by Ivan Doig
We passed a dozen empty boxcars, huge husks without their cargo, and came to a final one with a stubbly barricade of hay behind its slatted side. The agent broke ice from its door with a black smith hammer, then used a pinch bar to pry the grudging door open. “All yours,” he stated, and hustled back inside the warmth of the depot.
The railroad car was stacked full of large bales like shaggy crates. Rob thrust a mitten under his armpit, pulled out his hand and thrust it into a bale. The handful he pulled out was brown crackly swamp-grass, which only in a winter of this sort would qualify as hay at all. “Awful stuff,” Rob proclaimed.
“The woollies won’t think it’s as awful as starving,” I told him. “Let’s load and go.” The weather was ever over our shoulder, and this was a lead-colored day that showed no intention of brightening. First thing of morning, I had taken a look out the hotel window to the west for the mountains and they were there, white-toothed as if they had sawed up through the snow prairie. As long as the mountains stayed unclouded we had what we needed from the weather today, neutrality.
Our work was harsh, laboring the bales from their stacks in the boxcar to the sleds alongside, as if we were hauling hundreds of loaded trunks down out of an attic. Oftener and oftener, Rob and I had to stop for breath. The smoke of our breathing clouded between us, two aging engines of work. To say the truth, without Varick’s limber young strength I do not know how we ever would have loaded those three hay sleds.
When the last bale was aboard, even Varick looked close to spent, but he said only, “I guess that’s them.” A marker in our journey, that final bale; with it, the easy half of our hay task was over. Now to haul these loads, and ourselves, all the miles to Gros Ventre before nightfall, and on to Scotch Heaven the next day. Rob and I headed for the depot with our checkbooks to pay an outlandish price for this god-awful hay that was the only hay there was, and then we would have to get ourselves gone, out onto the prairie of winter.
• • •
We had our own tracks of yesterday to follow on the white plain west of Valier, smooth grooves of the sled runners and twin rough channels chopped by the horses’ hooves. The Reese horses strained steadily as they pulled our hay loads. With every step they were rescuing us a little more, drawing us nearer to Scotch Heaven and out of this width of winter.
All was silence except for the rhythm of the horses’ labor, muscle against harness, hooves against snow. Existence crept no faster than our sleds, as if time had slowed to look gravely at itself, to ponder what way to go next, at what pace. I know I had thoughts—you can’t not—but the lull we were traveling in held me. Keeping the team’s leather reins wrapped in my mittened hands was the only occupation that counted in the world just then.
The change in the day began soon after we were beyond Valier’s outlying farms and homesteads, where our tracks of yesterday went on into the prairie of the Double W range. At first the mountains only seemed oddly dimmed, as if dusk somehow had wandered into midday. I tried to believe it as a trick of light, all the while knowing the real likelihood.
In front of me I could see Varick letting only his hands and arms drive the team, the rest of him attentive to those dimming mountains. Behind me Rob undoubtedly was performing the same.
So the three of us simultaneously watched the mountains be taken by the murk. As if a gray stain was spreading down from the sky, the mountains gradually became more and more obscure, until they simply were absorbed out of sight. We had to hope that the weather covering the western horizon was only fog or fallow cloud and not true storm. We had to hope that mightily.
The wind, too, began faintly enough. Simply a sift along the top of the snow, soft little whiffs of white dust down there. I turtled deeper into the collar of my sheepskin coat in anticipation of the first gust to swoosh up onto the sled at me. But a windless minute passed, then another, although there were constant banners of snow weaving past the horses’ hooves. I could see Varick and his sled clear as anything; but he and it seemed suspended in a landscape that was casually moving from under them. A ground blizzard. Gentle enough, so far. A breeze brooming whatever loose snow it could find, oddly tidy in its way. Another tease from the weather, but as long as the wind stayed down there at knee-high we were out of harm.
I believed we were nearly to our halfway mark, the Double W fence, yet it seemed an age before Varick’s sled at last halted. I knew we were going to feed our teams, and for that matter ourselves, at this midpoint. But when Rob and I slogged up to Varick, we found he had more than replenishment on his mind.
“I don’t know what you two think,” he began, “but I figure we better just give up on the notion of going back the same route we came by.”
Rob gave a grimace, which could have been either at Varick’s words or at the sandwich frozen to the consistency of sawdust which he had just taken first bite of. “And do what instead?” he asked skeptically.
“Follow this fence,” Varick proposed with a nod of his head toward it, “to where it hits the creek.” Half a fence, really, in this deep winter; only the top portions of the fenceposts were above the snow, a midget line of march north and south from our cluster of hay sleds and horses. “Once we get to the creek,” Varick was postulating, “we can follow that on into Gros Ventre easy enough.”
“Man, that’d take twice as long,” Rob objected. “And that’s twice as much effort for these horses, not to mention us.”
Varick gave me a moment’s look, then a longer gaze at Rob. “Yeah, but at least this fence tells us where the hell we are,” he answered. He inclined his head to the prairie the other side of the fence, where the wind’s steady little sift had made our yesterday’s tracks look softened. “It won’t need a hell of a lot more of this to cover those tracks.”
“Even if it does, Varick, we know that country,” Rob persisted. “Christ, man, the hills are right out there in plain sight.” The benchlands north of Noon Creek and the Double W were like distant surf above the flow of the blown snow.
“We won’t know an inch of it in a genuine blizzard,” Varick insisted. “If this starts really storming and we get to going in circles out there, we’ll end up like the fillyloo bird.”
Rob stared at him. “The which?”
“The fillyloo bird, Unk. That’s the one that’s got a wing shorter than the other, so that it keeps flying in littler and littler circles until it disappears up its own rear end.”
Rob gave a short harsh laugh, but credit him, it was a laugh. I chortled as if I was filled with feathers. Were we all going giddy, the cold stiffening our brains? Would they find us here in the springtime, with ice grins on our faces?
“All right, all right,” Rob was conceding, as much to the notion of the fillyloo bird as to Varick. If I had been the one to broach the fence route to him, Rob would have sniffed and snorted at it until we grew roots. But here he was, grudging but giving the words to Varick. “Lead on to your damn creek.”
We began to follow the Double W fenceline south. The low stuttered pattern of the fenceposts could be seen ahead for maybe a quarter of a mile at a time, before fading into the ground blizzard. Occasionally there was a hump, or more often a series of them, next to the barbed wire—carcasses of Double W cattle that had drifted with the wind until the fence thwarted them. I wondered if Wampus Cat Williamson in his California money vault gave a damn.
A tiny cloud caught on my eyelash. I squinted to get rid of it and it melted coldly into my eye.
I blinked, and there were other snowflakes now, sliding across the air softly.
The stillness of their descent lasted only a few moments, before the first gust of wind hit and sent them spinning.
Quickly it was snowing so hard there seemed to be more white in the air than there was space between the flakes. In front of me Varick’s sled was a squarish smudge.
The wind drove into us. No longer was it lazing along the ground. From the howl of it, this blizzard was blowing as high as the stars.
The Re
ese horses labored. Varick and I and Rob got off and walked on the lee side of our hay sleds, to lessen the load for the teams and to be down out of the wind and churning whatever warmth we could into ourselves. I had on socks and socks and socks, and even so my feet felt the cold. This was severe travel, and before long the ghostly sled in front of me halted, and Varick was emerging from the volleys of wind and snow to see how we were faring. Rob promptly materialized from behind. A gather seemed needed by all three of us.
The wind quibbled around our boots even in the shelter of my hay sled. There we huddled, with our flap caps tied down tight over our ears and scarves across our faces up to our eyes. Bedouins of the blizzard. One by one we pulled down our scarves and scrutinized each other for frostbite.
“We’re doing about as good as we can, seems to me,” Varick assessed after our inspection of each other. In the howl of the wind, each word had to be a sentence. “I can only see a fence-post or two at a time in this,” Varick told us, “but that’ll do. Unk, how’s it going with you, back there?”
“Winterish,” was all Rob replied.
“How about you, Dad—are you all right?”
That question of Varick’s was many in one. I ached with cold, the rust of weariness was in every muscle I used, I knew how tiny we three dots of men, horses and hay were in the expanse of this winter-swollen land. But I took only the part of the question that Varick maybe had not even known he was asking: was I afraid? The answer, surprise to myself: I was not. Certainly not afraid for myself, for I could make myself outlast the cold and snow as long as Rob Barclay could. If one of us broke, then the other might begin to cave. But our stubbornnesses would carry each other far. We would not give one another the satisfaction of dying craven, would we, Rob.
“I’m good enough,” I answered my son. “Let’s go see more snow.”
• • •
Trudge and try not to think about how much more trudging needed be done. Here was existence scoured down as far as it could go. Just the flecked sky, filled with fat snowflakes and spiteful wind; and us, six horse creatures and three human. Hoof-prints of our horses, sliced path of our sled runners, our boot-prints, wrote commotion into the snow. Yet a hundred yards behind Rob you would not be able to find a trace that we had ever been there. Maybe winter was trying to blow itself out in this one day. Maybe so, maybe no. It had been trying something since October. I felt pity for Woodrow, the horse of my team who was getting the wind full against his side. But being a Reese horse, he simply turned his head and persevered with his work.
I pounded my arm against my side and trudged. The wind whirled the air full of white flakes again. Old mad winter/with snow hair flying. This must be what mesmerism is, every particle of existence streaming to you and dreamily past. A white blanket for your mind. A storm such as this blew in all the way from legendary times, other winters great in their fury. The winter of ’83. The Starvation Winter, these Blackfeet call that, and by Jesus they did starve, poor bastards them, by the hundreds. Pure gruesome, what they went through. Gruesome was the apt word for such winters, Lucas, yes. The winter of ’86, Toussaint’s telling of it. That winter. That winter, we ate with the axe. And Rob saying, A once in a lifetime winter. It depended on the size of the lifetime, didn’t it.
The wind blowing, the snow flowing. Try to pound another arm’s worth of warmth into myself and keep trudging. Every so often Varick, tall bundle of dimness ahead in the blowing snow, turned to look for me. I did the same for Rob. Rob. Rob who was all but vanished back there. Say he did vanish. Say he stumbled, sprawled in the miring snow, could not get up in time before I missed him, next time I glanced back. Say Rob did vanish into the blizzard, what would I feel? Truth now, Angus: what? As I tried to find honest reply in myself, a side of my mind said at least that would end it once and all, if Rob faltered back there in the snow and Varick and I could not find him, the poisoned time that had come between us—this entangled struggle between McCaskill and Barclay—would at last be ended. Or would it.
Whether it was decision or just habit, I kept watching behind me periodically to Rob. The team he had were big matched grays, and against the storm dusk they faded startlingly, so that at a glance there simply seemed to be harness standing in the air back there, blinders and collars and straps as if the wind had dressed itself in them. And ever, beside the floating sets of harness, the bulky figure of Rob.
We were stopped again. Varick came slogging to me like a man wading surf, and reported in a half shout that the fenceline had gone out of sight under a snowdrift that filled a coulee. We would need to veer down and around the pit of snow, then angle back up once we were past it to find the fenceline where it emerged from the coulee.
“If we’ve got to, we’ve got to,” I assented to Varick, and while he returned to his sled I beckoned for Rob to come up and hear the situation. He looked as far from happy as a man could be, but he had to agree that the detour was all there was to do.
The horses must have wondered why they had to turn a corner here at the middle of nothingness, but they obediently veered left and floundered down the short slope.
Now the problem was up. The slope on the other side of the coulee was steep and angling, the top of it lost in the swirling snow, so that as the horses strained they seemed to be climbing a stormcloud. This was the cruelest work yet, the team plunging a few steps at a time and then gathering themselves for the next lunge, all the while the loaded sled dragging backward on them. It hurt even to watch such raw effort. I sang out every encouragement I could, but the task was entirely the horses’.
Up and up, in those awful surges, until at last the snow began to level out. The horses’ sides still heaved from the exertions of getting us here, but I breathed easier now that we were atop the brow of the coulee and our way ahead to the fenceline would be less demanding.
Varick had halted us yet again. What this time?
One more time I waved Rob up to us as Varick trudged back from the lead sled.
“This don’t feel right to me,” Varick reported. He was squinting apprehensively. “I haven’t found that fenceline yet and we ought’ve been back to it by now.”
“We must not have come far enough to hit it yet, is all,” Rob said impatiently, speaking what was in my mind, too.
Varick shook his head. “We’ve come pretty damn far. No, that fence ought to be here by now. But it isn’t.”
“Then where to Christ is it?” demanded Rob belligerently into the concealing storm. Our faces said that each of the three of us was morally certain we had come the right way after veering around the coulee. Hop with that first leg of logic and the second was inevitable: we ought to have come to the fence again. But no fence, logical or any other kind, was in evidence.
For a long moment we peered into the windblown snow, our breath smoking in front of our faces like separate small storms. Without that fence we were travelers with nowhere to go. Nowhere in life, that is. Bewilderment fought with reasoning, and I tried to clear my numb mind of everything except fence thoughts. Not even a blizzard could blow away a line of stoutly set posts and four lines of wire. Could it?
“There’s just one other place I can think of for that fence to be,” Varick suggested as if he hated to bring up the idea. “The sonofabitch might be under us.”
With his overshoe he scuffed aside the day’s powdery freshfall to show us the old hardened snow beneath. Rob and I stared down. Oh sweet Christ and every dimpled disciple. A snow bridge, was this? If it was, if we were huddled there on a giant drift where the snow had built and cemented itself onto the brow of the coulee all winter, fenceposts and barbed wire could be buried below us, right enough. Anything short of a steeple could be buried down there, if this truly was a snow bridge. And if we were overshooting the fenceline down there under the winter crust, we next were going to be on the blind plain, in danger of circling ourselves to death.
“Damn it,” Rob seemed downright affronted by our predicament, “who ever saw snow like this?
”
Varick had no time for that. Rapidly he said, “We can’t just stand around here cussing the goddamn situation. What I’d better do is go out here a little way”—indicating to the left of us, what ought to be the southward slope of the long hump of drift we were on, if we were—“and take a look around for where the fence comes out of this.”
His words scared my own into the air. “Not without a rope on you, you won’t.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid you’re right about that,” Varick agreed. The three of us peered to the route he proposed to take. Visibility came and went but it was never more than a few dozen strides’ worth. I repeated that Varick was not moving one step into the blizzard without a rescue rope to follow back to us, even though we all knew the cumbersome minutes it would cost us to undo the ropes that were lashing the hay to the sled racks, knot them together, affix them around his waist—“It won’t take time at all,” I uttered unconvincingly.
Hateful as the task was, stiff-fingered and wind-harassed as we were, we got the ropes untied from each of our hay loads. Next, the reverse of that untying chore. “Rob, you’re the one with the canny hands,” I tried on him. He gave me a look, then with a grunt began knotting the several ropes together to make a single lifeline for Varick. One end of the line I tied firmly around Varick’s waist while Rob was doing the splice knots, then we anchored the other end to Varick’s hay rack.
“Let’s try it,” Varick said, and off he plunged into the blizzard. Rob and I, silent pillars side by side, lost sight of him before he had managed to take twenty effortful steps.
With my son out there in the oblivion of winter, each moment ached in me. But I could think of no other precaution we might have done. If Varick didn’t come back within a reasonable time, Rob and I could follow the rope into the blizzard and fetch him. I would do it by myself if I had to. It might take every morsel of energy left in me, but I would get Varick back out of that swirling snow if I had to.
The rope went taut.
It stayed that way a long moment, as if Varick was dangling straight down from it instead of out across a plain of snow. Then the line alternately slackened and straightened, as Varick pulled himself back to us hand over hand.