by Les Weil
"One's warm," Lat said and went on to poke the other carcasses. "These don't seem too cold to skin."
Tom slit the belly of a wolf and started on the legs and stopped and looked around again. The earth was quiet as a coffin save for Lat's busy knife. The wolves were bayed out and the buffalo too distant to be heard. Not even the wind whined in this dip, and nothing moved, not a bird, even, in the sky.
He went back to his job. If the saucer rim cut off his view, it hid him, too. The hunches that didn't pan out would fill a good-sized backhouse. Nothing to worry about but the burn of iced flesh on cold fingers. Quit peeking under the bed!
But for Lat, he could be riding stove in some snug bunkhouse, loafing time away until the spring roundup. He could have whiskey and a woman. He wouldn't stink. He wouldn't ache low in the back. He wouldn't call a boar's nest home. He wouldn't be feeling in his hands the creeping bite of frost. Damn Lat and his big notions! Damn Lat. His knife blade whispered that idea.
He wrenched at the pelt and gave it a last flick and tore it loose and stood up. Lat was almost done, too. His hand around the handle of the knife looked red and thick and clumsy.
"You take the warm one," Lat said.
"Goddam it!" Tom answered and hunted more to say. Not much came out. "Your hands is just as cold as mine, pard."
He grabbed the other wolf and went to work, his hands almost unfeeling, touched with frostbite, but still they moved the wolf around and managed the cuts and began the job of separation. Lat, on his softer carcass, was making faster time.
A shake or two, Tom told himself, and he'd be through, thank God; but all at once he felt them at his back, felt them through the lifted bristles of his neck, and he came slow around, and there they were -a line of Indian bucks on foot with loosened shoulder wraps and hands free on their guns. He said, "Lat!" and, watching, straightened up. Too late for warning now, his pony caught the smell of them and sucked in a snort.
They stood there, six of them, no more than twenty feet away, and bored him with their eyes. On his thigh he felt the chancy help of his six-gun. Yonder, on the bull head, were his old Sharps and Lat's repeater.
From behind him Lat's voice sounded flat. "Easy!" It rose a little. "How, friends?"
An old and withered Indian with a face like a sick hawk's stood a pace in the lead. He grunted through closed lips, sending a small quiver through a sprout of feathers on his head. The others held up, waiting on him. Only their eyes stirred, sliding off to the bait, to the two horses and quickly back again. A young and squatty Indian in a white man's hat kept glancing off at Sugar, his braids swinging to his turns of face.
Now, above them on the hill, Tom saw their horses, held by squaws and children, saw their dogs rumped down, checked by hand holds on their scruffs.
The old leader stepped ahead, talking in his chest, and the rest pushed forward, guns swung up short and ready. Tom felt Lat beside him.
"How?" Lat said.
"Smoke?" the chief asked. "Drink?" Between their narrowed banks of lids his eyes swam off to Lat.
"Tobacco, Tom?"
"No."
"Present, no, for Injun?" The eyes swam back.
"At camp," Lat said, pointing that direction, and stumbled for their way of talk. "Much smoke. You understand? You savvy? Much meat. Much things for empty belly." He patted his stomach. "Injun savvy?"
"Me savvy. No good."
A broad-faced buck, knife-scarred from eye to jaw, growled words behind the chief and stepped ahead and swung around on him and growled out more. Then all of them were arguing, crowding around the old one and yammering in Indian and swinging out from him to point with hands and musket barrels as if asking yes to murder. But hardly for a minute wasn't someone watching, ready with his gun. At the side, beyond safe hope of reaching, rested the repeater and the Sharps.
Tom sneaked his hand toward his revolver. Before his fingers touched the butt the chief waved down the hubbub and spoke up. He pointed north and east and south and west, his face lined and solemn, while he talked Indian talk. A man with the pinch of fear in his guts could grab for the idea. White man there. White man there. White man there and there. Injun best walk careful or white man rub him out.
The chief dropped his hand and closed his mouth and waited, his eyes going from buck to buck as though tallying the vote.
They didn't like to simmer down. They grunted, sore, and paced around and swung their muskets, their eyes still mean, but now it was if they just goddamned the luck.
The young buck in the white man's hat held still of a sudden, looking, and passed his gun over to another and quit the bunch and made for Sugar. One by one the rest fell silent, watching him. He picked up the reins and turned and smiled and called back as if laying claim. Sugar put out his nose and snorted at the smell but didn't pull away.
"Whoa, Sugar!" Tom said soft to Lat and didn't get an answer. Lat only stood and watched. But Sugar let the buck climb on, let him bring the reins snug and put moccasin to stirrup and heave up, let him do it, even, from the right or Indian side.
The Indian waved and dug his heels in and lashed back with the rein ends. For a blink or two it looked as if things would be all right. The Indian lashed again. Then Sugar bogged his head and boiled. Out of that almighty pitch he came lock-legged and went sideways in a spin before the Indian's gutty grunt was done. The buck flew off. Like crack-the-whip. Like the end man in the game. He hit hard and slid and tumbled over and lay spraddled in the shallow snow, and the old chief started for him, hand out as if to ward off hurt.
The young buck moved. He got his hands and knees under him and then his feet and found his bearings and began to lag back to the bunch. Seeing he wasn't harmed, the other Indians started laughing, soft at first, then louder, and louder yet as they made out the black storm in his face. They whooped and hollered and clapped their mouths and pointed at him, adding to the storm.
His step steadied and quickened. He came at them as if to whip them all but, instead, he grabbed his gun back. He wheeled around and leveled for an aim on Sugar.
A blur of movement at the corner of the eye. Lat lunging for the man, lunging open-handed. Forgetful of the six-gun on his hip. A shout from somewhere, and the young buck heeling round and seeing and jerking up his musket, and Lat lunging dead on to the eye of it. His own revolver leaping from its keeper and going off, too late. Two blasts, and his the second. Lat staggering backwards, the young buck going down, and then hands on him from behind, hands from everywhere, muscles, a mess of bodies, weighting him to earth, tearing the six-gun from his twisted arm, and him spitting snow and crying to the snow, "You sons-of-bitches! You dirty sons-of-bitches!"
The chief's voice, cracked and commanding, rose above him. Some of the hands left him, but still he couldn't wrestle up. The chief spoke more, and other hands left him and the feet that belonged to them screeched in the snow, and the hands still on him yanked him upright.
He fought his dizziness. He saw Lat standing pale with the burn of powder on his chest, and the young buck standing, too, but gimpy-legged, while the chief bent at his side and fingered for the bullet hole.
Hands still held him. Guns still pointed. He asked, "How bad you hurt, Lat?", and Lat answered thin, "It took me high."
Bending, the chief jerked up his head and held still with the look of listening. Tom heard it then, the sound of rifle shots, one and another and three together, fired out of sight beyond the rim.
The chief snapped straight. His words were shots. He wheeled and beckoned to the squaws and young ones. They set up a clatter as they started down the hill, and he wheeled back, anger in his face, and hushed them with his arms.
One buck ran and gathered up the repeater and the Sharps. One elbowed Lat to Sugar and let him try to get on by himself and then shoved him in the saddle and stepped back for an instant to see would Sugar buck.
The hands left Tom. Something poked him in the back. It was a musket barrel, jabbed by the scar-faced buck. The buck pointed to Tom'
s horse and made a shoving motion toward the west.
Tom got on and hitched around. Some of the Indian men were mounting. Two squaws fought dogs off from the poisoned bait. Close by, Lat sat sagging in his saddle. The scarcheeked buck shoved toward the west again and made out as if about to fire.
"Hang on, Lat, and tell me if you can't. He means us to rattle hocks." Tom wheeled his horse. "You up to it? Lat, tell me! You up to it?" Behind him he heard Sugar stepping out.
"Now what's the head and tail of this?" he asked himself, hardly knowing that he spoke out loud until he saw his horse's ears bent back.
A quick look gave him the answer, and for an instant, which instantly shamed him, he had a notion to light out, for the Indians were falling in behind. Alone, he might have got away.
13
BULLET ACHE and cold ache were one, and night and day and snow and sky and climb and fall. They mixed in the mind, in the eye, in this torment of flesh that was his and not his. One Indian was another, and Tom Ping one of them, his black forelock whipped by the breeze like their braids. A horse wasn't a horse, not even Sugar. They were all parts of a dream that wouldn't shake loose to let a man find himself well and warm and snug in his bed.
Now it was day, and now it was dusk, and there in dusk after dusk were the night camps, the tatters of blankets and hides and the tiny fire under tiny meat that the stomach dreamed made it sick. Night moved into sunup, and the sun fired the snow and the snow fired the skull, and in the white blindness level and ridge and shallow and drift were the same. Or the bright day gave way to gray, with the snow weeping thick and the bitter wind mourning, driving into the clothes and back out, letting other winds have their turns at the pinched life inside.
No Oregon, except in other dreams. No Fort Benton. No Pa or Ma or Callie Kash. No God even. Thou shalt set no god above no-god. No nothing, then or now. Ghosts of night and day. Ghost-ache of cold and wound. Ghosts of other riders, heads crooked against the wind.
He went on in pride, in the hard dream of pride, among hank-haired shadows of men, now alongside a shadow who went on in pride, his Indian mouth shut and his body unflinching and his leg swelling up in its legging, while around was the snow and the soft death waiting there.
"Country's changed some, Lat. See them mountains north? Where's that take us, you reckon? And what's these redskins up to, pard? But don't make talk unless you feel strong enough."
Buttes floated. Mountains waved. They swam ahead, keeping their distance, no nearer ever. Nothing was nearer. Nothing changed. Step by step, he and the shadows stayed fixed where they were, in light and dark and cold and blow and ache.
"You better, Lat? Feelin' perkier, boy? We'll make out, you bet. Can't whip us, these tatter-assed Injuns."
The face against the gloom of night was like a dark moon over him, a close and ragged moon. "I swear it looks some healed. Leave me swab it now with this hot rag."
The rag was wet and warm and wasn't real and didn't touch the pain.
He thought he heard himself say, "Thanks." He thought he tried a piece of meat that Tom held to his mouth.
"Plenty grit in your gizzard, boy."
Asleep, maybe he could shake the dream.
As if the devil or someone had sworn to wipe out all life, the storm whistled out of the north. Tom felt it like fire, like a blown flame that shriveled the flesh and withered all but the little knot of the guts which itself hurt with dying. Or he felt it like knives -this licking wind, this sharp, driven snow, this thrusting frost. It cut through the clothes, through the flesh, and stabbed at the bones. It froze the breath on a man's collar, froze the hair in his nose, froze the eye-water that kept crying down in his beard. It iced the snoots of the horses, building milk moss from the leak of their nostrils and the ooze of their spit. It slashed them to southward against bit and rein held tight to the west.
It had been cold before but not close to this. This was as cold as cold ever could be. Even the camp fire at night was only a whisper of warmth, a promise of heat somewhere in the world, maybe far off in Texas; but here in itself was the whole world, lapped white from skyline to skyline, with no end to be seen and none to be hoped for.
But except for one goddam blind-streaming, blindscreaming, goddam ground-blizzard day when a man had to feel his way back from taking a leak, the Indians kept going, the older ones hunched deep in their loose fittings of blankets and skins and two little ones riding in a skin hammock hung between skid poles hitched to a poor-as-dirt pony. Now and then the two nits that would make lice if they lived long enough poked their heads from under their buffalo robes, silent and round-eyed, and ducked back under cover at the slash of the wind.
The devil was after these Indians, or so they must think. Or other red devils like the Sioux or the Crows. Which didn't make sense, or why would they hold him and Lat prisoner? Maybe, cut off from some main band, they just wanted to sneak safe to their reservation where they could scatter and lose themselves, or maybe they aimed to go on into Canada like Sitting Bull. Meantime they'd hold him and Lat with them so's word of their doings wouldn't get out till too late. What proved something or other was they kept going.
West, always west, and now north of west. A little draggletail column of bucks, squaws, cayuses and curs, each puffing clouds with his breath, and the snow squealing under hoof and the wind for once stopping to catch its wind so it could blow more, and the air so still that the cold itself was a sound and the white lifting of buttes far ahead was as lifeless and fixed as a glassed-in picture of buttes.
When he tried to think how long, the days since the shooting ran into each other. It could be Tuesday or Sunday, or the fourteenth or the twentieth or whatever. Time as unknown as the lost country they traveled. Time blurred always by worry. Lat so weak and sick! And the two of them like brothers, better than the real brothers he used to know.
He heard a grunt behind him. It came from the scarcheeked buck, who was telling him to catch up with the bunch. All right. All right. But another day would come. No one could ever say that Tom Ping turned the other cheek, which Lat once said was in the Bible. Fool advice if it was there, like other pious bull he'd heard.
On and on and on to Jesus. Through this unending snow. In this forever land. Under this cruel-hearted sky. On to everloving Jesus.
"How's it go, Lat? Just get through today, and you'll make the rest, boy. Warmin' a little, ain't it? And you got some blood in your face."
But what was the good of it with Lat mostly unanswering, his whole, little strength spent in keeping himself in the saddle?
Night, and the squaws setting lodge poles with hands stiff as clubs, the squaws wrangling firewood and boiling a pot if they had something to boil, and the proud palefaces getting the leavings and one of them being grateful for that niuch. The ground for a bedstead and a saddle cloth and an old robe for a bed and frost breathing up out of the ground, frost breathing sideways and down from the sky, the froze hands of frost reaching into the tepee that four of them shared, and, unseen on the hills, the wolves rumped and crying. The wounded buck, Hole-in-the-Leg, twisting and moaning, and Lat moaning, too, in sleep both of them loosed from their holds on themselves.
Spread Lat with your robe, boy! You haven't got a wound in your chest. You've got blood in your system and muscles to exercise to keep it stirred up. Lay it on gentle, and to hell with the old chief and his watching eye. Sleep's what he needs, sleep and a warm bed and something to eat besides an old piece of elk gut. Bad off, he is, but still not too bad to sleep with his bridle so the bit'll be warm for his Sugar. Lay it on gentle.
A man lay and thought, or just thought he thought, things dodging in and out of his head while the cold stayed there. Moo Cow and Godwin and Carmichael, and were they alive any more? Here, roundabout if half-froze, were Hawk Face, the chief, and Cut Cheek and Hole-in-the-Leg who used to be White Hat. Names came for all of them, like jug Butt for one of the squaws. Lat was Hole-in-the-Chest, not Lat any more or in any way, not in speech
or in looks, for he hardly spoke and looked older and thin, and the muscles ridged tight on his jaw points.
Come morning, they'd break camp and push on with not one Indian complaining, though Christ knew how they lived in what passed for clothes with them when even the dogs trailed along whimpering and the horses, starved down to ribs, wouldn't try for a nibble of brush. He and Lat were better-fitted, warmer-dressed, but nearer froze to death, Lat naturally. But Hole-in-the-Leg naturally, too, then. Not Holein-the-Leg but Swole Leg, Swole-Big-as-Hell Leg, Swoll-to-theGrave Leg. And there would be one good Indian.
A fed man, like a fed steer, could stand cold, but where was the meat? No buffalo here. None now at all. Only an antelope once in a long time, or an elk or a deer, and these next to impossible to hunters who used bows and arrows because arrows were quiet.
But let it go. Let it all go. Don't think at all, not even of Lat, not even of Jen and what she has waiting there in some other world. Catch some sleep if you can. Go to sleep with the cold.
Along toward the white-dark of night they came to some brush where a summer stream must have flowed once, and the bucks slid stiff off their horses, saying without words that here was the place to make camp.
Tom staggered for balance as his feet hit the ground, staggered and steadied and hobbled ahead, his voice crying, "Lat! I'll help you up, pard."
He bent over Lat. "Can't sleep in the snow, boy. Can't give up now," he said, but as he spoke he thought it was no use, and more words came trembling from his throat. "The dirty sons-of-bitches!"
Lat moved. With the help of an arm he got up. But still, by God!
14
THERE WAS a whisper in the night, a distant stirring, a sort of blowing music that the ear kept reaching for. It could be no more than dream or fever, or the murmur of tired blood mside the head, for all was quiet here -no flutter of tepee, no shrill of wind or rasp of snow, no click of brush. And yet, And yet, at the edge of hearing, the singing rustle, like a low chant from the land or like the flurry of far wings.