Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  She fell onto her knees, weeping and laughing. “Thank the Lord,” she said. “You’ve come at last.”

  Others were climbing out of the cabins now, my baby brothers, and Phillipine, the whole Breen clan. Patrick’s prayers had been answered, it seemed, and Virginia’s too. In our eyes these men were saints. Maybe they were the angels I’d been hearing in the dark, their voices floating toward me from beyond the mountains to the west. Maybe one of them was papa. I scanned their frosted eyes and craggy faces. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there. I said, “Where’s papa?” my voice so tiny in the hubbub of sobs and hallelujahs mama didn’t hear me.

  Once they slung down their loads, it didn’t matter who they were or how they got there. They had packed in biscuits and jerked beef. We groveled and wept and gobbled up the morsels passed around to us, and begged for more, but they knew better than we did what can happen when you try to fill a shrunken belly.

  The leader was a fellow named Glover. He had come across the plains and had camped with our party a time or two along the Platte. Mama remembered him. That night he slept with us, while the other men divided up among the cabins. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were almost as bad off as we were. Our pitiful shelters were the first warm spots they’d seen in three weeks of being wet and cold and worn down with the climbing.

  Since that time I’ve heard it said that these men in the rescue party did it for the money. It’s true that they were earning wages they couldn’t have made any other way. This was two years before the Gold Rush. You could buy a pound of butchered beef for two cents and a whole chicken for fifty cents. Five dollars a day was a huge amount. But something else was driving them. It wasn’t family. None of them had relatives to rescue. Maybe it was some sense of kinship for the big trek we would later call the Great Migration. They had all come across to California in the past six months. I happen to think it was more than that. From time to time in this life people actually do courageous things. In my view now, looking back, it was nothing but valiant, and I cannot fault any of them for what happened next.

  Those seven men needed a lot more rest. They also knew the sooner we started out, the better. They’d come through two bad storms to reach us. Now the skies were clear. The big question was, Who to take? Counting our camp and Donner’s camp there were over fifty still alive. Mr. Glover made promises. Rescue teams would be going back and forth, he said, until everyone was on the other side. Some folks were too weak to walk, or too sick. Uncle George Donner, for instance. The hand he cut trying to plane a new axle had festered and the infection had spread all through him. He couldn’t travel, and his wife, Tamsen, she wouldn’t leave without him. They sent two of their little girls and two of Jacob Donner’s children. Lewis Keseberg was bedridden, but Phillipine was still healthy and not quite so loyal. She could hike out, she said, with their little girl, Ada. The Breens sent their two oldest boys, while the rest of the family stayed put a while longer, since they had some meat in reserve. As for us, mama had nothing left, not even a scrap of hide, so we all ended up among the two dozen who set out from the lake camp behind the rescue team.

  Just before we left, Keseberg emerged from the hole leading down to his buried lean-to. No one had seen him for weeks. With his son dead and his wife and daughter leaving, he didn’t want to live alone. He was hobbling down to widow Murphy’s. He had cut a forked branch into a homemade crutch. His tangled beard was so greasy it looked gray instead of blond. The weeks of pain had lined his face. The way his tortured eyes blinked and squinted against the light, he was like a convict released from a dungeon. He didn’t look at us. He just hobbled across the snow, wincing with each tiny step. I have to confess, I hoped then I would never see him again. What a relief it was to leave that man behind, to leave those dreadful cabins behind at last, the lice, the stink, the smoky darkness. I felt that I too had been imprisoned and was finally set free.

  Up ahead, someone led the way in a pair of snowshoes. The rest of us were supposed to follow along, stepping where he stepped. If you had short legs like Tommy and me, it wasn’t easy. We had to climb in and out of each deep step. Tommy was four, going on five. In the whole party he was the youngest one walking, and the smallest. I called back to him a few times, “C’mon, Tommy. Papa’s gonna be here pretty soon.” Then my breath gave out. I couldn’t do both, call to him and climb in and out of those holes everyone ahead of us made deeper and mushier.

  Mama urged us on, lifting us from time to time, but we fell farther behind with each step. The party had hiked about two miles, stretched out along the side of Truckee Lake, with me and Tommy right at the end, when Mr. Glover came back and told mama we were slowing everyone else down. If we couldn’t make better time we’d have to go back to the cabins.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Reed. I got to think about the welfare of the whole party and make it across while we got the weather on our side.”

  Mama said if we went back she’d go with us. The whole family would go back together and wait for another rescue team. Mr. Glover, he got real stern, said he couldn’t let her do that. “Every person able to walk has to walk out of here. You go back with your children, you’ll only eat the others’ food. Everyone that goes helps them that stays behind.”

  Virginia and James Junior had started to cry. Mama begged Mr. Glover not to leave us. She said it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. He said he could tell by looking at us we were too weak to walk and we were too much to carry. Two of his men were already carrying infants, and there was still the summit trail to climb.

  Mama couldn’t stand what he was telling her to do. She looked around at the four of us, and what I saw then was the most terrible look I’ve ever seen on any face before or since. It was the wild, stark, near-madness that comes into the eyes when you have eaten almost nothing for weeks and your flesh wastes away and leaves the bones and sockets showing. And it was something else. It was the mother’s bottomless terror. She had already climbed the summit trail. She knew what awaited us up there. She now had to face the fact that Tommy and I would both perish if we kept on going the way we’d been going, spindly as we were, and down to nothing, with no meat on our bones. She also knew returning to the cabins was no better, maybe even worse.

  When Mr. Glover saw she could not speak, he said he would come back for us. Mama turned her anguished and accusing eyes on him. She made him promise that he himself would do this, and he said he would. When they got to Bear Valley, he told her, if no other rescue team had started in, he would turn right around and come back for the two of us.

  Mama dropped to her knees in the snow and pulled Tommy close and told him to stay right with me, and she would be seeing us again in a few days. Poor Tommy was so numb and cold and hungry you couldn’t tell if he had any idea what was being asked of him.

  She hugged me close and looked into my eyes. “Never forget that I love you, Patty. And papa loves you too.”

  I still do not know what possessed me to say what I said just then. Something in me had shifted. I know enough now to give words to what it was. The little girl inside me went away, as surely as if a path had opened up through the trees. She just stepped out of my body and walked down that path and into the Sierra Nevada forest, never to return. I had already seen more than you ought to see by the time you are that age. I had seen my father stab another man in the chest and watched that man bleed to death. I had heard wounded animals screaming for water in the desert night, and heard the widow Murphy crying out from her cabin like a lone wolf howling in the woods. I had watched people starving and watched my own brothers shrivel up till there was nearly nothing left and watched my mother walk away from me, out across the snow and disappear. As she prepared to do this yet again I was able for the first time to imagine my own death and to imagine that I would not see her anymore. At moments like this you are supposed to cry. I wasn’t able to cry. She was the one who cried. I was the one who stood there giving motherly advice. I know now my words cut through her as surely as if a sword o
f ice had dropped off one of the limbs above us and speared her heart. It makes me weep to think of it. Yes, seventy-five years later my own tears come dripping down to match those she wept that day.

  “Well, mother,” I said, “if you never see me again, you do the best you can.”

  Is that too hard-hearted for an eight-year-old? Somehow I was prepared for my death and for hers too. I told as much to Mr. Glover after we turned and started back. It disturbed him, I know. In my eyes then he seemed to be an executioner. Later I would see that he was a very decent man, though rough and rugged in his looks, red-eyed from the cold and from his monumental efforts.

  “Don’t you talk like that,” he said to me. “I give your mama my word, and I mean to keep it.”

  He and his partner carried us, retracing the path of steps punched into the snow along the shore. Then we were standing again by the wide hole I thought we’d forever left behind. Mr. Glover called for someone to come up. I heard Patrick’s piping voice, complaining about the steps. His legs were so stiff and weak it took him a while.

  Patrick was still a puzzle to me. I could not then comprehend why he did the things he did. After he turned Milt Elliott away a second time I had come to hate him. Milt was like a brother and a father too, with papa gone. When he and mama and Virginia had tried to hike out in January, and Virginia had to be carried down from the summit, that trip was what broke Milt’s health. When the rest of us had to move in with the Breens and Patrick turned Milt away, he went over to Alder Creek to stay with the Donners. But things got so bad he came back to the lake camp. He’d lost all his weight by that time and could hardly stand up. He begged Patrick to let him in. mama begged too. Patrick said he didn’t want his kids to have to watch someone die right there in his cabin. mama had to drag Milt down to Murphy’s and that’s where he passed away, lying on the dirt floor with his head on a piece of kindling and mama feeding him snow water and melted rawhide.

  I knew Patrick would not be glad to see me and Tommy coming back. When Mr. Glover told him what had happened, he just shook his John-the-Baptist head.

  “Can’t do it.”

  “These children need shelter,” Mr. Glover said.

  Patrick’s face got pinched and angry. “We don’t have room.”

  “It’d just be a few days.”

  “I got my own.”

  “You have more room now than you had yesterday, with Mrs. Reed gone, and your two boys …”

  “I still got five mouths to feed. Plus the missus and me. That’s seven to care for, Mr. Glover.”

  “There’s no place else for these two to go.”

  “Widda Murphy has more room than anybody,” Patrick said.

  His wife had come up the ice steps. She was standing next to Patrick now, and her voice cut through the air.

  “You know these children can’t go down with widda Murphy!”

  She spoke up so fast it took him by surprise. She was a tough one, Peggy Breen. She had a way of setting her face that there was no arguing with. I still remember how they looked at each other then, her eyes holding his, and Patrick’s jaws working.

  Mr. Glover said, “We mean to leave some food behind.”

  “How much?” said Patrick.

  “Same as for everyone else. Seven days’ rations. Ounce of beef a day, a spoonful of flour.”

  “For both these young’uns? Seven ounces?”

  “It’s what we can spare.”

  With a disgusted shake of his head Patrick said, “God’s will be done.”

  He turned and headed down the ice stairs. Peggy nodded to us to follow him. Mr. Glover squatted next to me and said, “I promised your mama, and I promise you, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Or somebody will.”

  Then he and his partner were gone, trudging off the way they’d come. I dreaded going back down those stairs. I was entering a tomb. My heart was empty. My body was like an empty bottle sitting on a dark shelf in an empty cupboard. A cold sun was shining. While we stood there the wind came up, rushing through the pines with a sound like surf, a gushing roar like water on the rise, as if an ocean of ice water had begun to pour across the world.

  * * *

  IT WAS LIKE the first time mama left, but harder because Tommy didn’t move much. Sometimes I had to hold a mirror to his lips to make sure he was breathing. Sometimes his eyes would open, and he would almost seem to speak. I would warm our slivers of meat and fry up some flour, then chew Tommy’s portion to soften it and try to make him eat.

  I don’t know who was worse off then—him, because he had no idea of what was going on around us, or me, because I did. I remember hearing Patrick and Peggy say things I didn’t understand. Years later I came to see that they already knew what was happening at the other cabin, where someone had gone out and uncovered Milt’s body, buried in the snow, and started cutting away parts of him for food. Whether it was the widow started it, or Keseberg, no one would ever be able to say for sure.

  My heart went out to widow Murphy, and still does. She was called “widow” because her husband had died on her. The fact is, she wasn’t much older than mama, not yet forty. You have to give her credit for trying something most single women wouldn’t have dared in that day and age. She had started west on her own, with seven children. Two of her daughters had married young and had brought their children. For a while it had been quite a clan, three wagonloads. William Foster was her son-in-law. So was William Pike, the fellow Foster shot in the back. She’d lost a boy at the lake camp. Five more of her children had already hiked out, leaving her with one small son, a boy about my age. Little by little she’d been losing her eyesight and losing her mind. By the time Keseberg moved in, she’d probably forgotten who he was. In her sad hunger she’d probably forgotten who Milt was.

  I thank the Lord I had lost the will to walk more than fifty feet at a time. After Mr. Glover left I never wandered far enough in her direction to see any sign of what was going on—though I think I must have known. Deep down I must have. I must have chosen not to understand the words Patrick and Peggy whispered on the other side of the blanket.

  As I think back upon those weeks it seems as if the mountains themselves had revealed an appetite, as if somewhere among the snowy crevices and windblown granite slopes there were ancient and empty places that had to be filled, laying claim to what little energy and life force remained for us. It had a pull, and it had a voice, and you couldn’t resist it. When the angels came to visit I could not tell if they were heavenly angels or mountain angels, and it didn’t make much difference which, their music was so sweet. They would visit me at all times of the day and night, and before long I stopped hearing much of anything but their voices. They would come from far away like the flute notes of distant birds approaching, single notes I would hear before I saw the wings. Then they’d be all around, white-winged angels singing in a forest filled with silver light. Sometimes they wouldn’t sing. They would float and beckon, and start to drift away, and I would call out, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” And back they’d come, as if they’d just been teasing me, flirting and teasing.

  Late one afternoon, outside the cabin, I saw an angel walking toward me through the snow. The sun was low and sending dappled rays through the trees. A silver light rose off the snow. I watched and waited for the wings to lift and listened for the sweet voice to sing. This time there was no song, and I couldn’t see the wings. The whiteness was a furry cloak. This was another kind of angel. Maybe it was an Indian angel. The face was brown. The hair was black. The cloak of white and gray was made of skins, and in his arms he carried some kind of bundle, like a gift. I knew then it was Salvador. Every day I had been wearing his abalone pendant to bring us luck, and here he was come back at last. When I called his name he stopped at the edge of the trees.

  “Cómo está?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  I started to run toward him but a hand stopped me, a hand gripping my shoulder. It was Patrick.

  “Who are you?” he call
ed out. “What do you want?”

  The visitor held forth his bundle, then set it down in the snow and moved back into the trees. He didn’t speak or make a sound. When he was gone Patrick went over there and found half a dozen roots shaped like onions. “Never knew there was an Injun within a hundred miles.”

  “It’s Salvador,” I said.

  “Salvador,” said Patrick with a snort. “What on earth would bring him clear back up here?”

  I wanted to follow him, but the empty forest frightened me. I’d have to wait until he reappeared. I don’t know how long I waited. The days and nights all ran together. On one of those days I turned nine, though it wasn’t on my mind. All I thought about was food. We ate up the rations Mr. Glover left behind, then there was nothing. I sometimes chewed on bits of bark and pine twigs, hoping they might ward off the hunger pangs, which they never did. I was afraid to look at Tommy now. His face was like a skull. I know it snowed again and cleared up again. I noticed the weather less and less. Most of the time I sat by Tommy.

  One day I felt compelled to get outside. Something was calling me up into the light, whether angels with wings or the white-robed visitor again, I did not know. Something was out there. I had to know what it was.

  It took a lot of effort, climbing the snow stairs. I listened for the flute notes, the tender voices coming from the lake. I remember the sky was very blue when I stepped out onto the snow. The air was quiet. The figure coming toward me through the trees this time was dark and large. No wings. No furry robes. The arms were pumping, as if punching at the air, like someone running but in slow motion, fighting through the snow. And then a call came toward me.

  “Patty!”

  I knew this voice. It wasn’t Salvador. It wasn’t Mr. Glover. My heart stopped. I had been seeing so many things, hearing so many things, I closed my eyes. Again the voice called, “Patty?” like a question.

  He was closer, his huge pack thrown down behind him, and his hat thrown down. I could see his face, his beard, as he lunged toward me, calling, “Patty! Patty! Is it you?”