin.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”
“You ashamed of it?”
Marion seemed to reflect on the question, then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon. But it’s a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the one you’re starin at. Figure it was that young man’s time, and if it hadn’t been me, it’d a been—”
A shotgun blast exploded in the forest, trailed by a shout of unabashed joy.
Marion struggled up off the ground. “Son of a bitch hit somethin.”
Oatha felt the excitement bloom in his gut, Marion already on his feet, lumbering out of the shelter.
Nathan hollering, “Boys, come look at this! Shot us a elk!”
It required immense effort for Oatha to sit up, and he had to employ a spruce branch to leverage himself out of the dirt onto his feet.
Marion yelling, “I could kiss you, Nathan, tongue and all!”
Oatha limped out of the shelter as fast as he could manage into sunlight that passed blindingly sharp through the dead trees, Marion twenty yards away, moving with considerable speed though the spruce, Oatha following as fast as he could, shoots of pain riding up his legs, the muscle atrophied, already wearing away.
There was Nathan in the distance, standing with the shotgun beside a scrawny aspen, its bark chewed up, near cut in two by buckshot, Oatha scanning the woods for the fallen elk as Nathan raised his shotgun.
Marion’s head disappeared in a red mist and the rest of his body collided into a tree and pitched back as Oatha ducked behind a spruce, the trunk too small to shield him from a spray of buckshot, figuring if it came, he’d catch a pellet or two at the least.
“The hell you doin, Nathan?”
“Livin, brother. Livin.”
“You mean to kill me, too?”
“I mean for us to eat this fat son of a bitch, get back to civilization.”
Oatha peered through the branches, saw that Nathan was still standing above Marion’s headless frame, the breech of the shotgun broken over his forearm.
“Why you reloadin then?” Oatha shouted. He didn’t own a gun anymore, hadn’t in three decades, but Marion’s was sitting next to the snowbank inside the shelter—a Navy—and he had to bet it was loaded.
“‘Cause I don’t know if you the type a man to go along with somethin like this.”
Nathan was fishing in the pocket of his oilskin slicker, pulled out a pair of shells, Oatha thinking if there was ever a time to make a break for it, this was it.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nathan said. “I kilt him out a pure necessity. Was you the fat fuck, I’d a cut your throat long ago.”
“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat the flesh of another man.”
“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.
Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.
He heard the report before he registered the blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through him.
By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight distraction.
He fell through under the canvas as the crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.
The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down even as his hands trembled.
Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.
Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse vibrating his ear drums.
“They’s still time,” Nathan said. He was close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable to pinpoint his exact location.
“For what?” Oatha asked.
“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little Marion. You wanna live, don’t you?”
“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”
“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you dead.”
“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some the other way entire.”
“Guess we know which way you went, tramping through country like this without so much as a revolver.”
Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him, a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know about any of it?”
“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard
‘till now in your voice.”
Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.
“What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”
“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”
Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into a snowbank.
Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”
“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.
The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be called unpleasant. His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached Abandon.
“I’ve smelt this before,” he said. “Or somethin like it.”
“You’ve et man?”
“No, in a San Francisco nosebag.” He thought on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal. Smells like veal.”
“Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about to—”
“If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe. But I think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical conversation about what we’re about to do.”
They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.
Nathan flipped the ribcage. “I believe this is ready.”
The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.
Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when the door opened.
“You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,” she called out. “Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”
The man paused in the doorway, as if to appraise the vacant saloon.
“Not for nothin, but it’s twenty degrees out there, and the fire’s low.” The barkeep motioned to the potbellied stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at this closing hour.