Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

  As the others weakened on their steady diet of wild meat, Miller’s strength and endurance increased. After a full day of hunting, he still dressed his own kill and prepared the evening meal, taking over most of the duties that Charley Hoge seemed no longer capable of performing. And sometimes, late, on clear nights, he went into the woods with an ax, and the men who stayed by the warmth of the campfire could hear the sharp hard ring of cold metal biting into cold pine.

  He spoke infrequently to the others; but his silence was not of that intentness and desperation that Andrews had seen during the hunt and slaughter of the buffalo. In the evenings, hunched before the fire that reflected upon the shelter behind them and returned the warmth to their backs, Miller stared into the yellow flames whose light flickered over his dark, composed features; upon his flat lips there was habitually a smile that might have been of contentment. But the pleasure he took was not in the company, even silent, of the other men; he looked at the fire and beyond it into the darkness that was here and there lightened by the pale glow of moon or stars upon the drifted snow. And in the mornings before he set out for his hunting, as he fixed breakfast for the men and himself, he performed his tasks with neither pleasure nor annoyance but as if they were only a necessary prelude for his leaving. When he left the camp his movements seemed to flow into the landscape; and on his snowshoes of young pine and buffalo thongs, he glided without effort and merged into the dark forest upon the snow.

  Andrews watched the men around him, and waited. Sometimes at night, crowded with the others in the close warm shelter of buffalo hide, he heard the wind, that often suddenly sprang up, whistle and moan around the corners of the shelter; at such moments the heavy breathing and snoring of his companions, the touch of their bodies against his own, and their body stench gathered in the closeness of the shelter seemed almost unreal. At such times he felt a part of himself go outward into the dark, among the wind and the snow and the featureless sky where he was whirled blindly through the world. Sometimes when he was near sleep he thought of Francine, as he had thought of her when he had been alone beneath the great storm; but he thought of her more precisely now; he could almost bring her image before his closed eyes. Gradually he let the remembrance of that last night with her come to him; and at last he came to think of it without shame or embarrassment. He saw himself pushing away from him her warm white flesh, and he wondered at what he had done, as if wondering at the actions of a stranger.

  He came to accept the silence he lived in, and tried to find a meaning in it. One by one he viewed the men who shared that silence with him. He saw Charley Hoge sipping his hot thin mixture of coffee and watered whisky, warding off the bitter edge of cold that pressed against him at all times, even as he hunched over a blazing fire, and saw his blurred, rheumy eyes fixed upon the ruined pages of his Bible, as if desperately to keep those eyes from looking beyond into the white waste of snow that diminished him. He saw Fred Schneider withdraw into himself, away from his fellows, as if his lone sullen presence were the only defense he had against the great cold whiteness all around. Schneider tramped brutally through the snow, throwing as wide and rough a swath as his feet could make; through the thin slits in the narrow buffaloskin that he wore almost constantly tied over his eyes, he looked at the snow, Andrews thought, as if it were something alive, as if it were something against which he was waiting to spring, biding his time. He had taken to wearing again the small pistol that Andrews had first noticed back at Butcher’s Crossing; sometimes when he muttered and mumbled to himself, his hand would creep up to his waistband, and gently caress the stock of the pistol. As for Miller—Andrews always paused when he thought of the shape that he wished Miller to take. He saw Miller rough and dark and shaggy against the whiteness of the snow; like a distant fir tree, he was distinct from the landscape, and yet an inevitable part of it. In the mornings he watched Miller go into the deep forest; and he always had the feeling that Miller did not so much go out of his sight as merge and become so intrinsic to the landscape that he could no longer be seen.

  He was unable to view himself. Again, as if he were a stranger, he thought of himself as he had been a few months before at Butcher’s Crossing, looking westward from the river at the land he was now in. What had he thought then? What had he been? How had he felt? He thought of himself now as a vague shape that did nothing, that had no identity. Once, on a bright cloudless day that threw blindingly dark shadows over himself and Charley Hoge and Schneider as they sat around the pale campfire, he had a restless urge, a necessity to get away from the two silent hulks on either side of him. Without a word to either, he strapped his seldom-used snowshoes to his feet and trudged away from the camp into the valley. For a long time he walked, his eyes upon his feet that shuffled sibilantly through the crusted snow. Though his feet were cold to numbness above the snow, the back of his neck burned beneath the unshadowed sun. When his legs began to ache from the constant awkward shuffling forward, he stopped and raised his head. All around him was whiteness which glittered with needlelike points of fire. He gasped at the immensity of what he saw. He raised his eyes a little more, and saw in the distance the wavering dark points of pine trees that lifted up the mountainside toward the pure blue sky; but as he looked at the dark-and-bright rim of the mountain that cut into the blue of the sky, the whole mountainside shimmered and the edge of the horizon blurred; and suddenly all was whiteness—above, below, all around him—and he took an awkward backward step as a sharp burning pain started in his eyes. He blinked and cupped his hands over his eyes; but even upon his closed lids he saw only whiteness. A small inarticulate cry came from his lips; he felt that he had no weight in the whiteness, and for a moment he did not know whether he remained upright or whether he had gone down into the snow. He moved his hands upon air, and then bent his knees and moved his hands downward. They touched the crusted softness of the snow. He dug his fingers into the snow, gathering small handfuls, and thrust his hands against his eyes. It was not until then that he realized that he had come away from the camp without his snow-blinders, and that the sun, reflected against the unbroken snow, had seared his eyes so that he could not see. For a long while he knelt in the snow, massaging his closed lids with the snow he scraped under his fingers. Finally, through barely-spread fingers that he kept over his eyes, he was able to make out what he thought was the dark mass of tree and rock that marked the campsite. With his eyes closed, he trudged toward it; in his blindness, he sometimes lost his balance and tumbled into the snow; when he did so, he risked quick glimpses through his fingers so that he could correct the direction in which he traveled. When he finally arrived at the camp, his eyes were so burned that he could see nothing, not even in brief glimpses. Schneider came out to meet him and guided him into the shelter, where he lay in darkness for the better part of three days, while his eyes healed. Thereafter, he did not look upon the snow again without his rawhide blinders to protect him; and he did not go again into the great white valley.

  Week by week, and at last month by month, the men endured the changing weather. Some days were hot and bright and summery, so still that no breeze dislodged a flake of snow hanging on the tip of a pine bough; some days a cold gray wind whistled through the valley, funneled by the long reach of mountain on either side. Snow fell, and on quiet days it made the air a solid mass that moved gently downward from a gray-white sky; and sometimes it was driven hard by various winds, which piled it in thick banks about their shelter, so that from the outside it appeared that they lived in a hollowed cave of snow. The nights were desperately, bitterly cold; no matter how closely they put their bodies together, and no matter how heavily they weighted themselves down with buffalo hides, they slept in a tense discomfort. Day slipped into indistinguishable day, and week into week; Andrews had no sensation of passing time, nothing against which to measure the coming thaw of spring. Every now and then he looked at the notches in a stripped pine branch that Schneider had made to keep track of the days; dully, mechanically, he counte
d them, but the number had no meaning for him. He was made aware of the passing of the months by the fact that at regular intervals Schneider came up to him and asked him for his month’s pay. At such times, he solemnly counted from his money belt the money Schneider demanded, wondering vaguely where he kept it after he got it. But even this gave him no consciousness of passing time; it was a duty he performed when Schneider asked him; it had nothing to do with the time that did not pass, but which held him unmoving where he was.

  VIII

  Late in March and early in April, the weather settled; and day by day, with an agonizing slowness, Andrews watched the snow melt in the valley. It melted first where it had drifted most thinly, so that the once level valley became a patchwork of bleached grass and humped banks of dirtying snow. The days became weeks; and from the moisture that seeped into the earth from the melting snow, and from the steadying heat of the season, new growth poked up among the matted winter grass. A light film of green overlaid the grayish yellow of last year’s growth.

  As the snow melted and seeped into the quickening soil, game became more plentiful; deer wandered into the valley and cropped the fresh young blades of grass, and grew so bold that often they grazed within a few hundred yards of the camp; at a sound they would raise their heads, and their small conical ears would pitch upward as their bodies lowered and tensed, ready for flight; then, if the sound were not repeated, they would resume their grazing, their tawny necks bent in a delicate curve toward the earth. Mountain quail whistled among the treetops above them and lighted beside the deer, and fed with them, their mottled gray-and-white-and-buff bodies blending into the earth upon which they moved. With game so close and available, Miller no longer wandered in the forest; almost contemptuously, cradling Andrews’s small repeater in the crook of his elbow, he walked a few steps away from the camp, and throwing the rifle butt casually to his shoulder brought down as much game as they needed. The men were replete with venison, quail, and elk; what dressed game they could not eat spoiled in the growing warmth. Every day, Schneider trudged through the melting snow toward the pass to inspect the snow mass slowly melting between them and the outside world. Miller looked at the sun and calculated with his somber glances the widening patches of bare earth that were beginning to eat toward the mountainside, and did not speak. Charley Hoge kept to his worn Bible; but every now and then, as if with surprise, he lifted his head and gazed upon the changing land. They gave less care to the fire they had attended all winter long; several times they let it go out, and had to start it again with the tinderbox that Miller carried in his shirt pocket.

  Even though the valley was almost cleared, the snow still lay in heavy drifts where the flat land rose upward into tree and mountain. Miller let out to graze the horse they had kept corralled all winter; gaunt from its meager supply of grain and what little forage it had been able to find, the horse cropped the new grass to the bare earth around the area that fronted their campsite. When it had regained some of its lost strength, Miller saddled it and rode away from the camp into the valley, and returned after several hours with the two horses that had run loose during the winter. After their long freedom, they were nearly wild; when Miller and Schneider tried to hobble them, so that they would not stray from the camp, they reared and turned their heads, manes flying and eyes rolling upward so that the whites were visible. After a few days of grazing on the young grass their coats began to take on a faint shine and their wildness decreased. At last the men were able to saddle them; the cinches they passed under their bellies could not be tightened, so gaunt had they become during their lean winter.

  “A few more days of bad weather,” Miller said bleakly, “and we wouldn’t have had any horses. We’d of had to walk back to Butcher’s Crossing.”

  The horses saddled and tamed, Miller, Andrews, and Schneider rode into the valley. They paused at the wagon, which had endured on the open plain the fury of the winter; a few of the floor boards had warped and the metal fittings showed thin layers of rust.

  “It’ll be all right,” Miller said. “Needs a little grease here and there, but she’ll do the job we need her to do.” He leaned from his horse and touched with his forefinger the heavy metal band that encircled the wagon wheel; he looked at the bright rust on his fingertip and wiped his finger on his dirt-stiffened trousers.

  From where the wagon rested, the men rode off in search of the oxen that had been loosed during the storm.

  They found them all alive. Not so gaunt and bony as the horses had been, they were much wilder. When the men approached them, they broke into motion and pounded away in clumsy fright. The three men spent four days rounding up the eight oxen and leading them back to the camp, where they were hobbled and set to graze. As their bellies filled on the rapidly growing grass, they too lost some of their wildness; and before the week was out, the men were able to yoke them to the wagon and work them for a few hours aimlessly about the valley, among the wasted corpses of the buffalo killed in the fall. In the growing warmth, these corpses began to give off a heavy stench, and around them the grass grew thick and green.

  As the weather warmed, the chill that had been in his bones all winter began to leave Andrews. His muscles loosened as he worked with the stock; his sight sharpened upon the greening earth; and his hearing, accustomed winter-long to noises absorbed in heavy layers of snow, began to take in the myriad sounds of the valley—the rustling of breezes through stiff pine boughs, the slither of his feet through the growing grass, the creak of the leather as his saddle moved on his horse, and the sound of the men’s voices carrying across distances and diminishing into space.

  As the stock fattened and became once again used to working under human hands, Schneider spent more and more time moving between the camp and the snow-packed pass that would let them out of the high valley and down the mountain into the flat country. On some days he returned, excited and eager, going up to each of them and speaking in a rapid, hoarsely whispering voice.

  “It’s going fast,” he would say. “Underneath the rind, it’s all hollow and mushy. Just a few days, now, and we can get through.”

  At other times he came back glumly.

  “The god damned crust keeps the cold in. If we could just have a warm night or two, it might loosen up.”

  And Miller would look at him with a cool, not unfriendly amusement, and say nothing.

  One day Schneider rode back from an inspection of the snow pack with more excitement than was usual.

  “We can get through, men!” he said, his words running upon each other. “I went clean through, to the other side of the pack.”

  “On horseback?” Miller asked, not rising from the buffalo skin on which he lay.

  “On foot,” Schneider said. “Not more than forty or fifty yards of deep snow, and it’s clean as a whistle from there on.”

  “How deep?” Miller asked.

  “Not deep,” Schneider said. “And it’s soft as meal mush.”

  “How deep?” Miller asked.

  Schneider raised his hand, palm downward, a few inches over his head. “Just a mite over a body’s head. We could go through it easy.”

  “And you walked through it, you say?”

  “Easy,” Schneider said. “Clean to the other side.”

  “You god damned fool,” Miller said quietly. “Did you stop to think what would happen if that wet snow caved in on you?”

  “Not Fred Schneider,” he said, and pounded himself on the chest with a closed fist. “Fred Schneider knows how to take care of his self. He takes no chances.”

  Miller grinned. “Fred, you’re so hot for some soft living and easy tail, you’d burn your ass through hell if it would get you to it quick.”

  Schneider waved his fist impatiently. “Never mind about that. Ain’t we going to get loaded?”

  Miller stretched himself more comfortably on the buffalo hide. “No hurry,” he said lazily. “If it’s as deep as you say it is—and I know it ain’t any less—we still got a few days.�
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  “But we can get through now!“ Schneider said.

  “Sure,” Miller said. “And take a chance on a cave-in. Get those oxen buried under a couple of ton of wet snow, not to say anything about ourselves, and then where would we be?”

  “Ain’t you even going to look?” Schneider wailed.

  “No need to,” said Miller. “Like I said, if it’s anywhere near as deep as you say, we still got a few days. We’ll just wait for a while.”

  So they waited. Charley Hoge, coming slowly out of his long dream during the winter, worked the oxen with the wagon for an hour or so every day, until they pulled, without a load at least, as easily as they had the previous fall. Under Charley Hoge’s direction, Andrews smoked quantities of foot-long trout and great strips of venison to sustain them on their journey down the mountain and across the plain. Miller took to wandering again upon the mountainside, which was still drifted heavily in softening snow, with two rifles—his own Sharps and Andrews’s varmint rifle—cradled in the crook of his arm. Frequently the men who remained at camp heard the booming of the Sharps or the smart crack of the small rifle; sometimes Miller brought his kill back to camp with him; more often he let it lie where it had dropped. At camp, his eyes constantly roved over the long valley and about the rising contours of surrounding mountainside; when he had to look away for one reason or another, he seemed to do so with reluctance.