Averaging five miles an hour except in ravines where the crust gave way under him, Sam walked all day; and when darkness fell he thought he was only twenty miles from the Judith River. The northern foothills of a mountain range had been on his right for some time but he had seen no sign of game there or of living thing. Along the Judith, as along most rivers, there were buffalo feeding on river-bottom grasses and shrubs. He hoped to find an old or sick one. Numbed by fatigue and hunger, he kept walking. Two hours after dark, three, four, he was still walking, with five wolves trotting along behind him.
Then he came to the river, and the first thing he did was to find an open place and lie on his belly and drink. With night the cold had deepened and the frost was burning his ears. He searched up and down the river till he found a shelter he could crawl under, and with the hatchet he dug into the earth deeper than the winter chill, making a coffin area large enough to house him. He was protected by dense snow-laden brush on all sides but the river side. He had hoped to sleep but after curling up in the robe he found the earth so cold and the air above him so bitter that he sat up and considered his problem. Without food he might walk another two or three days but he doubted that he could do it without both food and sleep. The thought then seemed to him so cowardly and shameful that he tried to put it away; and while making an effort to do this it occurred to him that he ought to laugh. Wondering what he could laugh at, he thought of the fifty-seven braves rushing round and round like big red ants, or wasps, whose house had been destroyed. So he exploded a shout that could have been heard a mile up or down the river, and then burst into song:“Hey, git along, git along, Sammy! Hey, git along, Sam along Joe!” Had Hugh Glass ever laughed while crawling the hundred miles?—or Colter, as he slunk through the night, stark naked, starved, his feet soled with cactus needles?
There now rose before him, as he shivered, a vivid picture of the Indians. A brave had come with a second drink for the guard and had seen him lying there, dead, with eyes and tongue choked half out of him. Shrieking, he had run to the chief; and half drunk and stuffed with half-cooked elk meat, the redmen had rushed to the tent to stare with amazement at one of their most valiant. Then all hell had broken loose. The Indian camp must have been like an anthill after squaws built a fire around it. What odors!—of stinking war paint, fire smoke, rum, howling dogs, and rage; and what yells of fury and frustration! What wild barking from the dogs, what terrified snortings and whinnying from the horses; and then what a bedlam as fifty-seven men, clutching their guns and tomahawks, ran back and forth, east, west, north, their senses fogged with rum and their black eyes turning yellow!
Sam’s idea of the scene warmed him a little. “When this ole woman she torst him come he went jumpin.” Sam could imagine the chief’s eyes almost down on his cheeks when, bending over in the dim light of the tepee, he could no longer doubt that The Terror had killed a mighty warrior with his bare hands. Sam snorted and chuckled and shivered. He was warming his body and warming his soul. “Me and the chief,” he said, wiping a tear away, “will have a huggin match, come next summer.”
He stood up and for a third or fourth time wrapped the robe around him, tugging at it as if by tugging he could stretch it, but it would reach only from his chin to his knees. Doing the best he could vith it, he lay again in the coffin hole, knife and hatchet within reach, both hands clutching the edges of the robe to hold them together. It was his lower legs and feet that felt coldest. Trying again, he lay on bare earth on his left side, brought his knees up, and spread the robe over him, with the back edge tucked under his back and rump, and the front edge under his knees and hands. And though the temperature was fifteen below Sam fell asleep, with five wolves crawling close to smell him.
The wolves were bivouacked and waiting when Sam awakened four hours later, chilled through and so stiff that the only thing he could move was his head. There was no sensation in his hands or legs. and it was only with a supreme effort that he was able at last to sit up. The hunger pangs in him were as sharp as knife points when he crawled out of the shelter and rose like a huge animated corpse to his feet. As he hailed himself to drive blood through him he sensed that during sleep he had come close to freezing to death. Looking east into the gray morning. he wondered how it was with Kate.
For a few minutes he tried to quiet his violent shivering and think of things that would give him strength. There were mountain flowers—the Mariposa, caltha, and alpine lilies, the windflowers and violets and poppies, columbines and paintbrushes and whole mountainsides of syringa. It had seemed to him in times past that the loveliest flowers and the sweetest musical themes were but two aspects of the same grace; but the relationship seemed a bit strained. He tried to hum a Schubert song while telling himself that when spring came he would climb to the snowbanks and gather an armful of lilies to lay over the bones of his wife and son. His muscular spasms were so strong that he began to pinch and smite himself, and fling his arms wildly and jump up and down; and two hundred feet away live wolves sat on their haunches and looked at him.
26
AN HOUR LATER he looked down the Judith River, which was north, and wondered if it would be safe to ride a raft down it to the Missouri, and then down the Missouri to the Musselshell. He knew it was a stupid thought and he took it to mean that his mind was failing. After his dreadful ordeal and escape, Tom Fitzpatrick, whose hair had turned white in a few days, had said, “After a certain time the biggest danger is a man’s ideas, for his mind fails and he thinks every idea is brilliant; but nearly every idea would lead him to certain death if he followed it.” Yes, it was what looked like easy ways that fooled a man. So Sam looked straight east and told himself to get along, that it was less than a hundred miles to Kate’s door. There was a stiff wind from the north this morning. The lands between him and Kate’s shack were the winter hunting-grounds of the blizzards down from Canada. Though feeling terribly weak, Sam thought he could cover the distance in two days and two nights, if the winds did not put him down. It was the kind of land the Creator used to test His boldest children. Job he had tested one way, Sam Minard he was testing in another. The greenhorns and other weaklings, with soft useless hands, flabby bellies, and timid fawning ways, He tested by allowing them to walk two blocks to a trolley, or to fish in a hole on a pleasant stream. Sam accepted the test and resolved to survive it, but he knew that it was a test more severe than he had ever faced, with its cold and hunger, and the blizzards in which any mountain man on earth could lose his way. Somewhere yonder in the frosty early-morning haze was Judith Mountain, and somewhere beyond it was Wild Horse Lake. Not far from the lake was a sizable creek that flowed into the Musselshell. If he could see these landmarks he could find his way, even though the sun was hidden day and night.
The river before him was frozen about a fourth of the way across on either side. Sam had to find and drag across the ice pieces of log for a raft. It was when he moved to pick up the end of a log that he knew, with a pang of dismay, not only that a good deal of his strength had left him but that merely to lift sixty or eighty pounds drove sharp pains all through him. He hadn’t realized that he was so weak. He spent two hours getting enough timber to the edge to carry him, and it was almost noon when he reached the farther side. It was so cold this morning that the steel of hatchet and knife burned his flesh. Deciding that he wouldn’t need the hatchet, he buried it at the root of a tree; but after he had gone a little distance he turned to look back, and began to tremble, as though he were taking farewell of a living thing. He became conscious of a wish to return to it, and to take his mind off it he stared at the five wolves across the river. Then he faced the east and began to walk.
For the first ten miles it was easy walking. As he trudged along, trying to ignore the pains in nerves, muscles, and bones, there was around him only the white blinding waste, for it was blinding, even though the sun was hazed over. There was a sharp burning wind on his left, and after a while his face was so numbed by cold that there was little feeling in
it. Having no mittens, he had to keep rubbing his hands or striking them against him. But it was his feet that gave him the most trouble. He now had only two pairs of moccasins and they were thin. He wondered if he ought to wrap a piece of the robe around each foot; what he did from time to time was to fold the robe and sit on it and take the moccasins off. He then rubbed his feet to bring the blood through them, and studied the sun, the sky, and the world around him. Since leaving the Judith he had seen no wolf, no rabbit, no bird. Winter cold was supreme here. He thought the temperature was about fifteen below zero, and failing. If it reached forty below could he keep going? Of course he would keep going.
When he walked again he hung the robe over his head and down on the left side, but the wind made such frenzied efforts to tear it away that he again carried it in his arms, with his numbed hands inside it. Would Kate have a fire? Or would he find her dead? When darkness fell what a glory it would be if far away through the cold he were to see the pale wintry yellow of a lighted window! But there was no window, and unless she had a fire there would be no light. He supposed that she was sitting with her knees drawn up to her belly, with all her bedding piled under, around, and over her. It made a man mad to think of a woman living that way, winter after winter; but her devotion to her children was one of the great and noble things, like Beethoven’s Ninth, or a sunset, or a wild storm on the ocean. He looked up at the frozen sky and wondered what the Almighty thought of Kate. She was all grit and a yard wide. What a mountain man she would have made!
Sam could guess the hour by the paler patch of sky where the sun was hidden. It was one o’clock, then three, then five, and dusk again closed in, and cold more bitter. He felt that he was not walking fast or getting far; in six hours he doubted that he had covered twenty miles. The wind became more savage after the sun went down. Only squaws, he thought, could be as completely wild and uncontrolled as a wind. It was absolute raving lunacy all around him, something sent by the English down from Canada, to terrorize and desolate American land. It came shrieking and howling across the Missouri and then swept across the wastes, gathering madness and violence as the night deepened; and with his emotions as close to panic as they had ever been, Sam sat, his back to the winds, the robe over his back, and wondered what he could do. Job had been tested with afflictions that became harder and harder to bear, until the goaded and tortured man had cried out that he could endure no more. But he had endured more. Sam grimly told himself that he was being tested with one of the mightiest winds from the Creator’s wind chamber. He would do all that a man could do, and then do more.
There in the deep night he sat, with the winds howling against him, their Canada cold pouring over him like an atmosphere of ice. He still knew which way was east. He would rise and go again; he would walk as long as he knew the direction and could lift his feet; and then he would make mittens of the robe and he would crawl. If he lost the direction he would stop and dig in for the night, and in the morning he would crawl again. The sky above him was only an ocean of swift winds, with not a hint of moon or stars; the world around him was riven by forces that only the strongest could stand against. Bending to the left and into it, he went on, the knife inside a fold of robe and one hand clasping its handle, his feet numbed; his face turned to the right and away from the driving insanity of the blizzard; his half-frozen legs stepping forward, on and on. Until the wind changed he would know which way was east, but blizzards had a way of becoming cyclonic vortexes in which all directions were lost.
Now and then he stopped, knelt, faced south, and made a hole in the snow; and he then sat in the hole so that he would not be blown away, while he took off the moccasins and massaged his feet. He tried to keep his senses alive to his physical condition, for he knew that persons could be seduced by numbing cold into a tranquil state of mind that thought all was well. He knew that he was half frozen but he could move all his toes; after vigorous rubbing he could feel a pale warmth in his feet; and moving from side to side, he could feel a little sensation in his rump. He twisted his ears and nose. Then he walked again, struggling on through the night, as a man will when all his being is fixed on one thing; he was numbed almost to his marrow and hunger pangs were like violent massaging of his stomach and bowels; and his mind was not as clear as he wanted it to be, but he went on and on. Mountain men had tried to figure out why in a blizzard a man went round and round, while convinced that he was following a straight course. One said it was because a man was heavier on one side than the other, that if you were to cut a man down the middle from his head to his crotch you’d find one side of him five pounds heavier than the other, for the same reason that one side of his face was fuller and one ear was larger. Face a tree two hundred yards distant, shut your eyes and walk toward it, and you’d find yourself fifty feet on the right of it or the left. An obscene remark had then been made about a man’s stones, and some of the men had laughed, and Windy Bill had said that might be the reason.
His eyes almost closed against the winds, his head bent, the knife now tied into a corner of the robe, his hands massaging one another, Sam went on and on, until past midnight. He knew now that the winds would howl all night and all the next day. This country from the Missouri east to the Black Hills and south to the Yellowstone was the winter playground of Canada’s winds; laden with ice and menace, they came like tumultuous oceans of zero-breath, down from the great northern mountains; and after shrieking over this broad desolation they swept up the elk basins between the Bitterroot and the Bighorns, and the Bighorns and the Black Hills; and roared all the way south to the Sangre de Cristo, the great sand dunes, and the San Juans.
He guessed that was how it was, for he was forcing his mind to think and he was keeping before him the lesson of Job. His father had read this to his children. God had said that Job was a fine man, and Satan had said, Yeah, but you have built a fence of love around him and what does he strive against? God then turned Job over to Satan to test the stuff he was made of; and murderers came and fell on Job’s servants, burned his sheep, and took away his camels; and then came a terrible wind from the wilderness that razed his house and killed his sons and daughters. All that was only the beginning. Me, Sam told himself, I am a wee mite hungry and a wee mite cold, so shall I shave my head and fall to the ground? Often he had heard his father utter Satan’s words, “Skin for skin, all that a man has will he give for his life.” Satan was a politician. A man would not give his children, his wife, his friends, his honor, or the defenseless into the powers of evil. Sam dug inside his shirt for his harp and warmed it by turning it over and over in his hands. Then, as he plodded along, he tried to play into the winds, choosing first the favorite song of Mozart’s mother and of his mother. Taking the harp from his mouth, he cried into the winds, “Rejoice, O my heart!” He tried to play the finale of a sonata and a tender melody of man-woman love, while thinking of Lotus. Job, the idiot, had cursed his Creator. Job had wished he had died at birth or was sunk in eternal sleep, for there even the wicked put away their vices, and the troubled and the weary were at rest. There the prisoners lay together in peace and heard not the voice of the tyrant; the famous and the forgotten mingled their dust; and the servant leapt to his master’s call no more. How his father had loved to declaim the bold words! Sam heard in the winds, “For wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one.” Poor old Job, he was so tormented that he longed only for death—“Oh, that God would let loose his hand and cut me off!” For the first time in his life Sam had an inkling of what Job’s cries meant; for as he staggered forward, sick with hunger and weakness and frozen to his marrow, he found himself thinking that rest was supreme among the good things of life.
He sensed the warning in time. His first act was to try to look round him but he could see only the wild gray terrors sweeping by. He might be twenty feet from, trees, or miles; possibly before him there was a deep sheltered cove, full of the soft spillings from the winds. He sank to his haunches, swept the new snow away, and with the kni
fe cut a round lid in the frozen crust. He lifted it away and plunged his arm down, and almost wept with joy when he realized that the snow here was deep. Reaching down, he pushed it back under the crust or scooped it out, until he could enter the hole, feet first. He pulled the robe after him. Then he kicked and beat at the soft snow under the crust to force it back and away, so that he could draw down out of the wind. He thought he must be in a ravine, or in a drift against trees or a bluff. On his knees he kept pushing the snow away from him and back.
It seemed amazingly warm down under the crust, but he was so sunk in weariness that he did not know his labor had made his blood race. The earth under him was not frozen; this meant that a good cover of snow had fallen, and remained, before the first hard frost. Clearing away the snow so that he could spread the robe, he sat on it, took off the mocassins, and massaged his ankles and feet. He was exhausted but he had not admitted it. More than anything else he wanted sleep but he knew that if he were to fall asleep he would never awaken. While dimly thinking of the matter he sensed that staying awake would demand more than an effort of his will. Overhead, he could hear the rushing of winds at fifty or sixty miles an hour, and when he put an ear to the earth he could still hear them, as if they were underground. They were not carrying much snow but they were filling the hole; after a while it seemed almost cozy where he sat, for no breath of wind touched him. If only he had four warm robes he would sleep for a day and a night and then walk to Kate’s shack in a few minutes!
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 28