A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

  Behind Doggett, the boy bent over with sneezing and when he recovered, he looked bleary-eyed from under his blanket hood. “Huh?”

  Doggett pointed. “What the hell is that over there?”

  The boy pushed back his hood and wiped a mitten across his watery eyes, and saw nothing more than a continuing landscape of snow, hardly differing from anything he had seen since leaving Snelling three days ago. Then he saw the big rock.

  “’At’s a rock,” he said.

  “Aw, Gawd,” said the Corporal. “Down off to the bottom there. What’s that? Is that a horse?”

  Coughing, the boy squinted long and hard. “Well, it might be.”

  Doggett knew his soldierly obligations. “You go on and see what that’s all about. If it gets late we’ll wait on you at the crick. Get a move on.”

  The boy’s horse was big, a five-year-old roan gelding that had stepped along easily on the blown-over freight road and had only slightly more trouble heading through the deeper snow toward the big rock.

  What had pricked the Corporal’s interest was indeed a horse—an almost dead horse, the boy saw, which hardly moved its head at their noisy approach through chest-deep snow. It was a shabby old bay gelding, its cinch partly torn so the saddle hung under its belly, anchored in the snow. Its head hung without moving, the warmth of its nose having melted a small depression in the snow to accommodate its breathing.

  “You poor bastard,” said the boy. He unwrapped himself, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and lowered himself into the drift. With his knife he finished the tear in the cinch and pulled the saddle free. He punched some of the snow off. It wasn’t worth a nickel; just rotten-looking wood in the frame, the leather scraped off or hanging in fringes.

  But as he threw the saddle aside, the boy found something else attached to a short piece of rope on the pommel—an old rifle. From muzzle to stock, snow and ice had attached itself to the firearm, and he couldn’t tell if it was worth anything. He knocked most of the snow off and strung the rope on his own saddle, wondering whether this find was something the Corporal needed to know about.

  The old bay hadn’t moved. This was one sick horse, thought the boy. Why in hell was it out here in the middle of nowhere, not a tree or anything in sight? Who owned this horse, the saddle, the rifle? He sure as hell was a goner, thought the boy . . . out here.

  He wiped his nose on his mitten and looked toward the road where the detail moved along slowly, back toward Fort Buford—they’d be there tomorrow night, if another Goddamned storm didn’t decide to come in and freeze everybody’s asses off. He climbed into his blankets on the roan, the horse anxious to get back to his pals moving away from him on the road.

  Looking back, the boy saw the old bay make its first real move, raising its head as if to watch his departure.

  Poor bastard sure could use something to eat, the boy thought. There was plenty of oats and a little corn in the mule packs, but he wasn’t going to ride down to get it. Then he remembered the stale bread in his saddlebag. A fellow never knew when he might want a little extra. The army usually gave you enough to eat, but a lot of it was crap you didn’t want, not even as good as yesterday’s leftovers. Lots of stuff he had saved that he didn’t end up eating, but the dogs and chickens and the ornery hog at the fort sure loved it.

  Out of the bag he dug a large handful of crusty bread, five or six big slices, and leaned over with it to the old bay. He wasn’t a foot from its nose before the whole lot disappeared—just sucked it up, just like that.

  Jeez, the boy thought, I coulda lost a hand there! The horse watched for more.

  “You’re gonna have to come and get it yourself, my friend,” said the boy, and set off to retrace his trail to the freight road, where the detail’s caboose mule was just visible a mile ahead. Behind, the old bay nag came along, steadily.

  Smells them oats, thought the boy.