Butcher's Crossing (26 page)

Schneider had not moved. He lay on his stomach, on his small stack of hides, and looked at Miller and Andrews; through the snow and ice that glittered and stiffened his tangled hair and beard, his eyes gleamed.

After Miller had crossed the hides and as he was tying the last thong to hold them together, he shouted to Schneider: “Come on! Let’s drag this over to where Charley and me are laying.”

For a moment, through the ice and snow white on his face, Schneider’s bluish lips retracted in what looked like a grin. Then slowly, from side to side, he shook his head.

“Come on!” Miller shouted again. “You’ll freeze your ass off if you lay out here much longer.”

Strongly through the howling wind came Schneider’s voice: “No!”

Dragging the shelter between them, Andrews and Miller came closer to Schneider. Miller said:

“You gone crazy, Fred? Come on, now. Get inside this with Will, here. You’re going to get froze stiff.”

Schneider grinned again, and looked from one of them to another.

“You sons-of-bitches can go to hell.” He closed his mouth and worked his jaws back and forth, trying to draw spittle; bits of ice and flakes of snow worked loose from his beard and were whipped away by the wind. He spat meagerly on the snow in front of him. “Up to now, I’ve done what you said. I went with you when I didn’t want to go, I turned away from water when I knew they was water behind me, I stayed up here with you when I knew I hadn’t ought to stay. Well, from now on in, I don’t want to have nothing to do with you. You sons-of-bitches. I’m sick of the sight of you; I’m sick of the smell of you. From here on in, I take care of myself. That’s all I give a damn about.” He reached one hand forward to Miller; the fingers clawed upward, and trembled from his anger. “Now give me some of them thongs, and leave me be. I’ll manage for myself.”

Miller’s face twisted in a fury that surpassed even Schneider’s; he pounded a fist into the snow, where it sank deep to the solid ground.

“You’re crazy!” he shouted. “Use your head. You’ll get yourself froze. You never been through one of these blizzards.”

“I know what to do,” Schneider said. “I been thinking about it ever since this started. Now give me them thongs, and leave me be.”

The two men stared at each other for several moments. The tiny snowflakes, thick and sharp as blowing sand, streamed between them. Finally Miller shook his head and handed the remaining thongs to Schneider. His voice became quieter. “Do what you have to do, Fred. It don’t matter a damn to me.” He turned a little to Andrews and jerked his head back toward the fallen bales. “Come on, let’s get out of this.” They crawled across the snow away from Schneider, pulling Andrews’s shelter with them. Once Andrews looked back; Schneider had begun to lash his hides together. He worked alone and furiously in the open space of storm, and did not look in their direction.

Miller and Andrews placed the shelter beside the one which was humped with Charley Hoge’s body, and shoved its open end against the bale of hides. Miller held the other end open and shouted to Andrews:

“Get in and lay down. Lay as quiet as you can. The more you move around, the more likely you are to get froze. Get some sleep if you can. This is liable to last for some time.”

Andrews went into the bag feet first. Before his head was fully inside, he turned and looked at Miller.

Miller said: “You’ll be all right. Just do what I said.” Then Andrews put his head inside, and Miller closed the flap, stamping it into the snow so that it would stay closed. Andrews blinked against the darkness; the rancid smell of the buffalo came into his nostrils. He thrust his numb hands between his thighs, and waited for them to warm. They were numb for a long time and he wondered if they were frozen; when they finally began to tingle and then to pain him with their slowly growing warmth, he sighed and relaxed a little.

The wind outside found its way through the small openings of the bag and blew snow in upon him; the sides of the bag were thrust against him by the wind as it came in heavy gusts. As it lessened, the sides of the bag moved away from him. He felt movement in the shelter next to his own, and over the wind he thought he heard Charley Hoge cry out in fear. As his face warmed, the rough hair of the buffalo hide irritated his skin; he felt something crawl over it, and tried to brush it away; but the movement opened the sides of his shelter and a stream of snow sifted in upon him. He lay still and did not attempt to move again, though he realized that what he had felt on his cheek was one of the insects parasitic upon the buffalo—a louse, or a flea, or a tick. He waited for the bite into his flesh, and when it came he forced himself not to move.

After a time, the stiff hide shelter pressed upon him with an increasing weight. The wind seemed to have lessened, for no longer did he hear the angry snarl and moan about his ears. He raised the flap of his shelter, and felt the weight of the snow above him; in the darkness he saw only the faintest suggestion of light. He moved his hand toward it; it met the dry, crumbling cold of solidly banked snow.

Under the snow, between the skins that had only a few days before held together the flesh of the buffalo, his body rested. Slowly its sluggish blood generated warmth, and sent the warmth to his body’s skin, and out to the close hide of the buffalo; thence his body gathered its own small warmth, and loosened within it. The shrill drone of the wind above him lulled his hearing, and he slept.

For two days and three nights the storm roared about the high valley where the men were trapped; they lay hidden under drifts of snow and did not move beneath them, except to emerge to relieve themselves, or to poke holes in the drifted banks to allow fresh air into their close dark caves of skin. Once Andrews had to come out into the weather to release water that he had held inside him until his groin and upper thighs throbbed with pain. Weakly he pushed the snow aside from his head-flap, and crawled into the bitter cold, blinking his eyes; he emerged into a darkness that was absolute. He felt the snow sting against his cheeks and forehead; he winced at the cold air that cut into his lungs; but he could see nothing. Afraid to move, he crouched where he had merged and made water into the night. Then he fumbled back through the snow and squirmed into his close shelter, which still held a bit of the body warmth that he had left.

Much of the time he slept; when he did not sleep, he lay motionless on his side, knees drawn up on his chest, so that his body would give warmth to itself. Awake, his mind was torpid and unsure, and it moved as sluggishly as his blood. Thoughts, unoccasioned and faint, drifted vaguely into his mind and out. He half remembered the comforts of his home in Boston; but that seemed unreal and far away, and of those thoughts there remained in his mind only thin ghosts of remembered sensation—the feel of a feather bed at night, the dim comfortable closeness of a front parlor, the sleepy hum of unhurried conversation below him after he had gone to bed.

He thought of Francine. He could not bring her image to his mind, and he did not try; he thought of her as flesh, as softness, as warmth. Though he did not know why (and though it did not occur to him to wonder why), he thought of her as a part of himself that could not quite make another part of himself warm. Somehow he had pushed that part away from him once. He felt himself sinking toward that warmth; and cold, before he met it, he slept again.

On the morning of the third day, Andrews turned weakly under the weight of the snow and burrowed through the long drift that had gathered at his head. Though he had grown somewhat used to the cold, which even in sleep enveloped the thin edge of warmth his body managed to maintain, he flinched and closed his eyes, hunching his neck into his shoulders as his flesh came against the packed coldness of the snow.

When he came from under the snow, his eyes were still closed; he opened them upon a brilliance that seared them over for an instant with a white hotness. Though melting snow clung in patches to his hands, he clapped them over his eyes and rubbed them until the pain subsided. Gradually, by squinting his eyelids open a little at a time, he accustomed his eyes to daylight. When at last he was able to look around him, he viewed a world that he had not seen before.

Under a cloudless sky, and glittering coldly beneath a high sun, whiteness spread as far as he could see. It lay thickly drifted about the site of their camp and lay like movement frozen, in waves and hillocks over the broad sweep of the valley. The mountainside, which had defined the valley’s winding course, now was softened and changed; in a gentle curve the snow lay in drifts about the dark pines that straggled from the mountain into the flat valley, so that only the tips of the trees showed dark against the whiteness of the snow. The snow was gathered high upon the mountainside, so that no longer did his eyes meet a solid sheet of green; now he saw each tree sharply defined against the snow which surrounded it. For a long time he stood where he had come out of his shelter and looked about him wonderingly, and did not move, reluctant to push through the snow which bore no mark of anything save itself. Then he stooped and poked one finger through the thin crust in front of him. He made his hand into a fist and enlarged the hole his finger had made. He scooped a handful of the snow, and let it trickle through his fingers in a small white pile beside the hole from which he had scooped it. Then, weak from lack of food and dizzy from his days and nights of lying in darkness, he stumbled forward a few steps through the waist-high drift; he turned around and around, looking at the land which had become so familiar to him that he had got out of the habit of noticing it, and which now was suddenly strange to him, so strange that he could hardly believe that he had looked upon it before. A clear and profound silence rose from the valley, above the mountains, and into the sky; the sound of his breathing came loudly to him; he held his breath to gather the quality of the silence. He heard the slither and drop of the snow as it fell from his trouser legs into the harder snow packed around his feet; in the distance there came the soft echoing snap of a branch that gave beneath its weight of snow; across the camp, from the drifted corral, came the sharp snort of a horse, so loud that Andrews imagined for a moment that it was only a few feet away. He turned toward the corral, expelling his clouded breath; beyond the drifted snow he saw the horses move.

Gathering air into his lungs, he shouted as loudly as he could; and after he had shouted, he remained with his mouth open, listening to the sound of his own voice that boomed as it grew fainter, and after what seemed to him a long time, trailed into the silence, dispersed by distances and absorbed by the snow. He turned to the mounds of snow, under one of which he had lain for two days; under the other Miller and Charley Hoge still lay. He saw no movement; a sudden fear caught him, and he took a few steps through the snow. Then he saw a tremor, saw the snow break from above the mound, and saw the break lengthen toward him. Miller’s head—black and rough against the smooth whiteness from which it emerged—came into sight; the heavy arms, like those of a swimmer, flailed the snow aside and Miller stood upright, blinking furiously. After a moment he squinted at Andrews and said hoarsely, his voice wavering and unsure: “You all right, boy?”

“Yes,” Andrews said. “You and Charley?”

Miller nodded. He looked across the expanse of their campsite. “I wonder how Fred made out. Likely as not he froze to death.”

“The last I saw, before we settled in, he was over there,” Andrews said, and pointed toward the chimney rock around which they had earlier arranged their camp. They walked toward it, their going uncertain; they sometimes plowed through drifted snow that came above their waists, and sometimes easily in snow that barely reached the middle of their calves. They went around the high rock, poking cautiously into the snow with their boots.

“No telling where he is now,” Miller said. “We might not find him till the spring thaw.”

But as he spoke, Andrews saw the snow move and break very close to him, beside the chimney rock.

“Here he is!” he shouted.

Between Miller and Andrews a rough shape came up through the snow. Great chunks of white ice clung to the matted hair of the buffalo hide and fell away, revealing the flat umber color; for an instant, Andrews drew back in fear, thinking irrationally that somehow a buffalo was rearing itself upward to confront them. But in the next instant, Schneider had thrown aside the skins in which he had wrapped himself like a mummy, and was standing blindly between them, his eyes screwed shut, an expression of pain furrowing the flesh between his eyebrows and pulling his mouth to one side.

“Jesus Christ, it’s bright,” Schneider said, his voice an unclear croak. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Are you all right?” Andrews asked.

Schneider opened his eyes to a slit, recognized Andrews, and nodded. “I think my fingers got a little frostbit, and my feet are damn near froze off; but I managed all right. If I ever get thawed out, I’ll know for sure.”

As well as they could—with their hands, their feet, and the folded buffalo hides that Schneider had discarded—the three men scraped away a large area of snow from around the chimney rock; upon the frozen ground, and over the charred, ice-coated remains of an old campfire, they piled what dry twigs they could strip from the snow-weighted lower branches of the pine trees. Miller dug into their cache of goods and found an old tinderbox, some crumpled paper that had not been wetted by the snow, and several unused cartridges. He laid the paper under the dry branches, worked the lead bullets loose from the cartridges, and poured the gunpowder upon the paper, crumpling more paper on the powder. He struck the tinderbox and ignited the powder, which flared powerfully, igniting the paper. Soon a small fire blazed, melting the snow that clung to the inward side of the rock.

“We’ll have to keep this going,” Miller said. “It’s mighty hard to start a fire in a blowing wind with wet wood.”

As the fire grew stronger, the men dug into the snow for logs and piled them, wet, upon the fire. They huddled about the warmth, so close that steam rose from their damp clothing; Schneider sat on his buffalo skins and thrust his boots close to the fire, almost into it. The smell of scorching leather mixed with the heavier smell of the burning logs.