Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The rest watched silently. It was so cold that the Creoles had to work swiftly, and soon their hands were covered with frozen red slush. Not even stuffing them under their coats or into their armpits helped much, but in time they did crudely butcher perhaps a hundred pounds of stringy meat and load the freezing red meat into panniers. The head of the mule, now severed from its body, was half buried in snow, its sightless eyes staring at nothing and its sliced-off tongue an open wound between its jaws. It would go hungry no more, and I had done it a favor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Henry King

  I was settling a blanket and a sawbuck on a mule when I spotted Colonel Frémont and Old Bill struggle up to that knob. I thought I knew what that was all about. I grinned and nudged Godey, who was overseeing the loading.

  He winked. Pretty soon the rest of the colonel’s men were observing the two climbers who were stumbling up that snowy grade. Old Bill could hardly keep up with the colonel. I nodded slightly to Breckenridge, who in turn nudged Scott, Bacon, and Beadle, and that caught the attention of Ferguson, Hubbard, and Carver. Pretty quickly, most of the colonel’s veterans were staring up that slope, plainly entertained by the sight.

  “Colonel’s heading up there to get the Ten Commandments,” Ferguson said.

  “No he isn’t. He’s going up there to give God ten or twelve commandments,” Hubbard said.

  “Saddle those mules,” Godey said, but no one paid the slightest heed.

  Frémont and Old Bill Williams reached the crown of that knob and began an animated conversation or maybe a dispute, with plenty of arm waving.

  “I guess I know what’s being said,” I announced.

  “Maybe you don’t,” Tom Martin retorted.

  “That old coward Williams, he’s calling it quits, and he’s telling the colonel to turn around and head back the way we came,” I said.

  “Could be, but I’d suppose they’re just looking at the way west. All this snow, it gets hard to see what’s what.”

  “I’ve been watching that Williams,” I said, reaching for the girth that Martin was handing me under the mule’s belly. “You know what he is? A loafer. He hasn’t done a lick of work, but that’s not what’s galling me. He don’t know the way, and he’s pretending he does, and now the colonel’s seen right through him and giving him what for.”

  “I think he wants the colonel to turn around,” Joseph Stepperfeldt said from behind the next mule over. “He’s half-crazy. He told me once he can see animal spirits. Maybe the mule spirits are telling him to turn around.” He laughed. It was a good joke.

  I tightened the girth and buckled it. Martin began lifting panniers onto the trembling mule, who stood with locked legs, head low. They were all like that. They had gone three days without a meal, apart from a few twigs.

  The wind was howling again, and cirrus clouds ribbed the sky. It would be snowing soon. It entertained me. I’m always wondering how bad it can get.

  “I’d bet my last dollar we’ll move ahead,” I said.

  “Of course,” Martin said. “The colonel’s commanding. There’s not one soul over him now that he’s out of the army. There is no one to say nay.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I saw the truth in it. I’d always seen the colonel as a man who let nothing stop him. Our gentlemanly commander would take orders from no one, not even God. And he would succeed in his design, even if he left the entire company behind him. I have the same nature. We were going to go over these mountains no matter what the cost, and that was already decided. We were going to do what no others could do. The Conqueror of California would conquer the San Juan Mountains.

  “He’s got him a wife waiting out in California,” Martin said. “If I had me a wife, maybe I’d be in a hurry, too.”

  I smiled. “Mine’s back East, but you don’t see me hightailing it out of here.”

  “It ain’t a wife that’s itching old Frémont,” said Breckenridge. “He’s got some other kind of itch.”

  No one had a reply to that.

  Iron-bellied clouds were scudding in, and we faced another mean day. Breckenridge noticed the clouds, too. “Don’t know where we’ll be spending Christmas,” he said.

  “We’ll have a feast. Mule-meat pudding, with mule soup,” I replied.

  He eyed the trembling mules, who stood lock legged with the packs on their backs. “It’d do them a favor,” Breckenridge said. “What’s the new missus going to do this Christmas, Henry?”

  “Pine for me,” I replied.

  “Like you’re pining for her, eh?” Breckenridge retorted.

  I laughed. A gust of air wormed through my buckskin coat. I was already frostbit in half a dozen places, two fingers, my earlobes, and there was plenty of dead flesh around my ankles too. “She’s not frostbit,” I said. “She’s with her parents, I imagine.”

  A burdened mule shivered and slowly buckled, slowly collapsing, resisting its own weakness to the last, but it went down in the snow, half-buried even as it shuddered and died.

  “I suppose we ought to butcher him,” I said. “I’ll ask Godey.”

  I found the headman loading a trembling mule.

  “We just lost one. You think we should butcher before he freezes up?”

  “Leave him. We’ll butcher another tonight,” Godey said.

  So Breckenridge and I tugged the packs off the dead one. It was hard work, and I kept feeling I wasn’t up to my usual. Sometimes I felt plumb faint. Half the men felt the way I did. Maybe it was altitude, or bad food. We hadn’t seen a green in weeks. But some of the company didn’t seem affected at all. Preuss, the wiry German, seemed the way he always was, furiously measuring everything, getting the height of every peak in sight, making pencil sketches and notes, and ignoring every hardship. But others, like that Scot, Cathcart, seemed to shrink down every day, and now he was parchment over bones and had great hollow sockets around his eyes. You never knew about those foreigners, whether they could take it.

  A fresh gust of bitter air boiled past us, firing pellets of ice into our beards.

  “Goddamn the wind,” Martin snapped.

  I had rarely heard oathing in this company. The colonel’s utterances were free of it, and there was an unspoken rule that the rest of us would follow his example. But the colonel was up on that knoll, talking things over with the rotten guide.

  I felt the slivers of ice melt in my beard, work down, and then freeze. This would be another day of icicles hanging from our beards and hair.

  About then, Frémont and Old Bill skidded and tumbled down that knoll, barely remaining upright. Frémont surveyed the company, the loaded mules, the newly dead one.

  “On our way,” he said. “We’ll walk.”

  Some of the company seemed irritated by the command and reluctantly slid off their wretched animals. But it was a valuable request. By now the outliers of the approaching storm were overhead, and the wintry sun vanished behind an iron overcast. The trail beaters once again hacked our way westward, this time through windswept country that harbored only two or three feet of snow on the level. The wind jammed so much drift into our faces and eyes we couldn’t tell what was descending from the clouds and what was being lifted by the gusts.

  It took the heat right out of me, even though I was walking, and I knew ere long I’d be frostbit again and again, and this would be a hard day. I wondered if a man could get frostbit in the privates. What would that do to me? Now that was something to think about. I thought I’d ask Ben Kern about it, not that a greenhorn would know anything. There sure are places a man doesn’t want to get himself frostbit, especially me. I’ve sure got an itch to get to California with all my parts ready and willing.

  We rotated the trail breaking, three at a time. When my turn came, I found myself with Stepperfeldt and Ferguson, each of us armed with a deadwood club, which we used to break through the skin of the drifts, hammer down a wideenough trail to pose no obstacle to the weary mules. Usually I didn’t mind the work. It was a way
of keeping warm, keeping the blood up, but now a mysterious lassitude gripped me, and it was all I could do to lift the deadwood, smash through snow, and lift it again. And instead of getting warmer, I found myself getting so chilled I thought to find my bedroll and wrap myself. Not that blankets would do much in a wind like that.

  So, step by step, we proceeded on. I was glad when Godey sent our relief forward, and I turned over my driftwood snow club and waited for the train to catch up. The rest were a long time coming, and I could see why. The mules were quitting, and even the efforts of several men tugging and shoving couldn’t get them to move. So time was flying by and the company was stalled, right in the first foothills on the far side of that plateau. There wasn’t a mule that would climb up that trail.

  Godey shouted a few things, his voice lost in the wind, and I watched as the company stripped the packs off the mules, tied ropes to the panniers, and began skidding them forward. Even then the mules had to be yanked and shoved, but now the company was struggling up slopes again. I watched Preuss wrestle two panniers up the icy slope, his precious instruments in them. He would not allow anyone to touch the packs and was uncommonly careful whenever he came to a hump or a protruding rock. Well, I didn’t blame him one particle. Tough old bird, doing what had to be done. We all protect our jewels.

  Godey handed me a rope, but I was so worn from beating a trail I didn’t have the strength to drag a pack. But I did. There was no help for it. Drag a pack or give up. Quit. Sit down in the snow and die. And I was damned if I would do that and let them think I didn’t have the temper in me. So I learned to drag for twenty yards, pause a while, and go another few yards, and pause, and let my heart settle down.

  The snow fell now, driven by the gusts, but these were thick flakes, and in moments they were filling the trench the beaters had pounded up that slope. More mules quit. They would stop, tremble, and slowly collapse into the snow, and we would leave them there. In two minutes they were buried by snow, just a white lump blocking our snow road.

  There went more dinner, I thought. Mule meat wasn’t much for eating, and the mules were down to bone anyway. But we managed, mostly by cutting the meat up fine and boiling it to a sort of mush. Some of the messes tried slicing it thin and roasting, but it was like eating leather, and pretty soon we were all eating mule stew, mule mush, mule soup, because that was the only way we could get any mule into our innards.

  But now we were running through mules in a hurry, and I wondered what we would be eating in a week. I’d heard that Frémont had put aside some frozen elk for Christmas dinner a few days before, and I supposed that would be mighty fine, if we got as far as Christmas. The way things were going, I didn’t know whether we’d make one more day or not.

  I’d heard there were some Mexican settlements down the Rio del Norte, but that was some piece away, and that wasn’t the direction the colonel was heading. He’d gotten his compass set on west, and west was how he’d go. California or bust. He was stubborn, I’ll grant that. That’s what I liked about him. There’s a type of man who won’t quit, and he’d rather die trying. That’s what I am.

  We didn’t make much progress, and by afternoon, with the peril of darkness drawing nigh, the colonel halted us on a slope in a pine forest where deadwood abounded and there would be some shelter from the gale. We had lost mules all day; an animal would simply quit, stand stock-still, and slowly fold into the snow. I surveyed the new camp hopefully and did see some grass on an exposed southerly slope, and I hoped we could put the mules onto it, even though we would have to beat a path through perilous slopes to reach it. Some weary men started at once, while the rest of us collected deadwood and tried to save the mules by rubbing them. The mules either stood inertly, an inch from death, or sought blankets and ropes and leather to eat, making life difficult for us because there was little they would not gnaw on, including what was left of our tents and clothing and tack.

  I watched the Creoles slit the throat of the weakest of the living mules, watched it sag into the snow, blood gouting from its neck. They set upon the animal before it was entirely dead. We would have mule stew this night, and mule hide with which to fashion patches for our ruined boots. The prospect offered me no comfort.

  Somehow, we made camp and got some fires going in protected snow pits where the wind would not snuff them. The snow had diminished, but the heavens scowled at us, and I had the sense we were trespassers, invaders of a place sacred to others, where no mortal should pass by. I got from gossip that ahead, at the top of a bald hill, one would only find more of the same, no relief in any direction.

  The men were all done in. I had thought myself alone in my weakness, but now I saw horror everywhere, men so skeletal and worn they seemed half alive. The sole exception was the colonel, who was calmly erecting his tent, scraping snow away, building a private fire—he always camped apart from the rest of us—and making himself comfortable. I could not fathom it. He had pulled away from us for several days, rarely saying a word to any of us, and never a word of encouragement. It was as if he were indifferent to our fate, or maybe he simply felt helpless to change anything or admit to a mistake or terrible judgment. And if pride stopped him from changing course, his fate was our own, for there was nothing we could do about any of it.

  We did get a few of the mules over to that grassy slope, but most could not be budged and stood mutely near our mess fires, waiting to die. I imagined that within a day or so, not a one would be standing. The question that had us all brooding now was whether any of us would soon be standing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Benjamin Kern, MD

  White on white on white. We called it Camp Dismal, but that understates the case. We huddled on the north slope of a great bald mountain at around eleven thousand feet, in a deluge of snow that lasted for days. There was only misery and foreboding.

  We settled in some vast depth of snow, whiteness so deep we could see only the tops of trees, making them seem like needle-bearing shrubs. But below us, buried in snow, were scrub pines, all that grew at this altitude. We could not pitch a tent, for there was no ground under us to take the stakes, so we erected huts of deadwood and canvas, and that was all the shelter we could manage. Each mess managed to build a fire in a pit, which allayed the wind slightly but added smoke to our misery and did little to warm our numb flesh.

  Now, at last, we could go no further. We were walled by white, by endless snow falling upon us, a foot or two or three a day. We could neither retreat from the bald mountain nor push forward, so we were trapped there. Preuss led a small party westward, intending to find a way down, but not even that wiry, hardy man, a veteran of Frémont’s earlier campaigns, could manage it, and in time he retreated to our camp, where we all sat helplessly, awaiting our fate with each tick of the clock.

  Snow engulfed our messes, and we could scarcely find firewood to keep a blaze going in all that stinging white downfall. The misery was compounded by the wetness of our clothing, which permeated every layer of our wool and leather and rendered us so miserable that we wondered how we might endure yet another minute of another hour of another day. We could not dry ourselves or our clothing in that constant blizzard.

  We scraped away snow with our tin mess plates, struggled into the treetops to hack at limbs for the fire, retreated into our huts chilled and soaked, our beards dangling icicles, our eyes smarting from the smoke. And lost from us was hope, for the extent of our horizon was a white wall blotting out even the closest scenery, so that all we had before our watering eyes was ten or fifteen feet of whiteness.

  But that was only one facet of the horror. Through this whole white nightmare, we heard the piteous whickering of the dying mules, summoning one another for help, telling one another they were departing. I swear, all that first night, the mules we had managed to drive to that windswept dome where a little grass broke through wailed miserably. I swear what I heard was sobbing, the weeping of the mules as they trumpeted their distress to one another, and then the he
avy silence that overtook them in the night. I knew they were gone. I knew that the murderous wind had clubbed them senseless, even as they frantically pawed and dug for the thin brown strands of grass that might sustain them in kinder climates.

  Thus did the ghastly night pass, and in the gray light of dawn, after we had scraped away new feet of snow with our mess plates, we searched for them and saw none standing on that slope. They had vanished, and we could not find their carcasses even if we had tried with a pole, for merciless nature had mercifully hidden them from our eyes under a white blanket. Yet a few still stood in the woods, protected from the wind, a foot of snow on their backs, icicles dangling from their every hair, rattling under their jaws. Old Bill Williams swore he could see their spirits hovering over them, waiting to fly away, but I could never fathom such a thing. I knew only what my medical training and senses told me: their body temperatures barely sustained life. They had not eaten for days and were surviving on the last of the fat they carried. They were too weak to walk, much less plow through drifts as high as they were. But those few lived, if only for the moment.

  At some of the other messes, live mules were being slaughtered. I would hear one last pitiful bleat, and then the thud of an animal capsizing. But it was odd. These messes never dressed out the entire carcass, making the most of it. Those men were as worn as we were, numbed by cold, struggling for breath in the thin air, and soon the slaughtered and mostly intact mule was blanketed by merciful snow. The last mules were simply targets of opportunity and were not systematically butchered to give us as much meat as possible. I had come to love those mules, knew many of them well, and could hardly bear to see them tumble, never to rise again.