Looking off through the forest, he saw movement under the low-hanging branches of a pine tree as one of the wolves crawled out from between a snowdrift and the trunk. He had his gun up, aiming to fire before he realized it wasn’t a wolf—it was the old man’s dog. Even so, he almost shot it anyway. The only thing that stopped him was his fear that someone following them would hear the shot.
“My horse is gone,” Sarah murmured.
“And we’ve got company,” he told her, pointing. “Stay away from it. Roll up the sleeping bag.”
He was setting the two saddle blankets onto the bay while she did what she was told. Then he was burying one saddle in the snow, hefting the other one onto the bay, cinching it, and all the while the air was still in contrast with the wind in the night, and the dog stood fifty yards away under the low-slung branches of the pine tree, watching. It hardly breathed or blinked or otherwise moved a muscle, just stood there, waiting. He coiled the rope he had used to tether the horse and secured it to the saddle. He picked up the saddle bags from the pinto and tied them over the ones on the bay. Then he tied the rolled-up sleeping bag over them, lifted Sarah onto the saddle, got on behind her and started off. They had deliberately not eaten the night before, figuring that the soup they had eaten at the mine was enough for one day. Now he pulled out some beef jerky that he had saved from the meal they had eaten with the old man back in town, gave some to Sarah, bit into some himself, cold and brittle, taking a while to soften it in his mouth, and looking back, he saw that the dog was coming out from under the pine branches, struggling through the chest-deep snow, bounding, stumbling, finally reaching the depression of their tracks and following.
5
It kept the same distance, fifty yards behind them. He looked back once, and it was gone. He looked back another time, and it was following them again.
“What are you stopping for?” Sarah asked.
The dog stopped too, easing down onto its haunches.
He nudged the horse forward. The dog followed. He nudged the horse faster, and the dog kept pace. Then fearful of draining the horse’s strength, he reined the horse slower, and the dog eased up as well, still following.
In time the wind returned, coming from the right, gusting snow across in front and back of him. But the snow never rose more than four feet off the ground, it just kept streaking along the ground, the thick green boughs of the pine trees clear all around him above it but everything hidden below, and glancing back, he couldn’t see the dog anymore. He imagined it darting closer to them under the cover of the gusting snow, imagined it leaping, his hand on his gun in its holster, riding faster, and then the wind eased off, and he looked quickly back, and the dog wasn’t there anymore.
Then it was.
The procession went on like that, the dog sometimes there, sometimes not, sometimes hidden by the gusting snow but always the same distance behind whenever he saw it. He was forced to stop that night in a hollow among the trees, the only half-decent spot that he could find, and he couldn’t let himself sleep, lying in the sleeping bag, keeping watch over Sarah, his gun by his hand, the rope that tethered the horse wound several times around a tree and then around his wrist so that he could tell in the dark if anything was happening to the horse.
He must have dozed, but if he did, he didn’t know it, day suddenly and the horse all right and the dog the same distance over there under a tree. He saddled the horse again, and they started off again, the dog following, and this time the wind returned much earlier, not just picking up snow and blowing it along but bringing flakes down with it, sporadic at first, then thin and constant, by late afternoon a steady snowfall, and this was what? the third day, he wasn’t sure anymore, since his horse had eaten anything, and it was moving slower, more awkwardly, and he didn’t see how it could keep going much longer. Once it stumbled to its knees, and he was barely able to urge it up.
That was when the dog moved a little closer.
Or maybe it was before that. Since the snowfall shortened the distance that he could see, the dog must have been moving closer all the while, keeping them in sight in the gathering snowfall.
The whiteout settled everything, the wind so strong, the snow coming down so thick around them that sky, earth, air, everything was the same gray washed-out color, and trees which they bumped into weren’t visible even a foot away, their faces crusted with ice and snow, the horse hardly moving, every way the same and likely a chasm in front of them, and when the horse finally tumbled down, he knew that they were finished. The horse just kept tumbling, and he and Sarah were falling over, rolling in the snow, him tugging at Sarah to keep her free from the weight of the horse as it rolled, and then they were lying motionless, him still gripping the reins of the fallen horse but as close as it was to him, he couldn’t see it. He struggled to his feet, waist-deep in snow, fighting to get the horse up, shouting at it, the wind driving his words back into his throat. He got it up, and it rolled again, and he realized that he couldn’t see Sarah, clutching for her in the blinding snow, finding her, dragging her with him into the depression that the horse’s body had made, sinking down exhausted, for one brief moment thinking of the dog again before he noticed that the wind had lessened.
No, it hadn’t. It just seemed that way from where they were collapsed in the snow. They were in a kind of trench, sheltered by the walls, the whiteout whipping over them, and this was maybe the last idea he would ever have, but he needed to try it, cursing, rousing himself into motion, fumbling at the snow.
“Dig!”
“My hands,”
“Dig!”
He clawed at the snow, grabbing Sarah’s hands and working them, scooping with his arms, burrowing into the side of the drift.
“Dig!” he kept telling her, squirming farther in, the wind lessening the more he worked, and in a moment he had a hollow in there for her, pushing her in, and he was scooping the snow beside her, digging, worming in next to her. The hollow was maybe four feet by six feet, just room enough for the two of them scrunched up on their sides in there, but the wind was less, and he could breathe again, and if snow was still coming in on them, it wasn’t so much that he couldn’t keep pushing it away.
He crawled out, groping for the horse.
He couldn’t find it. Then he had it, almost drifted over by the snow. It was breathing weakly, trembling under his touch, and he was sure that the horse was going to die anyway and he couldn’t let it stand somehow and wander off and get buried by the snow where he would never find it again, so he slipped off his glove, fumbling for his gun. In the blinding snow he couldn’t see the horse’s head; he had to feel along until he touched where its massive jawbones curved up at the back of its head toward its ears, and pressing the barrel of his gun against the soft spot just behind the ears, he cocked and fired. The horse jerked against him, knocking him back down into the snow. Sarah screamed, and he almost let it go at that, but he couldn’t bear the thought that he might not have killed it, that it still might be alive and suffering, so he struggled to stand and felt and fired, the shot almost muffled soundless in the storm, and this time when the horse jerked, it was just from the impact of the bullet and he was satisfied.
Sarah was only a few feet in back of him. Even so, when he uncinched the saddle from the horse and worked it free, he almost didn’t find his way back to her.
“You shot the horse.”
“I had to. It was suffering.”
And something else, and he didn’t know how she was going to take it, but he had to be honest with her.
“We’re going to eat it. It’s what’s going to keep us alive up here.”
He was scooping out more snow to make room for the saddle and the saddlebags and the sleeping bag, glancing at her, and the idea of eating the horse didn’t seem to matter to her one way or the other. It might be food, but it wasn’t food now, and she just settled back against the low wall of the hollow, holding herself.
He made one more trip out, groping for the saddle
blankets off the horse, finding his way back, spreading the blankets under them, covering themselves with the sleeping bag, leaning back with his head against the saddle.
One more thing. Always one more thing.
“Here,” he said. “Use these saddlebags for a headrest. Here’s some jerky.”
It was the last two pieces he had left, one for her, one for him and they nibbled at them in silence, him sucking on a piece in his mouth while he waited for it to soften so he could chew it.
6
He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but the close stale air woke him, and he couldn’t see, and he realized that the snow had blocked the entrance. He pushed to clear it, and then he was out into darkness and the wind was shrieking in his face and he ducked back down, registering that it was night out there, that the snow was still coming, him sucking huge gulps of fresh air, crawling back down to where the air was warm from their breathing. He didn’t hear anything from Sarah. Touching her, he slumped back satisfied that she was alive. He snuggled in under the sleeping bag, heat from his body still lingering in its folds to comfort him. The entrance blocked up once more in the night, and he woke, crawling to clear it, only this time when he burst through, the snow blinded him in a different way, the storm gone, not night but day, the sky deep blue and cloudless and the sun arcing off the snow so brilliantly that after the darkness, he needed to close his eyes and lower his head.
He crawled back to Sarah.
“Wake up. It’s morning.”
She didn’t move.
“Wake up.”
But she still didn’t move, and suddenly frightened, he reached under her arms, dragging her to the entrance, nudging her, watching as her nostrils widened in the sharp cold air, seeing her eyelids flicker. The air down there must have half poisoned her. Or maybe she was simply exhausted. No matter. He had to wake her. He tapped at her face, pried at one eyelid, and then her arm was up, pushing weakly to get his hand away.
“I know,” he said. “It’s hard to see. But we can fix that. Right now we need to get some water into you. We’re going to be all right. Do you understand?”
She nodded weakly, but it was obvious that she didn’t believe him.
“No, it’s true. Listen. As long as we’ve got water, we can stay alive. There’s a rule of numbers that somebody made up once for people who get lost up here. You can only go three days maybe without water, but you can go for as much as three weeks without food. You might not look like much after all that time, you might not have very much flesh on you, but you can stay alive that long, and as it is, we’ve got plenty of water, all this snow around here, God knows we’ve got plenty of that, and we’ve got the horse for food, and we’re going to be all right, do you understand me?”
She nodded again, and this time her nod was a little more convincing as she took a handful of snow and brought it toward her mouth.
He had to stop her. “No, that isn’t what I meant. It takes too much heat to melt the snow in your mouth. We need to fix up that hole down there. We need to widen it, find a way to make it stronger, warmer, get it big enough to build a fire.”
And that did it. The idea of a fire began to brighten her, and as soon as she had rested longer, as soon as he had made sure she was fine, they crawled back in, him rounding the ceiling so there wouldn’t be as much stress on it, digging at the walls, widening them while she pushed the snow from the opening, piling it on either side the way he had shown her to form a windbreak. He wasn’t worried about their hunters coming after them now. The snow was so deep that nothing could move around up here for very far or long. He wasn’t even worried about the dog anymore, and he was betting that the others assumed he and Sarah had died in the storm.
Certainly they should have. It was only the slightest chance that they hadn’t. But now they were going to be all right, he told himself, convincing himself. It was just going to take a lot of work. He didn’t dare think about how long the winter could be, how deep the snow could fall, how little meat there would be on the horse after everything he had put it through. He just fought to concentrate on widening the burrow, sculpting the walls and the roof, wondering if he shouldn’t have built a fire out there right away and melted snow for Sarah to drink, deciding he was right, that another storm could come up anytime, and they needed shelter before a fire, and they needed to do everything at once or not at all.
He crawled out, groping through the snow before he came upon the frozen-solid horse, deciding that since everything had to be done and the horse was immediately before him, he would do this first.
But he didn’t know how, chipping at the hide with his knife, barely penetrating it. He saw how one leg stuck out like a dead limb from a tree, and that gave him the idea, mustering his energy as he stood and jumped down on it, trying to break it at the knee. He tried three times before he heard a crack in it and saw a split in the hide at the joint. Then he sat patiently cutting at it, not sure how much his knife could take without dulling, unable to do anything about that anyway. It seemed to take an hour before he jumped once more and the lower part of the leg broke off. When he picked it up, it felt like a club in his hand, the horseshoe and the hoof unnatural as he held it.
“Take this inside,” he told Sarah.
She didn’t want to touch it.
“Take it. I need to get some wood.”
They were in a hollow circled with pine trees. The nearest was fifteen feet, but the snow was so deep as he struggled over that it might as well have been a hundred. The snow wedged up under his pant legs and his coat. He tried scooping the snow from in front of him, leaning into it to pack it down and give him footing. Nothing worked.
Dear God, I need to dig a trench.
But he didn’t have the strength.
Then rocking back and forth to shift the snow, determined to get to that tree, he felt his coat snag against something underneath, and digging down, he saw the tip of a branch. No, it wasn’t the tip, it was the jagged end from where the rest of it had already broken off, and digging farther down he came to a massive fallen trunk.
It had been there all along, just a few feet ahead of him, and leaning forward, grabbing it, he drew himself up out of the snow onto it, standing on it, able to touch the nearest ends of the pine boughs.
But these were all green. He needed to get over to the inside branches of the tree where he could snap off dead limbs and twigs and dead needles to help get the fire started. Leaning out as far as he could without falling, he grasped the thickest branch he could reach and swung out into the snow, so underestimating his weakness that he almost lost his grip, fighting to keep hold as he pulled himself hand over hand along the branch through the snow toward where the drift was not as deep. By then he was among the other branches, and easing himself down, the snow just up to his thighs here, he began snapping off the wood he needed, twigs and clumps of needles that he put in his pockets, one stout dead branch that took all his effort to tug and break. It had other smaller branches projecting from it, and plenty of twigs and dead needles as well, and it would be enough to get a small fire started that would last for a while, but he didn’t want to have to make this trip any more than necessary, and moving around the trunk of the tree, he found more branches to break off. Then climbing a short way, he broke off even more branches, but he didn’t have the strength to climb any higher, and when he found himself gripping the trunk of the tree, fighting to breathe, he knew he had to stop.
He slipped down, almost falling, into the snow, gathering the branches, tossing them one at a time toward the entrance to the burrow. The smaller ones made it easily, Sarah over there watching him, gathering them in a pile, but the bigger wider ones with shorter branches projecting from them seemed to float in the air and only made it halfway. He needed to wade over to them, throwing them again, reaching the fallen trunk hidden in the snow, stepping onto it and over it into the trough he had already made and working his way toward Sarah. She already had most of the branches together, and he was so l
ightheaded and tired from his effort that all he could do was sit by the entrance and struggle to catch his breath, feeling his sweat beneath his clothes, his throat burning. Sarah broke off the smaller branches from the bigger ones, setting them in a pile, carrying them in as he told her, and then he had strength enough to stand and jump onto the bigger branches, snapping them.
The sun was well down across from them, the air colder when they finished, his sweat freezing on him, making him shiver, and he was grateful to have this over, to be able to crawl back into the burrow and start to build the fire, anticipating the warmth, the smell of food.
But there was always something more to do, he told himself. Always. He would never be finished. Because as soon as he set down the square of metal, putting dead needles in a pile onto it, setting twigs on top of that and then a few finger-thick bits of wood, he realized that he had not made allowance for the smoke. There might not be much, but it would be enough to choke them out, and he needed to find a way to clear it.
At first he thought of pushing two straight branches up through the roof of the burrow, leaving a small space between them and poking the snow free from there to form a chimney. But he had already broken the branches too short, and he couldn’t force himself to go out again for more, and there was too much risk of bringing down the roof.
There had to be another way.
He had been looking at it all the time. The tree that helped form the back wall of the burrow. He crawled over to it, grabbing a branch from the pile he had gathered and digging a small hole up through the snow at its side. The branch was three feet long, and when he had gone its length, he needed to crawl in closer, turning onto his back and looking up toward the hole as he raised his arm and dug even higher. The snow fell on his face, and he kept wiping it away, blinking it out of his eyes, digging higher, and then before he expected, he was through, daylight filtered by the needled branches of the tree showing greenish-gray up there.
Testament Page 20