For a while he had felt warmer but actually it was below zero where he sat and slowly he was filled with chills. He had dreadful cramps in his belly; when with massaging he tried to ease them they became so severe that he almost cried out. He ate a handful of snow and it filled him with nausea. Reaching back under snow, he tried to find grass, dead bugs, or anything he could chew and swallow; but there was only the soil. He cut off a buckskin fringe and began to chew it and at once doubled over, trying to vomit. He told himself he should think of the men of whom it had been said that they lived for weeks on the stiff old hides of dead wolves, or who lived for days on nothing but grass.
He guessed he would just have to massage the numbed parts of him, think of Job, stay awake, and wait for daylight. He would also think of Kate; she was not far from him now, no more than thirty miles, or twenty. Staying awake was the hardest thing he had ever tried to do; what a tyrant it was when the body wanted rest! When twice he almost reached the point of no return he knew that he would have to set up a better watchdog. While he sat, swaying a little, his head had imperceptibly sunk, and his eyes in the same slow treacherous way had almost closed, until it had been only with a feeble glimmer of awareness that he caught himself. He tried to devise a plan whereby if he fell asleep he would sink on the point of the knife. Turning to hands and knees, he told himself that no man could sleep in that position, that if he were to fall to his belly he would awaken. But that proved to be no good either. The only way he could think of in which he had any confidence was to count to twenty, over and over, and record each twenty. For awhile he plopped a piece of snow into his mouth after uttering the word “twenty,” and he thought he was doing all right until, with a start, he came awake and realized that the last word he had spoken was seventeen. Convinced that he was pampering himself, he resolved on sterner measures, he began to smite and pinch himself and to yank at his nose and ears. All this he had to abandon; the massaging and pinching filled him with a warmth that was almost the same as sleep.
“Doggone it, Sam,” he said aloud, “if ye can’t stay awake, then git up and go!”
He thrust up through the snow that had been blown into the hole and stood up, head and shoulders in the wind. He could see no sign of daylight. The winds seemed to be rushing by in even greater haste and he doubted that he could stand in them. To punish himself for being such a sleepy lubber he turned his head from side to side, so that the air filled with frozen crystals could smite and sting all over his face. Then he sank back under the shelter.
He was never to know how he survived this night and the next forenoon. His mind was no longer clear when at last he tested the winds and decided to go. With the robe around his back and the edges tucked in around his hands he pointed his haggard face into the east, bent forward, and walked again. He now moved more like a robot than a man. The winds had abated a little, a pale nimbus of light was halfway up the southern sky, and he could see sometimes for a hundred yards, sometimes for half a mile. For seven hours he walked, pausing only four times to massage his feet. And at last he stood, swaying in almost utter exhaustion, and looked at a snow-laden riverline and knew that it was the Musselshell.
He had barely enough awareness left to know that his journey was not over. He would have to cross the river. Somehow he would have to determine if he was north or south of Kate’s shack. And he knew he would have to keep in the forefront of his mind the hard and merciless fact that when a person found his dreadful ordeal almost over his tendency was to relax his efforts, to let go of what remained of his strength. He tried to hum the Ave Maria while searching round him for pieces of wood for a raft; he tried to think of a story to lift his spirit and recalled one that Bill had told about wolves. A big pack of wolves was running around campfires after dark, snapping their teeth and moving in a foot or two every time they circled the camp. At last, exploding at them in profane rage, Lost-Skelp Dan had rushed at them with long knives, only to see the wolf nearest him leap to his hind legs, shed his wolf clothing, and vanish into the darkness. Before Dan could recover from amazement all the wolves had jumped up and fled. Sam tried to laugh at the old Indian trick but it did not seem to be funny now, nor could he think of anything funny as he set his teeth on the weariness and pain and dragged chunks of wood to the edge of the river ice. The Ave Maria didn’t sound like a prayer any more. He found berry vines to bind the logs and he got across the river but he would never know how he did it; and he crossed the bottomlands and looked north and if south for a landmark. Seeing nothing familiar, he climbed a hill and looked over the country up and down the river, and to the west where he had plodded through the wild winds. He felt pretty sure that Kate was north of him, and after he had walked a mile he knew that she was. After two more miles and two hours and the coming of night he looked up the hill at her cold snow-covered shack.
In this moment, when convinced that he was looking at it, that it was no mirage or apparition, he was overwhelmed by sudden and awful weakness. In spite of all he could do he sank to the earth and began to weep. The mightiest of all the mountain men had reached the end of his strength but not of his grit. He began to crawl on hands and knees toward her door. His escape from the Blackfeet and his long journey without food through deep cold and blizzards was to become one of the legends of the mountain men, along with Tom Fitzpatrick’s, Colter’s, and Glass’s. “He done it, he shorely did,” Windy Bill would say a hundred times around the campfires. “He jist headed torst the crazy woman and clum the mountains and there he wuz …. “
By the time Sam reached Kate’s door his hands were so nearly frozen that he spent a few minutes blowing on them, sucking the fingers, washing them in snow, massaging them, and putting them inside his clothing against his ribs. He was so weak that he was sitting, and when he saw the snowpath to the graves, and then the cairn that looked like a mound of snow, he began to cry like a tortured child. He pounded on the door planks, for the door was closed, and he said, “It’s me! It’s Sam!” Grasping the door with both hands, he pulled it open and back. He was straining forward to peer into the gloom when with a low cry he saw that the woman was almost in his hands. She was right by the doorway and she seemed to be sitting in her pile of bedding, but only her gray hair and a part of her face were visible. Sam put a finger up and touched her face to see if it was alive.
“It’s me!” he whispered. “It’s your friend Sam.” He crawled over the pile of bedding and turned and pulled the plank door shut. Then like an animal he wormed himself into the pile of bedding and put an arm up and around the woman and wept quietly till he fell asleep.
PART THREE
SAM
27
SAM SLEPT THROUGH the night and into the next afternoon and when he awoke he was alone. After realizing where he was he wondered if he had hogged the bedding, and then like a beast crawled over to the north wall to paw among the cold things there. One parcel, as hard as stone, he thought was jerked venison; with his knife he peeled back a part of the skin pouch, and chipping off a small piece, thrust it into his mouth. A moment after swallowing it he turned sick and was convulsed but like a famished wolf in midwinter at a carcass he chewed and swallowed other morsels. Then, suddenly, he was seized by shudderings so strong and uncontrollable that he shook all over and moaned. He crawled over to the bedding, dragging the sack of meat after him, and with some blankets around him he sat, shuddering and wondering what was wrong with him. He drew the sack of meat into the bedding and his shaking hands tried to whittle off another piece; but he was so utterly and infinitely tired that his deepest wish was to surrender to the warmth and sleep again. And so he sank back and piled bedding around and over him, and with his arms around the pouch of venison he slept again.
It was after dark when he stirred and sat up. This time it took him several minutes to come into wakefulness and realize where he was. He was still but half awake and more than half dead. At first he had thought he was in the hole back under the snow and he listened for the winds. Then he reach
ed around him to examine the things. On seeing the open door, the bedding, the river bottom down the hill, he knew where he was and he wondered where Kate was. He sat a few minutes, feeling more than thinking, and trying to believe that he was still alive. After a while he became aware of the bag of meat and the knife, and of the indescribable sensations of emptiness and pain in his stomach and bowels. He began to tell himself in a dim feeble way that he would find matches and build a fire and cook a feast; but when he tried to rise he seemed unable to. And so he sat, trying to think. Realization came slowly, filling him with a kind of wonder and gladness; and at last with a cry he told himself over and over that he had escaped, like Job he had endured, and here he was, alive, whole, and ready for breakfast or supper. And for vengeance, but that didn’t seem so important now. What was important was that he seemed unable to move his legs, to bend his fingers, to focus his gaze; but he was alive, and with superhuman effort he struggled to his feet. Then he stood, trembling all over, and tried to imagine that he was Don Giovanni about to sing, with magnificent brio and power, to a lovely servant maid. What he did, while conjuring images of beautiful girls, was to topple and fall face downward on the pile of bedding. With both hands he reached round him and pulled bedding over him; and he was about to sink again into sleep when he began to shake with rage against himself, and again forced himself to rise.
He felt pretty weak and foolish as he steadied himself against a wall and looked out at the world. He could see or hear no sign of Kate; he hoped he had not put her to flight. By God, he had better stop acting like a sick old man, he had better get some breakfast on and be the man around the house. How long had he slept, anyway? He was not sure that he had not been asleep for a week. Where was Kate? “Kate!” he called in his weak voice. “Where are you?” He felt horrible weakness and nausea; what he wanted to do was to sink again into slumber but he forced himself to clasp the doorjamb with both hands and look out.
It was not morning, it was night, and there was Kate, the poor gray old thing, sitting between the graves with robes over her. Sam stepped outside, and moving like a feeble old man, he made his way over to her and around to face her; and in a voice that was not at all like his normal voice he told her that the Almighty had walked with him all the way from the Blackfeet camp to the Musselshell; and in more days than he could remember he had had nothing to eat; but now he was going to get up a breakfast, or supper or whatever it would be—venison steaks, roasted grouse, hot biscuits, wild honey, coffee—Did she have any baccy around?
Kate seemed to pay no attention to him. Unable to tell if she was unaware of him or was ignoring him, he told her that he would not be with her long; as soon as he got some rest and some food in his belly, and had brought in some good meat for her, he would be gone. Could she tell him where the matches were? Only a part of her face was showing; a wrinkled hand clasped the edge of the robe under her chin. Sam looked up at the sky and around at the lonely white world; and over at the cairn with its deep cloak of snow; and he wondered if he was alive after all, or if he and the woman were only ghosts, here in the winter. Turning away from her, he felt numbed with cold, half dead with fatigue, drowsy, nausea-sick, and rather mindless and weightless; but so abounding was his health and vitality that he made his way inside the shack, and sitting by the bag of venison, began to eat. Afraid that he would vomit, he put in his mouth only a thin shaving and he chewed it thoroughly before he dared swallow it; and then sat a few moments studying the sensations in his stomach before chewing again. The shavings tasted more of frost than of meat, but after he had swallowed seven or eight thin slices he felt a little better and believed he could keep them down. Looking round him in the gloom, he wondered where the matches were, the flour, the coffee. Of course she had no tobacco. When he thought of tobacco and the loss of the lock of hair, and his fine rifle and revolvers and pipes, his bitterness toward the Blackfeet came boiling up in him with such passion that he exploded and emptied his stomach. What a fool he was to act this way! But they had stolen Mick’s fine horse! Oh, they would pay for it, they would pay for it! He stood up, in a childish tantrum of rage—a man only feebly in possession of his senses; and glowered round him and then went outside to look with hate at the gray wintry Blackfeet wilderness out of which he had come. He looked south, thinking of the distance between him and his nearest friend. In a few days he would head up the Musselshell to find Bill or Hank or Abner but now he had work to do.
His stomach had puked forth its shavings of meat and frost and was now growling in its pain. He thought it would be best to get a fire going and make a pot of coffee. That might settle his stomach. It might shoot warmth and aroma all through him. At the pile of wood in the southeast corner he made shavings; he dug into the stuff by the north wall and found matches, coffee, and an old coffeepot; and with a tin pail he went to the river. There he stood a few moments, surveying the scene and looking for sign of duck, goose, or anything a man could eat. Going up the hill with the water, he told himself that Kate must have gone over this path two or three times every day since the first snows, for it was firmly packed. While the coffee was steaming he found the flour, and dipping a shaving of meat into cold flour, he thrust it into his mouth. He ground a coffee bean between his teeth. That seemed to allay his nausea; he ate a half dozen and then searched for tin cups; and when the coffee was hot and fragrant he took a cup to Kate, and knelt, offering it to her. It was hot coffee, he said; she ought to drink it. He wanted to clasp her shoulders to see how thin she was, for she looked like nothing but hide and bone. He did not know that he himself was thirty pounds lighter than he had been when he walked around the two bull elk. The past week seemed to be only nightmare: had he actually killed a man and waded up a river and fought with a grizzly and crossed a hundred and fifty miles of frozen desolation in wild winds? Had he actually lain on his belly in the night and paddled across the black cold waters? He was like a man coming out of ether; he moved more by beast instinct than by human will. But his belly was mellowing in the hot coffee and his wits were clearing. “Please drink it,” he said. What were the words in Job at which his father’s finger had pointed so gravely? “Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with man, to bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living.” The temperature, he thought, was still fifteen below zero; the winds were still shrieking up the river and Canada was getting ready to dump more cyclones upon its neighbor; but Sam was warmed with hot coffee and filled with the light of the living, and neither wind nor cold could faze him now.
“All right, if you won’t drink it I’ll drink it.”
He was astonished, as he had been in previous visits, to see how little this woman had eaten. It looked as if she lived on flour and raisins. She had never touched the woodpile. Removing all the bedding from the doorway, Sam laid a part of the fire there, to warm the earth; but at once with a sharp rebuke to himself he took the fire away. How stupid it would be to warm the earth deep, so that her bed would be cozy, and then go away and leave her to freeze to death! There wasn’t much a man could do with such a woman, except leave her to God. He had learned in the past few minutes that fire wasn’t good for him either; he had become so inured to cold that fire heat on his flesh was like a scalding liniment, like sunburn on his forehead and eyes. The fire was not good for the shack’s cold timbers; in the heat they began to snap and complain, and moisture came out of the logs and out of the air, and stood in big drops. Smoke and heat went all through the cabin; and smoke poured out through the cracks in the walls and the doorway and the hole in the roof. With the axe he sliced off the venison and laid the meat by the fire. Finding no grease or salt, he decided not to make biscuits until he had fresh game. While the meat was thawing he took a second cup of coffee to Kate, hoping she would drink it, and with surprise saw that she had covered her head. Again he knelt before her and told her, briefly, of his capture, escape, and long flight, but he doubted that she listened or understood. Lifting the robe from her gray he
ad, he saw that her face was ghastly thin, drawn, haggard, immobile. Her eyes seemed to see and yet not to see. What had God done with this woman or for this woman? During her long winters here she had never had a fire or hot food but had been only a she-beast that had crawled over to eat flour and raisins, and then into her pile of dirty bedding to wait for another morning. It was the moon she waited for but the men who knew her would never know that.
Bending low, he touched lips to her gray hair, saying, “That’s for my mother and you and all mothers.” He had hoped she would open her eyes and look at him when she smelled the hot coffee, but maybe smell was not one of her senses any more. Returning to the shack, he mixed flour and water and cooked the batter and called it bread. He steamed raisins in hot water until they were swollen and soft, and he made another pot of coffee. What a feast it would be! If only after he had feasted he could sit back with his pipe and think of vengeance!
Out in the frozen wastes the eyes of man or beast could have seen the smoke rising—and wolves did see it and try to smell its odors. A few of them came within two hundred yards of the shack and trotted round it, smelling the hot odors; and Sam smelled the wolves and knew they were there. He took to Kate a tin plate of hot venison, raisins, bread, and coffee, but she refused to look at it or see it. Kneeling, he held it right under her face, so that the fragrance would enter her nostrils; and he said, as if to a child, “It’s hot food and you should eat it.” He arranged her robes so that he could set the plate in her lap and the cup of hot coffee at her side, and returned to the shack. He had warmed a spot of earth for his own bed this night and he now sat on the spot and ate, but very slowly, because sensations of nausea filled his throat. The warmth had made him feel drowsy and ill; he guessed that in the morning he would go out to the hills and find a deer. Until midnight he kept the fire burning in the shack, and Kate sat out by the graves. He went out to tell her that if she would move he would make her bed for her but she gave no sign that she heard him. “It’s warm inside,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to go in?” Had she forgotten what a fire was? He seized the edges of the robes around her and pulled. He almost toppled her over but he managed at last totake the robes away. After holding one before the fire to warm it he went out and draped it over her, saying, “There now, you’ll feel better.” He ought to have known that she would feel worse. To his amazement she began to cry. After staring at her a few moments he picked her up, bedding and all, and set her inside the cabin door. Her plate of food he put by the fire to keep warm; and while sitting by the fire, feeling ill himself and not far from tears, the thought came to him that this woman would eat nothing as long as he was with her. He could no longer doubt that she felt him to be an enemy. He fetched wood until he had a big pile in a corner, and then, with rifle and knife close by him, stretched out on his robe on the spot of warm earth and was soon asleep. When he awoke two or three hours later and looked over at Kate’s bedding she was not there. He went to the doorway and looked out. She was in the snowpath between the graves, with bedding under and over her; and she was talking, as if to her children. Sam looked up and saw a round frozen moon in the sky. He went over and stood behind her and saw that she was holding a Bible. She had her hands in a fold of blanket which she used as mittens but he thought her hands must be frozen, for it was a bitter night. A large robe inside the door he thoroughly warmed at the fire and then spread it over her and down across the book. Not once did she interrupt her talking or praying, or whatever it was she was doing.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 29