Snowbound and Eclipse (21 page)

A fresh gust of bitter air boiled past us, firing pellets of ice into our beards.

“Goddamn the wind,” Martin snapped.

I had rarely heard oathing in this company. The colonel's utterances were free of it, and there was an unspoken rule that the rest of us would follow his example. But the colonel was up on that knoll, talking things over with the rotten guide.

I felt the slivers of ice melt in my beard, work down, and then freeze. This would be another day of icicles hanging from our beards and hair.

About then, Frémont and Old Bill skidded and tumbled down that knoll, barely remaining upright. Frémont surveyed the company, the loaded mules, the newly dead one.

“On our way,” he said. “We'll walk.”

Some of the company seemed irritated by the command and reluctantly slid off their wretched animals. But it was a valuable request. By now the outliers of the approaching storm were overhead, and the wintry sun vanished behind an iron overcast. The trail beaters once again hacked our way westward, this time through windswept country that harbored only two or three feet of snow on the level. The wind jammed so much drift into our faces and eyes we
couldn't tell what was descending from the clouds and what was being lifted by the gusts.

It took the heat right out of me, even though I was walking, and I knew ere long I'd be frostbit again and again, and this would be a hard day. I wondered if a man could get frostbit in the privates. What would that do to me? Now that was something to think about. I thought I'd ask Ben Kern about it, not that a greenhorn would know anything. There sure are places a man doesn't want to get himself frostbit, especially me. I've sure got an itch to get to California with all my parts ready and willing.

We rotated the trail breaking, three at a time. When my turn came, I found myself with Stepperfeldt and Ferguson, each of us armed with a deadwood club, which we used to break through the skin of the drifts, hammer down a wideenough trail to pose no obstacle to the weary mules. Usually I didn't mind the work. It was a way of keeping warm, keeping the blood up, but now a mysterious lassitude gripped me, and it was all I could do to lift the deadwood, smash through snow, and lift it again. And instead of getting warmer, I found myself getting so chilled I thought to find my bedroll and wrap myself. Not that blankets would do much in a wind like that.

So, step by step, we proceeded on. I was glad when Godey sent our relief forward, and I turned over my driftwood snow club and waited for the train to catch up. The rest were a long time coming, and I could see why. The mules were quitting, and even the efforts of several men tugging and shoving couldn't get them to move. So time was flying by and the company was stalled, right in the first foothills on the far side of that plateau. There wasn't a mule that would climb up that trail.

Godey shouted a few things, his voice lost in the wind, and I watched as the company stripped the packs off the
mules, tied ropes to the panniers, and began skidding them forward. Even then the mules had to be yanked and shoved, but now the company was struggling up slopes again. I watched Preuss wrestle two panniers up the icy slope, his precious instruments in them. He would not allow anyone to touch the packs and was uncommonly careful whenever he came to a hump or a protruding rock. Well, I didn't blame him one particle. Tough old bird, doing what had to be done. We all protect our jewels.

Godey handed me a rope, but I was so worn from beating a trail I didn't have the strength to drag a pack. But I did. There was no help for it. Drag a pack or give up. Quit. Sit down in the snow and die. And I was damned if I would do that and let them think I didn't have the temper in me. So I learned to drag for twenty yards, pause a while, and go another few yards, and pause, and let my heart settle down.

The snow fell now, driven by the gusts, but these were thick flakes, and in moments they were filling the trench the beaters had pounded up that slope. More mules quit. They would stop, tremble, and slowly collapse into the snow, and we would leave them there. In two minutes they were buried by snow, just a white lump blocking our snow road.

There went more dinner, I thought. Mule meat wasn't much for eating, and the mules were down to bone anyway. But we managed, mostly by cutting the meat up fine and boiling it to a sort of mush. Some of the messes tried slicing it thin and roasting, but it was like eating leather, and pretty soon we were all eating mule stew, mule mush, mule soup, because that was the only way we could get any mule into our innards.

But now we were running through mules in a hurry, and I wondered what we would be eating in a week. I'd heard
that Frémont had put aside some frozen elk for Christmas dinner a few days before, and I supposed that would be mighty fine, if we got as far as Christmas. The way things were going, I didn't know whether we'd make one more day or not.

I'd heard there were some Mexican settlements down the Rio del Norte, but that was some piece away, and that wasn't the direction the colonel was heading. He'd gotten his compass set on west, and west was how he'd go. California or bust. He was stubborn, I'll grant that. That's what I liked about him. There's a type of man who won't quit, and he'd rather die trying. That's what I am.

We didn't make much progress, and by afternoon, with the peril of darkness drawing nigh, the colonel halted us on a slope in a pine forest where deadwood abounded and there would be some shelter from the gale. We had lost mules all day; an animal would simply quit, stand stock-still, and slowly fold into the snow. I surveyed the new camp hopefully and did see some grass on an exposed southerly slope, and I hoped we could put the mules onto it, even though we would have to beat a path through perilous slopes to reach it. Some weary men started at once, while the rest of us collected deadwood and tried to save the mules by rubbing them. The mules either stood inertly, an inch from death, or sought blankets and ropes and leather to eat, making life difficult for us because there was little they would not gnaw on, including what was left of our tents and clothing and tack.

I watched the Creoles slit the throat of the weakest of the living mules, watched it sag into the snow, blood gouting from its neck. They set upon the animal before it was entirely dead. We would have mule stew this night, and mule hide with which to fashion patches for our ruined boots. The prospect offered me no comfort.

Somehow, we made camp and got some fires going in protected snow pits where the wind would not snuff them. The snow had diminished, but the heavens scowled at us, and I had the sense we were trespassers, invaders of a place sacred to others, where no mortal should pass by. I got from gossip that ahead, at the top of a bald hill, one would only find more of the same, no relief in any direction.

The men were all done in. I had thought myself alone in my weakness, but now I saw horror everywhere, men so skeletal and worn they seemed half alive. The sole exception was the colonel, who was calmly erecting his tent, scraping snow away, building a private fire—he always camped apart from the rest of us—and making himself comfortable. I could not fathom it. He had pulled away from us for several days, rarely saying a word to any of us, and never a word of encouragement. It was as if he were indifferent to our fate, or maybe he simply felt helpless to change anything or admit to a mistake or terrible judgment. And if pride stopped him from changing course, his fate was our own, for there was nothing we could do about any of it.

We did get a few of the mules over to that grassy slope, but most could not be budged and stood mutely near our mess fires, waiting to die. I imagined that within a day or so, not a one would be standing. The question that had us all brooding now was whether any of us would soon be standing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Benjamin Kern, MD

White on white on white. We called it Camp Dismal, but that understates the case. We huddled on the north slope of a great bald mountain at around eleven thousand feet, in a deluge of snow that lasted for days. There was only misery and foreboding.

We settled in some vast depth of snow, whiteness so deep we could see only the tops of trees, making them seem like needle-bearing shrubs. But below us, buried in snow, were scrub pines, all that grew at this altitude. We could not pitch a tent, for there was no ground under us to take the stakes, so we erected huts of deadwood and canvas, and that was all the shelter we could manage. Each mess managed to build a fire in a pit, which allayed the wind slightly but added smoke to our misery and did little to warm our numb flesh.

Now, at last, we could go no further. We were walled by white, by endless snow falling upon us, a foot or two or three a day. We could neither retreat from the bald mountain nor push forward, so we were trapped there. Preuss led a small party westward, intending to find a way down, but not even that wiry, hardy man, a veteran of Frémont's earlier campaigns, could manage it, and in time he retreated to our camp, where we all sat helplessly, awaiting our fate with each tick of the clock.

Snow engulfed our messes, and we could scarcely find firewood to keep a blaze going in all that stinging white downfall. The misery was compounded by the wetness of our clothing, which permeated every layer of our wool and
leather and rendered us so miserable that we wondered how we might endure yet another minute of another hour of another day. We could not dry ourselves or our clothing in that constant blizzard.

We scraped away snow with our tin mess plates, struggled into the treetops to hack at limbs for the fire, retreated into our huts chilled and soaked, our beards dangling icicles, our eyes smarting from the smoke. And lost from us was hope, for the extent of our horizon was a white wall blotting out even the closest scenery, so that all we had before our watering eyes was ten or fifteen feet of whiteness.

But that was only one facet of the horror. Through this whole white nightmare, we heard the piteous whickering of the dying mules, summoning one another for help, telling one another they were departing. I swear, all that first night, the mules we had managed to drive to that windswept dome where a little grass broke through wailed miserably. I swear what I heard was sobbing, the weeping of the mules as they trumpeted their distress to one another, and then the heavy silence that overtook them in the night. I knew they were gone. I knew that the murderous wind had clubbed them senseless, even as they frantically pawed and dug for the thin brown strands of grass that might sustain them in kinder climates.

Thus did the ghastly night pass, and in the gray light of dawn, after we had scraped away new feet of snow with our mess plates, we searched for them and saw none standing on that slope. They had vanished, and we could not find their carcasses even if we had tried with a pole, for merciless nature had mercifully hidden them from our eyes under a white blanket. Yet a few still stood in the woods, protected from the wind, a foot of snow on their backs, icicles dangling from their every hair, rattling under their jaws. Old Bill Williams swore he could see their spirits hovering
over them, waiting to fly away, but I could never fathom such a thing. I knew only what my medical training and senses told me: their body temperatures barely sustained life. They had not eaten for days and were surviving on the last of the fat they carried. They were too weak to walk, much less plow through drifts as high as they were. But those few lived, if only for the moment.

At some of the other messes, live mules were being slaughtered. I would hear one last pitiful bleat, and then the thud of an animal capsizing. But it was odd. These messes never dressed out the entire carcass, making the most of it. Those men were as worn as we were, numbed by cold, struggling for breath in the thin air, and soon the slaughtered and mostly intact mule was blanketed by merciful snow. The last mules were simply targets of opportunity and were not systematically butchered to give us as much meat as possible. I had come to love those mules, knew many of them well, and could hardly bear to see them tumble, never to rise again.

I sat mutely as the sun rose and set somewhere above the gray blanket of clouds, too stupefied to write a thing. I'm not sure my numb fingers would have enabled me to write. I didn't have anything to say. Richard managed a few words. I saw him laboriously scribbling some little thing in his bound ledger, probably thinking what I was thinking: those who found us in the distant future would at least have an account of our last hours.

I confess I gave little thought to what transpired elsewhere, in the other messes. We were all wrapped in our misery. But some distance away—it seemed miles away but it was only a few dozen yards, Colonel Frémont was making his own plans. His object, I was soon to learn, was to move our camp from this exposed north shoulder of the bald mountain to the southern side, where we might escape the
wind, find forage and a shred of warmth. It was not a bad plan except that without capable mules, we would need to drag our worldly goods to the new locale by brute force, mostly along a snow path of our devising. He sent some of our stronger men to break a trail, and soon we found ourselves slowly dragging panniers and tack over the powdery snow, pausing every little way for breath in the thin air, hoping the ongoing storm would not close in and blind us or strand us. This wretched task consumed two days, and even after that we would need to return to Camp Dismal for the last of the packs. I can't remember a worse time, when I felt so faint and dizzy that I thought I would topple at any time and vanish in a drift.

And yet we succeeded and found ourselves in better circumstances, out of the icy blast and able to collect a goodly supply of deadwood to feed our fires. Such mules as were still standing were scattered behind us, unable to walk the three miles, and we ended up with none at our new refuge. I knew, with heavy heart, that we were now afoot.

In all this I saw Frémont consulting with our guide, Williams, over and over, but the colonel never made me a party to his decisions, preferring to consult only with those veterans of his California expedition. He avoided those of us who were newcomers to his cadre. So I didn't know what was being discussed so ardently, and the others were too weary or breathless at that altitude to inform me. But it was mostly about topography. When we finally settled on the southwesterly slope, we were in a new drainage, which I took to be another tributary of the Rio del Norte, but one more precipitous than what we had traversed to reach this upland of the San Juans.