“Eee yah! No!” “Whoa!” And then that awful thumping and crashing and whinnying. William looked down to see a white-and-brown piebald mare below him rolling down the slope, crushing the baggage it carried, including William’s own field desk. The horse tumbled through two lines of climbers, miraculously missing everybody, until it was brought to a halt by a sturdy juniper tree forty yards down. Papers and notebooks and pieces of desk lay scattered all the way down. The whole party was halted for an hour, getting the horse back on its feet, checking it over, gathering and repacking the strewn materials, reloading. The pieces of desk were tied in a bundle and put back on the mare, in the wan hope that Shields might be able to repair it. The desk was important, as both captains had been using it as their outdoor office ever since Lewis’s desk had been cached.
By midafternoon several more horses had slipped and rolled backward, two of them hurt badly but able to continue because no bones were broken. Up here in the devastated part of the forest, it was lighter but windier. Heavy clouds swept the mountaintop, sometimes hiding it, and the wind moaned. A bald eagle materialized from the underside of a cloud, screamed as if astonished at the sight of these ground creatures intruding in its lofty domain, then soared off eastward and out of sight over a ridge.
By late afternoon, the climbers had reached live timber again, the alpine fir and whitebark pine of the very high country, and the clouds blew open enough to show them the ridge a few hundred feet above. Here there was old snow behind the north sides of boulders and under lightning-blasted trees. All of the horses that had fallen were still coming up, but two other horses had simply given out; they had gone to their knees and then keeled over on their sides to lie on the slope, unable to rise, slobbering, sides heaving, necks stretched. Their loads had been distributed among the other horses, and those two defeated creatures had been left behind. It was no use to kill them for meat; they were too gaunt and poor; there wasn’t time to butcher them; and every man and horse was too heavily burdened and exhausted to add even a pound of bad horseflesh to his load.
William’s legs were twitching with a fatigue that had become like a pain of burning; his chest felt as if it would break open with its efforts to expand and extract some oxygen from the thin mountain air, his throat was parched and raw from gasping, and his shoulders were aching and raw from the pull and chafing of his knapsack. He reckoned they had climbed eight or ten miles on the zigzag path to reach this ridge. Below, in the dismal gorge, the fast river was invisible and too distant to be heard under the moan and whistle of the wind.
Scannon had long since given up his desire to move; he wanted to lie down and lick his bloody paws or sleep, and now York had made a leash for him from a rawhide strap and kept yanking it to make him come along, bellowing now and then: “Come ’long, you lazy black scound’l!” This, and the collapse of the two horses, redoubled William’s admiration for his men.
They’re stronger than horses and dogs, he thought.
They were on the ridge at last. There was the main Indian road again, that beaten footpath around rocks and along the crest, leading westward on this long, long ridge. And down on the other side of the mountain was another river gorge, probably the north fork of the Koos Koos Kee, William presumed, a thread of water winding below still another distant ridge, beyond which he could see peaks of snow, faint through the mist.
Now it was deep dusk, and the chill wind whipped the warmth of climbing out of sweat-drenched clothes immediately, and every man was trembling and twitching with cold and hunger and pain. Only Sacajawea and her papoose were riding. Everyone else walked and led a laden horse. William looked at her. Her blanket was pulled over her head and she held it closed over her mouth, her eyes half shut, caught up in destiny, again going away and away from her people. The horses limped along the ridge as the caravan moved on in the howling, blue-gray dusk, the distant mountains growing dimmer and then being swallowed by darkness. They went on, over knobs bare of trees, along saddles of ridgeline where the bent trees shuddered in the windblast; they went on, looking for a level place to camp. They would have to stop soon. They could hardly see the road.
Toby yelled. He had found water.
A small spring gushed from rocks a little way below the ridge. It was not a level enough place to camp, and there was no grass for the horses, but in the lee of a boulder, a hasty fire was built and a ration of the portable soup was heated. This time the men drank it without complaint. Then the fire was stamped out and the caravan continued along the ridge. Toby assured them there was a place not far ahead where they could stop.
There was old snow underfoot now, and they could see a vague grayness before them, but below everything was black and howling.
At last they were on a wide, rounded eminence. It was the bare, treeless promontory of a mountaintop, and in its center a scarp of stone stood like an old castle wall. The baggage was unloaded and piled near it to make a windbreak. Enough deadwood was found to make a small fire and melt snow for more of the portable soup. The horses were hobbled and let out to forage on the sparse ground cover.
It was all that could be done. No journal-keeping tonight, no washing, no undressing. The flames and sparks of the campfire were whipped by the wind, and soon all the firewood was gone.
The Corps of Discovery rolled, clothes, moccasins, and all, into their blankets and lay down on the trampled snow in utter darkness, on the backbone of a mountain range, pulled their heads inside to muffle the woeful dirge of the wind, some perhaps thinking for a moment of their dismal and Godforsaken circumstances, but were all, except the sentry, plummeting into the numb sleep of exhaustion within ten minutes.
Only the sentry saw the snow begin to fall.
“LORD-A-GOD, WE’RE IN FOR IT NOW!”
Sergeant Ordway’s shout, in the whistling wind, made William sit upright in his blanket. He saw a whirling blankness, with shapeless gray lumps here and there where the men were sitting up in their blankets to peer around. Farther out were the ghostly shapes of horses. William shook his blanket, and snow fell off of it. On the ground around him the snow was two or three inches deep. The packsaddles and baggage bundles were almost hidden by drifted snow. He could see as the snowflakes drove across the face of the stony escarpment that they were large flakes. It was no mere flurry. It looked like the kind of a snow that goes on all day.
William’s feet and legs and shoulders ached so fiercely that he could hardly move. He thought with heavy dread of the weight of his pack and the walking and climbing that would have to be done today, with the snow making it still harder and more dangerous. But this snow meant more than just hard going: it meant that the Nez Percé trail likely would be obliterated. And it meant that if there were any game animals around, they would be invisible at a hundred yards.
“We’d best make what distance we can early,” Lewis said, “while we can still see where the trail is.”
“Got a good excuse for skipping breakfast, anyway,” William said. “No food.” There was nothing left but a few pounds of the dried soup.
Few of the men had stockings anymore. They spent a few minutes wrapping their feet in rags, then mending their moccasins. Sewing the leather was excruciating and clumsy with their cold-stiffened fingers. Men sat huddled over this work, shuddering, their noses running. When they were done, they pulled the repaired moccasins on over the rags on their feet and then rose painfully to go out and round up the horses for loading. But even in the midst of this misery, there was laughter. Some of the men were warming themselves up with a snowball fight. Scannon, who apparently had slept off his fatigue rolled in a ball with his tail over his muzzle, was now among them, leaping to try to catch snowballs in flight.
Sacajawea knelt, her blanket draped tentlike over her, cleaning Pompey’s cradleboard and repacking it with new down. She smiled up at William as she administered to the baby. She put the child to her breast, keeping him, as always, close to her skin’s warmth and sheltered from the snowy wind. “At least one
of our boys is a-gettin’ some breakfast today,” Sergeant Gass remarked.
THE SNOW WAS TWO INCHES DEEPER BY THE TIME THE PACK train was underway. Parts of the trail were so drifted over it could be found only by watching for worn places on the bark of trees. William and old Toby moved ahead searching for this faint trail. As the drifting snow filled in their footprints almost at once, William had to blaze trees with his tomahawk, chipping away bark at eye level, to leave a way the pack train could see.
You wouldn’t think it could be so hard to keep to a trail that runs along a ridge, he thought. And yet he and the old Indian had to backtrack repeatedly; often their progress would lead them to cul-de-sacs or the edges of cliffs, even places where it would be impossible to turn horses around. So these places had to be followed to their dead ends before William could go back, find the true way, and only then make his marks on the trees.
They groped along this ridgetop for hours in this manner. The snow kept falling and the clouds they were in curtained everything beyond one or two hundred yards. The trail went along wooded saddles and over treeless knobs where the wind blew so strong that it was necessary to lean into it. The knobs were blank fields with grass-heads whipping wildly in the wind above waving currents of blowing snow. Far below there would be barely visible treetops, and below them, snow, mist and cloud. Some of these bald ridges seemed as narrow and steep as roof peaks. William, and even old sure-footed Toby, slipped and fell on their sides often on these slippery snowy edges, and William could see this was going to be exceedingly dangerous for the horses, top-heavy as they were with their loads. A horse tumbling from here might go down like a sled for hundreds of yards before crashing into a tree or sailing off some invisible cliff down there, and would be almost impossible to bring back up, even if unhurt.
The same for a man with a pack, he thought.
Toby ranged here and there tirelessly, cowled like a monk in the buffalo robe wrapped around him, the feathers on his bow twirling in the wind. William remembered how scrawny he had looked naked, how fragile he looked compared with the brawny soldiers, and wondered from where he drew his strength and endurance. When the old guide would turn around to look at him, William would see that dark raisin of a face with the white shell through the nostrils, the hooded eyes darting and searching. The old face never looked worried. That helped William a great deal.
The snow was six to ten inches deep in the open now, and in drift places it was to the thighs. William’s moccasins and socks and leggings were soaked through and caked with snow. In the falls he had taken, his elk-hide tunic and mittens had gotten snow-packed and wet. He was as cold and wet all over as he had ever been in his life.
Got to consider, he thought, that my feet could freeze. They well might, even if I keep moving.
One wind-smoothed slope of snow proved to have nothing under it, and he fell through and began sliding down through a cold cascade of snow-clods. He felt a tree limb as he went down and grabbed it. He got to his feet on the slope, heart slamming violently. Toby’s face appeared over the crest above him, then broke into a relieved grin. William floundered back up onto the ridge. He stood shivering and brushed snow off his rifle, out of the muzzle and the crevices of the flintlock and the steel frizzen. He took off his mittens so he could work. He cleaned out the powder and recharged it, tilting the small end of the powder horn down into it. While he was doing this he felt a tug at his sleeve.
Toby was pointing forward and down the slope. A few yards below the place where William had fallen, a gray animal was moving, half obscured by blowing snow. William saw its black tail-tuft and the long ears, saw it spring once like a goat from the chest-deep snow onto a ledge, then turn to look curiously up toward the ridge.
A mule deer! It was within easy range, not more than twenty yards below. It was small, but would give the troops at least one mess of venison which they sorely needed.
William raised the rifle to get a bead, and saw as he did so that Toby was notching an arrow on his bowstring.
William squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped. Damnation! He thumbed the hammer back again and squeezed the trigger and again it snapped. He knew the primer was dry; he had just changed it. He cocked the rifle again. Now the animal was starting to move away. It turned and began winding down through a cleft in the ledge, passing for a moment behind a shrub. William heard the thung! of Toby’s bowstring at the same time he squeezed the trigger. The arrow touched a twig of the shrub and went awry just as William’s flintlock snapped for the third time. He clenched his teeth, cocked it and heard it snap again, and watched the deer, moving away slowly into the snow curtain, unhurried, unaware of its absurd good fortune so far. Toby notched another arrow and let it fly, while William examined his rifle again, but the deer was far down now. It apparently heard or saw the arrow pass by, spraddled and leaped a few more steps, then faded into the white whirl as William snapped three more times with the accursed rifle.
He felt even colder now that the excitement of the hunter’s chance had drained out of him. He shook his head sadly, and old Toby nodded with sympathy. William saw the trouble now: the flint was loose, apparently dislodged in his fall. He adjusted it and tightened the thumbscrew down—or thought he did, as he could not tell whether his benumbed fingers were giving it any pressure at all. Then he searched in the snow until he found his mitten. He pulled it on and worked his fingers vigorously inside it, but the mitten was soaked and cold. A great shudder shook him down the length of his body. He pointed his rifle down the trail, and Toby nodded and they proceeded on along the howling ridgeline.
AT MIDDAY THEY WENT BACK TWO MILES AND FOUND THE pack train coming along. Lewis said several horses had fallen but had been returned to the trail with difficulty. Several men also had taken tumbles down the snowy slopes, but no one had been hurt. “You’re showing frostbite on your cheeks there,” Lewis said. “When we stop for soup, better get some grease and rub ’em.”
“There’s grass for the beasts about two hundred yards up yonder,” William said.
William looked anxiously around at the men as they huddled in the snow around a bonfire sipping the steaming brew. They were wasting, losing flesh. The horses were pulling at sparse grass in a steeply sloping little meadow where the scouring wind had kept the snow from getting deep.
“I hate to keep going in this snowstorm,” William murmured. “but I haven’t seen a place yet to make a camp.”
Lewis nodded. “Just have to keep ’em going,” he said. “Got to work our way over this blamed range before the snow gets over our heads.”
William rose, the hot soup eating like acid in the pit of his stomach. “We’ll go on ahead,” he said. “We’ll find a place, I swear it.”
“Take Colter with you. He hunted all morning and didn’t find so much as a sparrow. His luck’s due to change.”
William did not mention the mule deer and the failure of his rifle. The party did not need to hear that kind of a hard-luck story just now.
COLTER’S LUCK DID NOT CHANGE. THREE MORE DEER WERE seen during the rest of the long and torturous and chilling afternoon, but they vanished into the snow veil like ghosts before a sight could be put on them. The clouds stayed on the ridge and the snow kept falling It took the rest of the afternoon to go six more miles along the crest, the trail growing more and more faint as snow began sticking to the tree trunks.
THE SNOW WAS GRAYING WITH DUSK WHEN WILLIAM AND Colter found a heavily wooded cove with a running spring, just a few yards down the north slope from the ridge. There was not really any level ground, but there was the water and there was a little grass, and there was a wealth of fallen deadwood. “This is as good a home as we’re going to find this night,” William said. “Best thing we can do till they catch up is fix up bonfires.” Shivering, soaked, they dragged up wood and made high piles of it. “I hear ’em a-coming, now,” Colter said when it was almost dark.
“Good. Fire up those piles and I’ll walk back and lead ’em in.”
When William met the head of the column, Lewis was looking wild-eyed with anxiety. Then he saw the flames glimmering through the trees and managed a smile. “No game,” William said, “but we can warm up their outsides anyway.”
“Might have to let ’em kill another colt,” Lewis panted. “They’ve got to have some meat. Got to.”
York came alongside William as he led them along to the ridge toward the firelight. He had a scarf wrapped around his face up to his eyes. “Know what this night mind me of, Mast’ Billy?” he said in a muffled voice. “’Memmer when we was acrossin’ the Allegheny bringin’ you Ma an’ Pa an’ sisters, an’ you led us through th’ snow to that cabin?”
William’s mind leaped back across two decades and a continent, and he remembered. “Yes, by heaven, I do. Ha! Just like the old days, York, say what?”
“Just like,” York said.
“But I know one difference. I’m not fool enough to rassle you in any snowbank anymore. Y’ve outgrown me, old friend.” Tears suddenly smarted in William’s eyes as he said this. He didn’t remember ever having called his slave “old friend” before.
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 107