Butcher's Crossing (25 page)

Above the wind he heard a faint shout; the wagon loomed up suddenly before him; his horse halted, pitching him forward. He heard the shout again and thought it was his name that was called. He guided his horse along the side of the wagon, hunching himself against the wind and peering out of his half-closed eyes every second or so, trying to see who had called him. Miller and Schneider, their horses close together facing the wind, waited for him at the front of the wagon. When he came up to them, he saw Charley Hoge huddled between the two horses, his back hunched to the wind.

Stiffly, leaning against the wind, their faces turned down so that the brims of their hats were blown against their cheeks, the men dismounted from their horses, and, crouching against the wind, thrusting themselves at an angle through it, came toward Andrews; Miller beckoned him to get down. As he dismounted, the force of the wind pushed his unsupported body forward and he stumbled, one foot for a moment caught in the stirrup.

Miller staggered up to him, grasped him by the shoulders, and put his bearded face—which was now stiff and icy in spots, where snow had melted and frozen—to Andrews’s ear. He shouted: “We’re going to leave the wagon here; it slows us up too much. You hold on to the horses while Fred and I unyoke the team.”

Andrews nodded and pulled the reins with him as he went toward the horses. His own horse pulled back, almost dislodging the reins from his numb hand; he jerked heavily on the reins and the horse followed him. Still holding the reins in one hand, he stooped and fumbled in the snow, which lifted and swirled about his feet as if disturbed by a long explosion, until he found the knotted reins of the other horses. As he straightened, Charley Hoge, whose back had been toward him, turned; the stump of his forearm was thrust inside his light coat, and his good arm pressed it close to his body as his body hunched over it. For a moment Charley Hoge looked at Andrews without seeing him; his pale eyes were open and unblinking against the stinging wind and snow, and they focused on nothing. His mouth was moving rapidly and his lips twitched one way and another, causing the beard about his mouth to jerk unevenly. Andrews shouted his name but the wind tore the word from his lips; Charley Hoge’s eyes did not move. Andrews came a little closer; shifting all three reins to one hand, he reached out his other to touch Charley Hoge on the shoulder. At his touch, Charley Hoge jerked back away and cowered, his eyes still glazed and his lips still working. Andrews shouted again:

“It’ll be all right, Charley. It’ll be all right.”

He was barely able to hear what Charley Hoge repeated over and over, to the wind, the snow, and the cold:

“God help me. Lord Jesus Christ help me. God help me.”

At a thump behind him, Andrews turned; a dim dark bulk loomed out of the whiteness and lumbered past him. The first of the oxen had been unyoked by Miller and Schneider. As the shape lumbered into the whiteness and disappeared, the horses which Andrews held bolted. Their quick movement caught him by surprise, and before he could throw his weight against the reins, one of the horses’ bellies had brushed heavily against Charley Hoge, knocking him to the ground. Andrews started involuntarily toward him, and as he did so the three horses moved together, pulling him around and forward, so that he was off balance; his feet flew into the air behind him, and he landed heavily on his stomach and chest in the snow. Somehow he managed to hold on to the reins. Flat on the snow, he grinned foolishly at his blue-red hands that clutched the thin strips of leather. Snow flew around him, and he was aware of the heavy lift and fall of hooves on either side of his head; he realized slowly and almost without surprise that he was being dragged along the ground on his stomach.

He pulled his weight against the moving reins and managed to get his knees under his body; then he pulled harder, so that his knees went before him as he leaned backward and sawed on the reins. The rear leg of one of the horses brushed against his shoulder, and he nearly lost his balance; but he regained it and lifted himself upward again, thrusting his legs down in a desperate leap, stumbling to his feet, and running along with the horses for several yards. Then he dug his heels into the snow and sawed again on the reins; he felt himself being carried along, but less swiftly. His heels went beneath the snow, caught on the grass, and plowed shallowly into the earth. The horses slowed, and halted. He stood for a moment panting; he was still smiling foolishly, though his legs were trembling and his arms were without strength, as he turned and looked behind him.

Whiteness met his eyes. He could not see the wagon, or the oxen, or the men who stood near them. He listened, trying to hear a sound to guide him; nothing came above the increasing moan of the wind. He knelt and looked behind him at the path he had scraped in the snow; a narrow, rough depression showed shallowly. He pulled the horses with him as he followed the path, stooping close to the ground and brushing at the snow with his free hand. After a few yards the trail began to fill, and soon it disappeared before the gusts of wind and blown snow. As nearly as he could guess, he continued to walk in the direction from which he had been pulled. He hoped that he had been carried away from the wagon in a straight line, but he could not be sure. Every now and then he shouted; his voice was whipped from his mouth and carried behind him by the wind. He hurried, and stumbled in the snow; from his feet and hands, numbness crept toward his body. He looked about him wildly. He tried to walk forward slowly and steadily, conserving his strength; but his legs jerked beneath him and carried him forward in an uneven gait that was half trot, half run. The horses, whose reins he carried, seemed an intolerable burden, though they moved docilely behind him; he had to use all his will to keep from dropping the reins and running blindly in the snow. He sobbed, and fell to his knees. Awkwardly, with the reins still clutched in his right hand, he crawled forward.

Distantly, he heard a shout; he paused and lifted his head. To his right, a little closer, the sound came again. He got to his feet and ran toward it, his sobbing breath becoming a rasping laugh. Suddenly, out of the white and gray of the driving snow, the blurred shape of the wagon loomed; and he saw three figures huddled beside it. One of them detached itself and walked toward him. It was Miller. He shouted something that Andrews did not understand, and took the reins that Andrews still held. When he lifted the reins, Andrews’s hand was lifted stiffly to chest level; he looked at it and tried to loose the fingers. He could not make them move. Miller took his hand and pried the fingers back from the leather. His hand empty, Andrews worked his fingers, opening and closing his hand until the cramp was gone.

Miller came near him and shouted in his ear: “You all right?”

Andrews nodded.

“Let’s get going,” Miller shouted. Bending against the wind, the two men struggled toward the wagon and Charley Hoge and Schneider. Miller drew Schneider’s and Andrews’s heads together and shouted again: “I’ll put Charley on with me. You two stay close.”

Beside the wagon the men mounted their horses. Miller pulled Charley Hoge up behind him; he tightly grasped Miller around the stomach and buried his head against Miller’s back; his eyes were screwed shut, and his mouth still worked upon the words that none of them could hear. Miller moved his horse away from the wagon; Andrews and Schneider followed. In a few moments the wagon was blotted from their sight by a solid wall of falling snow.

Shortly they passed beyond the ground that was curved by the white mounds of buffalo carcasses; Miller pushed his horse to a gallop, and the others followed. The gaits of their horses were awkward, jolting them in their saddles so that they had to hang on to their saddle horns with both hands. Now and then they came upon stretches of ground where the snow lay in heavy drifts; there the horses slowed to a walk and plowed through the snow which covered their forelegs halfway up to their knees.

Andrews’s sense of direction had become numbed by the swirling white vortex of snow. The faint gray-green of the pine trees that blanketed the opposing mountainsides, which had earlier guided them in the general direction of the valley’s mouth, had long been shrouded from the views of all of them; beyond the horses and the figures huddled upon them, Andrews could not see any mark that showed him where they went. The same whiteness met his eyes wherever he looked; he had the sensation that, dizzily, they were circling around and around in a circle that gradually decreased, until they were spinning furiously upon a single point.

And still Miller spurred his horse, and beat its flanks, which glistened with sweat even in the driving, bitter cold. The three horses were grouped closely together; with a kind of vague horror that he could not understand, Andrews saw that Miller had closed his eyes against the stinging gale, and kept them closed, his head turned downward and to the side so that it was visible to Andrews even in their heavy gallop. Miller kept a tight hold on the reins, guiding the horse in a direction that he did not see. The others followed him blindly, trusting his blindness.

Suddenly, out of the storm, a dark wall reared up before them; it was the mountainside of trees, upon which the snow, driven by the fierce wind, could not settle. The ghostly shape of the large chimney rock where they had built their fires loomed vaguely, a dirty yellow-gray against the white snow. Miller slowed his horse to a walk, and led the others to the aspen-pole corral that Charley Hoge had built. Trying to keep their backs to the wind, they dismounted and led their horses into the corral, tethering them close together in the farthest corner. They left their saddles on, hooking the stirrups over the horns so that in the wind they would not beat against the horses’ sides. Miller motioned for them to follow him; bent almost double in the face of the wind, they made their way out of the corral toward the spot where they had stacked and baled the buffalo hides. The stacks of hides were drifted high with snow; some of them had blown over, and rested lengthwise on the ground; others swayed sharply before the strong gusts of wind; the corners of two or three loose hides, scattered over the ground, protruded from the snow; Andrews realized that this was what remained of an unthonged pile of hides, half as high as the completed ricks. Most of them had been blown away by the powerful wind. For a few moments, the men stood still, huddled close together beside a stack of hides.

Half leaning against it, a great weariness came over Andrews; despite the cold, his limbs loosened and his eyelids dropped. Dimly he remembered something that he had been told, or that he had read, about death by freezing. With a shiver of fright he stood up away from the hides. He flailed his arms, beating them against his sides until he could feel the blood run through them more swiftly; and he began to jog around in a small circle, lifting his knees as he ran.

Miller pushed himself away from the rick of hides where he had been resting and stood in his path; he put both hands on Andrews’s shoulders, and said, his face close and his voice loud: “Be still. You want to get yourself froze to death, just keep moving around; that’ll do it right quick.”

Andrews looked at him dully.

“You work up a sweat,” Miller continued, “and it’ll freeze around you as soon as you’re still for a minute. You just do what I tell you and you’ll be all right.” He returned to Schneider. “Fred, cut some of them hides loose.”

Schneider fumbled in one of the pockets of his canvas coat and brought out a small pocketknife. He sawed at the frozen thongs until they parted and spilled the compressed hides out of their confines. Immediately, the wind caught half a dozen of them, lifted them high, and sailed them in various directions; some of them landed high in the branches of the pines, and others scudded along the snow toward the open valley and disappeared.

“Grab yourselves three or four of them,” Miller shouted; and he fell upon a small pile that slid from the larger stack. Quickly Andrews and Schneider did the same; but Charley Hoge did not move. He remained huddled, half crouching. Miller, on his stomach, carrying the hides with him, crawled across the snow to where a few of the skins remained in the unbound pile. He pulled at the stiff thong that Schneider had hacked and managed to extricate a length of it from the bottom hide, where it was fastened to the small hole in the skin of what had been a buffalo leg. He cut this length into a number of pieces of equal length. Schneider and Andrews crawled across the snow and watched him as he worked.

With his short knife, Miller punched holes in each of the legs of the hides which he secured beneath him. Then, turning two of the skins against each other, so that fur touched fur, he thonged the legs together. The two other furs he turned so that the fur of each was to the weather, and placed them crosswise, one above and one beneath the crude open-ended and open-sided sack he had fashioned. When he had thonged the legs of the last two skins, there lay on the ground a rough but fairly effective protection against the weather, a bag whose ends were open but whose sides were loosely closed, into which two men could crawl and protect themselves against the main fury of the wind and hurtling snow. Miller dragged the heavy bag across the snow, pulled it among some of the fallen ricks, and jammed one open end against a bank of snow that was collecting against the fallen pile. Then he helped Charley Hoge crawl into the bag, and returned to Andrews and Schneider. Andrews lifted himself a little off the ground, and Miller pulled two of the hides from beneath him and began thonging the legs together.

“This will keep you from freezing,” he shouted above the wind. “Just keep close together in this, and don’t let yourselves get wet. You won’t be warm, but you’ll live.” Andrews got to his knees and tried to grasp the edges of the hides, to pick them up and carry them to Miller, who had almost finished the first part of the shelter; but his fingers were so numb that he could not make them move with any precision; they hung at the ends of his hands and moved feebly and erratically over the frozen fur, without strength or sensation. Bending his hands from the wrists, shoving them through the snow under the hides, he staggered to his feet; pressing the hides against his lower body, he started to walk with them to Miller; but a gust of wind caught him, thrusting the hides heavily against him, and nearly lifted him off his feet. He fell to the ground again, near Miller, and pushed the hides through the snow to him.