The dark green line of trees and brush that they had followed all the way from Butcher’s Crossing turned in a slow curve to the south. The four men, who came upon the turning in the midmorning of their sixth day of journey, halted and gazed for some moments at the course of the Smoky Hill River. From where they halted, the land dropped off so that in the distance, through the brush and trees of the banks, they could see the slow-moving water. In the distance it lost its muddy green hue; the sunlight silvered its surface, and it appeared to them clear and cool. The three men brought their horses close together; the oxen turned their heads toward the river and moaned softly; Charley Hoge called them to a halt, and set the brake handle of the wagon; he jumped off the spring seat, clambered from the wagon, and walked briskly over to where the others waited. He looked up at Miller.
“Trail turns here with the river,” Miller said. “Follows it all the way up to the Arkansas. We could follow it and be sure of plenty of water, but it would put us near a week off getting where we’re aiming at.”
Schneider looked at Miller and grinned; his teeth were white in his dust-encrusted face.
“I take it you don’t aim to go by the trail.”
“It’d put us a week off, maybe more,” Miller said. “I’ve gone across this country before.” He waved toward the flat country in the west that lay beyond the Smoky Hill Trail. “They’s water there, for a body that knows where it is.”
Schneider, still grinning, turned to Andrews. “Mr. Andrews, you don’t look like you ever been thirsty in your life; real thirsty, I mean. So I guess it won’t do much good to ask you what you want to do.”
Andrews hesitated; then he shook his head. “I have no right to speak. I don’t know the country.”
“And Miller does,” Schneider said, “or at least that’s what he tells us. So we go where Miller says.”
Miller smiled and nodded. “Fred, you sound like you want an extra week’s pay. You ain’t afraid of a little dry stretch, are you?”
“I’ve had dry stretches before,” Schneider said. “But I never have got over feeling put out when I saw horses and bull-oxes being watered and me with a dry throat.”
Miller’s smile widened. “It takes the grit out of a man,” he said. “It’s happened to me. But they’s water less than a day from here. I don’t think it’ll come to that.”
“Just one thing more,” Schneider said. “How long did you say it’s been since you went over this bit of land?”
“A few years,” Miller said. “But some things don’t leave a man.” Though the smile remained on his face, his voice stiffened. “You don’t have no serious complaints yet, do you, Fred?”
“No,” Schneider said. “I just thought there was a few things I ought to say. I said I’d go along with you back at Butcher’s Crossing, and I’ll go along with you now. It don’t matter to me one way or another.”
Miller nodded, and turned to Charley Hoge. “Reckon we’d better rest the stock and water them up good before we go on. And we’d better carry along as much water as we can, just in case. You take care of the team, and we’ll get what water we can back up to the wagon.”
While Charley Hoge led the oxen down to the river, the others went to the wagon and found what containers they could for carrying water. From a broad square of canvas that covered their provisions, Miller fashioned a crude barrel, held open and upright by slender green saplings that he cut at the river bank. Two of the more slender saplings he tied together and bent into a circle, and tied again; this he attached near the four corners of the square canvas with leather thongs. The shorter and stubbier saplings he cut to a length, notched, and attached to the circled saplings, thus forming a receptacle some five feet in diameter and four feet in height. With buckets and kettles that Charley Hoge used for cooking and with one small wooden keg, the three men filled the canvas barrel three-quarters full; it took them the better part of an hour to do so.
“That’s enough,” Miller said. “If we put any more in, it would just slosh out.”
They rested in the shade beside the Smoky Hill, while the hobbled oxen wandered along the banks, grazing on the rich grass that grew in the moisture. Because of the intense heat, and because of the dry country over which they would be traveling, Miller told them, they would begin their second drive somewhat later; so Charley Hoge had time to cook up some soaked beans, sowbelly, and coffee. Until the afternoon sun pushed the shade beyond them, they lay wearily on the grassy bank of the river, listening to the rustle of the water that flowed past them smoothly, coolly, effortlessly, that flowed back through the prairie through which they had worked their way, past Butcher’s Crossing, and onward to the east. When the sun touched his face, Andrews sat up. Miller said: “Might as well get started.” Charley Hoge gathered his oxen, yoked them in pairs, and put them to the wagon. The party turned to the flat land upon which they could see neither tree nor trail to guide them, and went forward upon it. Soon the line of green that marked the Smoky Hill River was lost to them; and in the flat unbroken land Andrews had to keep his eyes firmly fixed on Miller’s back to find any direction to go in.
Twilight came upon them. Had it not been for his tiredness, and the awkward, shambling weariness of the horses beneath the weight they carried forward, Andrews might have thought that the night came on and held them where they started, back at the bend of the Smoky Hill. During the afternoon’s drive he had seen no break in the flat country, neither tree, nor gully, nor rise in the land that might serve as a landmark to show Miller the way he went. They camped that night without water.
Few words were exchanged as they broke the packs from their horses and set up the night’s camp on the open prairie. Charley Hoge led the oxen one by one to the back of the wagon; Miller held the large canvas receptacle erect while the oxen drank. By the light of a lantern he kept careful watch on the level of water; when an ox had drunk its quota, Miller would say sharply: “That’s enough,” and kick at the beast as Charley Hoge tugged its head away. When the oxen and the horses had drunk, the tank remained one-fourth full.
Much later, around the campfire, which Charley Hoge had prepared with wood gathered at their noon stop, the men squatted and drank their coffee. Schneider, whose tight impassive face seemed to twitch and change in the flickering firelight, said impersonally:
“I never cared for a dry camp.”
No one spoke.
Schneider continued: “I guess there’s a drop or two left in the tank.”
“It’s about a fourth full,” Miller said.
Schneider nodded. “We can make one more day on that, I figure. It’ll be a mite dry, but we should make one more day.”
Miller said, “I figure one more day.”
“If we don’t come across some water,” Schneider said.
“If we don’t come across some water,” Miller agreed.
Schneider lifted his tin cup and drained the last dreg of coffee from it. In the firelight, his raised chin and throat bristled and quivered. His voice was cool and lazy. “I reckon we’d better hit some water tomorrow.”
“We’d better,” Miller said. Then: “There’s plenty of water; it’s just there for the finding.” No one answered him. He went on. “I must have missed a mark somewhere. There should have been water right along here. But it’s nothing serious. We’ll get water tomorrow, for sure.”
The three men were watching him intently. In the dying light, Miller returned each of their stares, looking at Schneider at length, coolly. After a moment he sighed and put his cup carefully on the ground in front of Charley Hoge.
“Let’s get some sleep,” Miller said. “I want to get an early start in the morning, before the heat sets in.”
Andrews tried to sleep, but despite his tiredness he did not rest soundly. He kept being awakened by the low moaning of the oxen, which gathered at the end of the wagon, pawed the earth, and butted against the closed tailgate that protected the little store of water in the open canvas tank.
Andrews was shaken from his uneasy sleep by Miller’s hand on his shoulder. His eyes opened on darkness, and on the dim hulk of Miller above him. He heard the others moving about, stumbling and cursing in the early morning dark.
“If we can get them going soon enough, they won’t miss the watering,” Miller said.
By the time the false light shone in the east, the oxen were yoked; the party again moved westward.
“Give your horses their heads,” Miller told them. “Let them set their own pace. We’ll do better not to push any of them till we get some water.”
The animals moved sluggishly through the warming day. As the sun brightened, Miller rode far ahead of the main party; he sat erect in his saddle and moved his head constantly from one side to another. Occasionally he got off his horse and examined the ground closely, as if it concealed some sign that he had missed atop his horse. They continued their journey well into the middle of the day, and past it. When one of the oxen stumbled and in getting to its feet gashed at its fellow with a blunt horn, Miller called the party to a halt.
“Fill your canteens,” he said. “We’ve got to water the stock and there won’t be any left.”
Silently, the men did as they were told. Schneider was the last to approach the canvas tank; he filled his canteen, drank from it in long, heavy gulps, and refilled it.
Schneider helped Charley Hoge control the oxen as, one by one, they were led to the rear of the wagon and the open tank of water. When the oxen were watered and tethered at some distance from the wagon, the horses were allowed to finish the water. After the horses had got from the tank all that they were able, Miller broke down the saplings that gave the canvas its shape, and with Charley Hoge’s help drained the water that remained in the folds of the canvas into a wooden keg.
Charley Hoge untethered the oxen and let them graze on the short yellowish grass. Then he returned to the wagon and broke out a package of dried biscuits.
“Don’t eat too many of them,” Miller said. “They’ll dry you out.”
The men squatted in the narrow shade cast by the wagon. Slowly and delicately, Schneider ate one of the biscuits and took a small sip of water after it.
Finally he sighed, and spoke directly to Miller: “What’s the story, Miller? Do you know where there’s water?”
Miller said: “There was a little pile of rocks a piece back I think I remember. Another half-day, and we ought to hit a stream.”
Schneider looked at him quizzically. Then he stiffened, took a deep breath, and asked, his voice soft: “Where are we, Miller?”
“No need to worry,” Miller said. “Some of the landmarks have changed since I was here. But another half-day, and I’ll get us fixed.”
Schneider grinned, and shook his head. He laughed softly and sat down on the ground, shaking his head.
“My God,” he said. “We’re lost.”
“As long as we keep going in that direction,” Miller pointed away from their shadows, toward the falling sun, “we’re not lost. We’re bound to run into water tonight, or early in the morning.”
“This is a big country,” Schneider said. “We’re not bound to do anything.”
“No need to worry,” Miller said.
Schneider looked at Andrews, still grinning. “How does it feel, Mr. Andrews? Just thinking about it makes you thirsty, don’t it?”
Andrews looked away from him quickly, and frowned; but what he said was true. The biscuit in his mouth felt suddenly dry, like sun-beat sand; he had swallowed against the dryness. He noticed that Charley Hoge put his half-eaten biscuit into his shirt pocket.
“We can still cut south,” Schneider said. “Another day, at the most a day and a half, we’ll run into the Arkansas. The stock might just hold up for a day and a half.”
“It would put us a week off,” Miller said. “And besides, there’s no cause for it; we may get a little dry, but we’ll make it all right. I know this country.”
“Not so well you don’t get lost in it,” Schneider said. “I say, we turn to the Arkansas. We’ll be sure of water there.” He pulled up a tuft of the dry, yellow grass that surrounded them. “Look at this. There’s been a drought in this country. How do we know the streams ain’t dried up? What if the ponds are empty?”
“There’s water in this country,” Miller said.
“Seen any sign of buffalo?” Schneider looked at each of them. “Not a sign. And you won’t find buffalo where there ain’t no water. I say, we ought to head for the Arkansas.”
Miller sighed and smiled distantly at Schneider. “We’d never make it, Fred.”
“What?”
“We’d never make it. We’ve been heading at an angle ever since we left the Smoky Hill. With watered stock, it would take us two and a half days—almost as bad as going back to the Smoky Hill. Dry, this stock would never make it.”
“God damn it,” Schneider said quietly, “you ought to have let us know.”
Miller said: “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll get you to water, if I have to dig for it.”
“God damn it,” Schneider said. “You son of a bitch. I’m half a mind to cut out on my own. I might just make it.”
“And you might not,” Miller said. “Do you know this country, Fred?”
“You know damn well I don’t,” Schneider said.
“Then you’d better stick with the party.”
Schneider looked from one of them to another. “You’re pretty sure the party’s going to stick with you?”
Miller’s tight face relaxed, and the loose ridges came again about the corners of his mouth. “I’m going ahead, just like I’ve been going. I just have to get the feel of the land again. I’ve been watching too close, trying too hard to remember. Once I get the feel of the country again, I’ll be all right. And the rest of you will be all right, too.”
Schneider nodded. “Hoge will stick with you, I guess. That right, Charley?”
Charley Hoge lifted his head abruptly, as if startled. He rubbed the stump of his wrist. “I go where God wills,” he said. “He will lead us to where water is when we are athirst.”
“Sure,” Schneider said. He turned to Andrews. “Well, that leaves us, Mr. Andrews. What do you say? It’s your wagon and your team. If you say we go south, Miller would have a hard time going against you.”
Andrews looked at the ground; between the dry thin blades of grass the earth was powdery. Though he did not look up, he felt the eyes of the others upon him. “We’ve come this far,” he said. “We might as well keep on with Miller.”
“All right,” Schneider said. “You’re all crazy. But it looks like I’ve got no choice. Do whatever you want to do.”
Miller’s thin flat lips lengthened in a slight smile. “You worry too much, Fred. If it gets that bad, we can always get by on Charley’s whisky. There must be nine or ten gallons of it left.”
“The horses will be glad to hear that,” Schneider said. “I can see us walking out of here on ten gallons of whisky.”
“You worry too much,” Miller said. “You’ll live to be a hundred and five.”
“I’ve had my say. I’ll go along with you. Now let me get some rest.” He lay on his side, rolled under the shade of the wagon, and came to rest with his back to them.
“We all might as well try to get some sleep,” Miller said. “It won’t do to travel in the heat. We’ll rest ourselves, and get the drive started this evening.”
Lying on his side, his folded arm supporting his head, Andrews looked out of the shade across the level prairie. As far as he could see, the land was flat and without identity. The blades of grass that stood up stiffly a few inches from his nose blurred and merged into the distance, and the distance came upon him with a rush. He closed his eyes upon what he saw, and his vague fingers pushed at the grass until they parted it, and he could feel the dry powdery earth upon his fingertips. He pressed his body against the ground, and did not look at anything, until the terror that had crept upon him from his dizzying view of the prairie passed, as if through his fingertips, back into the earth whence it had come. His mouth was dry. He started to reach for his canteen, but he did not. He forced thirst away from him, and put thought from his mind. After a while, his body, tense against the earth, relaxed; and before the afternoon was over, he slept.
When the edge of the sun cut into the far horizon they resumed their journey.
Night came on rapidly. In the moonlight, Miller, ahead of them, was a frenzied, hunched figure, whose body swayed this way and that in his saddle. Though Andrews and Schneider let their horses go at their own paces, Miller spurred in an erratic zigzag across the land that seemed to glow out of the night. To no apparent purpose, Miller would cut at a sharp angle from a path they took, and follow the new course for half an hour or so, only to abandon it and cut in another direction. For the first few hours, Andrews tried to keep their course in his mind; but weariness dulled his attention, and the stars in the clear sky, and the thin moon, whirled about his head; he closed his eyes and slumped forward in the saddle, letting his horse trail Schneider and Miller. Even in the cool of the night, thirst gnawed at him, and occasionally he took a small sip of water from his canteen. Once they paused to let the oxen graze; Andrews remained in his saddle, sleepily aware of what was going on.
They traveled into the next morning, and into the heat of the day. The oxen moved slowly; they moaned almost constantly, and their breaths were dry and rasping. Even Andrews could see that their coats were growing dull, and that the bones were showing sharply along their ribs and flanks.
Schneider rode up beside him and jerked his head back in the direction of the oxen. “They look bad. Their tongues will start swelling next. Then they won’t be able to breathe and pull at the same time. We should have headed south. With luck, we might have made it.”
Andrews did not answer. His throat felt unbearably dry. Despite himself he reached behind his saddle for his canteen and took two long swallows of water. Schneider grinned and drew his horse away. With an effort of will Andrews closed his canteen and replaced it behind his saddle.
Shortly before noon Miller pulled his horse to a halt, dismounted, and walked back toward the slowly moving wagon. He motioned to Charley Hoge to stop.
“We’ll wait the heat out here,” he said shortly. He walked into the shade of the wagon; Schneider and Andrews came up to him. “They look bad, Miller,” Schneider said. He turned to Charley Hoge: “How do they drive?”
Charley Hoge shook his head.
“Their tongues are beginning to swell. They won’t last out the day. And the horses. Look at them.”
“Never mind that,” Miller said. His voice was low and toneless, almost a growl. The black pupils of his eyes were shining and blank; they were fixed upon the men without appearing to see them. “How much water’s left in the canteens?”
“Not much,” Schneider said. “Maybe enough to get us through the night.”
“Get them,” Miller said.
“Now look,” Schneider said. “If you think I’m going to use water for anything except myself, you—”
“Get them,” Miller said. He turned his eyes to Schneider. Schneider cursed softly, got to his feet, and returned with his own and Andrews’s canteens. Miller gathered them, put his with them, and said to Charley Hoge: “Charley, get the keg and bring your canteen down here.”
Schneider said: “Now, look, Miller. Those oxen will never make it. No use wasting what little water we got. You can’t—”
“Shut up,” Miller said. “Arguing about it will just make us drier. Like I said, we still have Charley’s whisky.”
“My God!” Schneider said. “You were serious.”
Charley Hoge returned to the shade beside the wagon and handed Miller a canteen and the wooden keg. Miller set the keg carefully on the ground, rotating it a few times under the pressure of his hands so that it rested level on the stubby grass. He unscrewed the tops of the canteens, one by one, and carefully poured the water into the keg, letting the canteens hang above it for several minutes, until the last globules of water gathered on the mouths, hung, and finally dropped. After the last canteen was emptied, about four inches of water was in the keg.
Schneider picked up his empty canteen, looked at it carefully, and then looked at Miller. With all his strength, he flung the canteen against the side of the wagon, from where it rebounded back toward him, past him, and fell into the grass.
“God damn it!” he shouted; his voice was startling in the hot prairie quiet. “What good do you expect to do with that little bit of water? You’re throwing it away!”
Miller did not look at him. He spoke to Charley Hoge: “Charley, unyoke the oxen and lead them around here one at a time.”
While the three men waited—Miller and Andrews still, Schneider quivering and turning in an impotent rage—Charley Hoge singly detached the oxen and led them around to Miller. Miller took a rag from his pocket, soaked it in the water, and squeezed it gently, holding it carefully above the keg so that no water was lost.
“Fred, you and Will get a hold of his horns; hold him steady.”
While Schneider and Andrews grasped each of the horns, Charley Hoge circled the beast’s bony and corded neck with his good arm, digging his heels in the ground and pulling against the forward surge of the ox. With the wet rag, Miller bathed the dry lips of the ox; then he put the rag into the water again and squeezed it so that no water was wasted.
“Pull up on the horns,” he said to Schneider and Andrews.
When the ox’s head was up, Miller grasped the upper lip of the beast and pulled upward. The tongue, dark and swollen, quivered in its mouth. Again with care, Miller bathed the rough distended flesh; his hand and wrist were thrust out of sight up into the ox’s throat. Withdrawing his hand, he squeezed hard on the wet rag, and a few drops of water trickled on the tongue, which absorbed them like a dark dry sponge.
One by one the oxen’s mouths were bathed. Sweatless and hot, the three men held the beasts and dug their feet into the earth; Schneider cursed steadily, quietly; Andrews breathed in heavy gasps the dry air that was rough like a burr in his throat, and tried to keep his arms from trembling loose from the smooth hot horns of the oxen. After each ox had been treated, Charley Hoge led it back to its yoke and returned with another. Despite the haste with which they worked, it was the better part of an hour before they finished with the last animal.
Miller leaned against the side of the wagon; his dry, leatherlike skin stood out from his black beard with a faint yellowish cast.
“They ain’t so bad,” he said breathing heavily. “They’ll last to nightfall; and we still got a bit of water left.” He pointed to the muddy inch or so of water that remained in the keg.
Schneider laughed; it was a dry sound that turned into a cough. “A pint of water for eight oxen and three horses.”
“It’ll keep the swelling down,” Miller said. “It’s enough for that.”
Charley Hoge returned from the front of the wagon. “Do we unyoke them now and take a rest?”
“No,” Miller said. “Their tongues’ll swell as bad standing here as they will if we keep on. And we can keep them from grazing better if we’re on the move.”
“On the move where?” Schneider said. “How long you think them cows can pull this here wagon?”
“Long enough,” Miller said. “We’ll find water.”
Schneider moved suddenly, and whirled to Miller. “I just thought,” he said. “How much lead and powder you got in that wagon?”
“Ton and a half, two tons,” Miller said, not looking at him.
“Well, my God,” Schneider said. “No wonder them animals is dry. We could go twice as far if we’d dump the stuff.”
“No,” Miller said.
“We can find water, and maybe come back and pick it up. It ain’t as if we intended to just leave it here.”
“No,” Miller said. “We get there like we started out, or we don’t get there at all. There ain’t no need to get in a panic.”
“You crazy son of a bitch,” Schneider said. He kicked one of the heavy hickory wheel spokes. “God damn it. Crazier’n hell.” He kicked the spoke again, and pounded a fist on the rim of the wheel.
“Besides,” Miller said calmly, “it wouldn’t make all that difference. On this land, a full wagon can pull almost as easy an an empty one, once the team gets started.”
“It’s no good talking to him,” Schneider said. “No good at all.” He strode out of the shade and went to his horse, which had been tethered to the end of the wagon, its head held high so that it could not graze. Andrews and Miller followed him more slowly.
“It does Fred good to blow off now and then,” Miller said to Andrews. “He knows if we left the load here we might be a week finding it again, if we found it at all. Looking for it might put us in as bad shape as we are now. We don’t leave a heavy enough trail to follow back, and you can’t mark a trail very well in land like this.”
Andrews looked behind him. It was true. The wheels of the wagon in the short stiff grass, on the baked earth, left hardly an impression; even now the grass over which they had driven was springing erect to hide the evidence of their passage. Andrews tried to swallow, but the contraction of his muscles was stopped by his dry throat.
Their horses moved sluggishly; and beneath Charley Hoge’s cracking whip and before his thin sharp voice, the oxen moved weakly against the pull of the wagon. They shambled unsteadily forward, working not as a team but as separate beasts struggling from the whip and the sound of the driving voice behind them. Once in the afternoon the party came near a shallow depression in the earth, the bottom of which was cracked in an intricate pattern of dried mud. They looked sullenly at the dried-up pond and did not speak.
In the middle of the afternoon, Miller forced each of them to take a short swallow of Charley Hoge’s whisky.
“Don’t take much,” he warned. “Just enough to get your throat wet. More than that will make you sick.”
Andrews gagged on the liquor. It seared his dry tongue and throat as if a torch had been thrust into his mouth; when he ran his tongue over his cracked dry lips, they burned with a pain that lingered for many minutes later. He closed his eyes and clung to his saddle horn as the horse went forward; but the darkness upon his closed eyelids was shot with spears of light that whirled dizzily; he was forced to open them again and observe the trackless and empty way they went.
By sundown the oxen again were breathing with sharp grunting moans; their tongues were so swollen that they moved with their mouths half open; their heads were down, swinging from side to side. Miller called the wagon to a halt. Again Schneider and Andrews held the horns of the beasts; but even though both men were much weaker than they had been earlier, their task was easier. The oxen dumbly and without resistance let themselves be pulled around, and did not even show interest in the water with which Miller bathed their mouths.
“We won’t stop,” Miller said. His voice was a heavy flat croak. “Better to keep them moving while they’re still on their feet.”
He stood the bucket on its edge and sopped up the last of the water with the rag. He bathed the mouths of the horses; when he finished, the rag was almost dry.
After the sun dropped beneath the flat horizon before them, darkness came on quickly. Andrews’s hands clung to the saddle horn; they were so weak that again and again they slipped from it, and he hardly had the strength to pull them back. Breathing was an effort of agony; slumped inertly in his saddle, he learned to snuffle a little air through his nostrils and to exhale it quickly, and to wait several seconds before he repeated the process. Sometime during the night he discovered that his mouth was open and that he could not close it. His tongue pushed between his teeth, and when he tried to bring them together a dull dry pain spread in his mouth. He remembered the sight of the oxen’s tongues, black and swollen and dry; and he pushed his mind away from that image, away from himself, and tried to push his mind into a place as dark and unbounded as the night in which he traveled. Once, an ox stumbled and would not get back upon its feet; the three men had to dismount and with their little remaining strength pull and tug and prod the beast upright. Then the oxen would not or could not summon strength to get the wagon into motion, so the three pushed against the wagon spokes, while Charley Hoge’s whip cracked above the oxen, until the wheels began to move and the beasts took up the forward movement in a slow shamble. Andrews tried to wet his mouth with a little of Charley Hoge’s whisky, but most of the liquid ran off his lips down the corners of his mouth. He rode most of the night in a state that alternated between a mild delirium and intense pain. Once he came to his senses and found himself alone in the darkness; he had no sense of place, no knowledge of direction. In a panic he whirled one way and another in his saddle; he looked upward into the immense bowl of the sky, and downward at the earth upon which he rode; and the one seemed as far away as the other. Then he heard faintly the creak of the wagon, and prodded his horse in that direction. In a few moments he was back with the others, who had not noticed his lagging behind. Even with them, he shivered for a long while, the panic he had felt when he thought himself abandoned still upon him; for a long while the panic kept him alert, and he followed Miller’s dim movements, not as if those movements might lead him where he wished to go, but as if they might save him from wandering into a nothingness where he would be alone.
Shortly after dawn, they found water.
Afterward Andrews remembered as if from a dream the first sign they had that water was near. In the early light from the east Miller stiffened in his saddle and raised his head like an alert animal. Then, almost imperceptibly, he pulled his horse in a slightly northerly direction, his head still raised and alert. A few moments later he reined his horse more sharply north, so that Charley Hoge had to dismount from the wagon and prod the oxen toward Miller’s horse. Then, as the first small edge of the sun came above the flat line in the east, Andrews was aware that his horse had begun to quiver beneath him. He saw that Miller’s horse, too, was straining impatiently; its ears were pitched sharply forward, and it was held by Miller’s taut reins. Miller twisted in his saddle and faced those behind him. In the soft yellow light that fell upon Miller’s face, Andrews could see the cracked lips, raw and slightly bleeding from the distended cracks, parted in a grotesque smile.
“By God,” Miller called; his voice was rasping and weak, but it held a deep note of triumph. “By God, we found it. Hold your horses back, and—” Turning still farther around, he raised his voice, “Charley, hold on to them oxen as hard as you can. They’ll smell it in a few minutes, and they’re like to go crazy.”
Andrews’s horse bolted suddenly; startled, he pulled back with all his strength on the reins, and the horse reared upward, its front hooves pawing the air. Andrews leaned frantically forward, burrowing his face in the horse’s mane, so that he would not topple off.
By the time they came in sight of the stream, which wound in a flat treeless gully cut on the level land, the animals were quivering masses of flesh held back by the tiring muscles of the men. When the sound of the stream came to their ears, Miller called back to them: “Jump off, and let ’em go!”
Andrews lifted one foot from a stirrup; as he did so, the horse, relieved of the pressure of the reins, lunged forward, spilling Andrews to the ground. By the time he got to his feet, the horses were at the stream, on their knees, their heads thrust down into the shallow trickle.
Charley Hoge called from the wagon: “Somebody come here and give me a hand with this brake!” With his hand and with the crook of the elbow of his other arm, he was pulling against the large hand brake at the side of the wagon; the locked wheels of the wagon tore through the short grass, raising dust. Andrews stumbled across the ground and climbed upon the wagon by way of the unmoving wheel spokes. He took the hand brake from Charley Hoge’s grasp.
“Got to get them unyoked,” Charley Hoge said. “They’ll kill theirselves if they go at this much longer.”
The brake jerked and trembled under Andrews’s grasp; the smell of scorched wood and leather came to his nostrils. Charley Hoge jumped from the wagon and ran to the lead team. With deft movements, he knocked the pins from an oxbow, and jerked the oxbow from the yoke, jumping aside as the ox lunged forward, past him, toward the stream. Miller and Schneider stood on either side of the team, trying to quiet the oxen as Charley Hoge unyoked them. When the last ox was unyoked, the three men went in a stumbling trot across the ground to a spot a few feet upstream from where the animals were lined.
“Take it easy,” Miller said, when they had flung themselves down on their stomachs beside the narrow, muddy stream. “Just get your mouths wet at first. Try to drink too much, and you’ll make yourselves sick.”
They wet their mouths and let a little of the water trickle down their throats, and then lay for a few moments on their backs, letting their hands remain behind their heads, the water trickling softly and coolly over them. Then they drank again, more deeply; and rested again.
They stayed at the stream all that day, letting the animals have their fill of water, and grazing them on the short dry grass. “They’ve lost a lot of strength,” Miller said. “They’ll be a full day getting even part of it back.”
Shortly before noon, Charley Hoge gathered some driftwood that he found along the stream, and started a fire. He put some dry beans on to cook, and fried some side meat, which they wolfed immediately with the last of the dried biscuits, washing it all down with quantities of coffee. They slept the afternoon through; while they slept, the fire died down beneath the beans, and Charley Hoge had to start it again. Later, in the darkness, they ate the beans, undercooked and hard, and drank more coffee. They listened for a while to the slow, contented movement of the livestock around them; and themselves contented, they lay on their bedrolls around the embers of the campfire and slept, hearing in their sleep the quiet thin gurgle of the stream they had found.
They resumed their journey before dawn the next morning, only a little weak from the ordeal of thirst they had endured. Miller led the party with more confidence, now that water had been found. He spoke of the water as if it were a live thing that attempted to elude him. “I’ve found it, now,” he had said back at the camp beside the stream. “It won’t get away from me again.”
And it did not get away. They made their way westward in an erratic course over the featureless land, finding water always at their day’s end; usually they came upon it in darkness, when to Schneider and Andrews it seemed impossible that it could be found.
On the fourteenth day of their journey, they saw the mountains.
For much of the previous afternoon, they had traveled toward a low bank of clouds that distantly shrouded the western horizon, and they had traveled into the night before they found water. So they rose late that morning.
By the time they awoke, the sky was steel-blue and the sun was burning heavily in the east. Andrews rose from his bedroll with a start; they had not remained so late in camp during all the journey. The other men were still in their bedrolls. He started to call to them; but his eyes were caught by the brilliant clearness of the sky. He let his eyes wander unfocused over the high clear dome; and as they settled to the west, as they always settled, he stiffened and looked more closely. A small low uneven hump of dark blue rose on the farthest extremity of land that he could see. He sprang up and went a few steps forward, as if those few steps would enable him to see more closely. Then he turned back to the sleeping men; he went to Miller and shook his shoulder excitedly.
“Miller!” he said. “Miller, wake up.”
Miller stirred and opened his eyes, and came quickly to a sitting position, instantly awake.
“What is it, Will?”
“Look.” Andrews pointed to the west. “Look over there.”
Not looking where Andrews pointed, Miller grinned. “The mountains. I reckoned we should be in sight of them sometime today.”
By this time the others were awake. Schneider looked once at the thin far ridge, shrugged, got his bedroll together and lashed it behind his saddle. Charley Hoge gave the mountains a quick glance and turned away, busying himself with the preparations for the morning meal.
Late in the morning they began again their long trek westward. Now that their goal was visible, Andrews found that the land upon which they traveled took on features that he had not been able to recognize before. Here the land dipped into a shallow gully; there a small cropping of stone stood out from the earth; elsewhere in the distance a scrubby patch of trees smudged the greenish-yellow of the landscape. Before, his eyes had remained for most of the time fixed upon Miller’s back; now they strained into the distance, toward the uneven hump of earth, now sharp, now blurred, upon the far horizon. And he found that he hungered after them much as he had thirsted after the water; but he knew the mountains were there, he could see them; and he did not know precisely what hunger or thirst they would assuage.
The journey to the foothills took them four days. Gradually, with their going, the mountains spread and reared upon the land. As they came nearer Miller grew more impatient; when they nooned at a stream (the number of which increased as they traveled), he was hardly able to wait for the stock to water and graze. He urged them on, more and more swiftly, until at last the crack and hiss of Charley Hoge’s whip was regular and steady and the oxen’s lips were flecked and dripping with white foam. They drove late into each night, and were on the move again before the sun rose.
Andrews felt that the mountains drew them onward, and drew them with increasing intensity as they came nearer, as if they were a giant lodestone whose influence increased to the degree that it was more nearly approached. As they came nearer he had again the feeling that he was being absorbed, included in something with which he had had no relation before; but unlike the feeling of absorption he had experienced on the anonymous prairie, this feeling was one which promised, however vaguely, a richness and a fulfillment for which he had no name.
Once they came upon a broad trail running north and south. Miller paused upon it, got off his horse, and examined the path that had been worn in the grass.
“Cattle trail, looks like. They must have started running cattle up from Texas.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t here the last time I come through.”
Late in the afternoon, just before dark, Andrews saw in the distance the long thin parallel lines of a railroad, which found a level course by winding among the gentle hillocks that were beginning to swell upon the land; but Miller had already seen it.
“My God!” Miller said. “A railroad!”
The men increased the paces of their mounts, and in a few minutes halted beside the humped foundation of the road. The tops of the rails gleamed dully in the last light of the sun. Miller got off his horse and stood unmoving for a moment. He shook his head, knelt, and ran his fingers over the smooth steel of the tracks. Then, his hand still upon the metal, he raised his eyes to the mountains, which now loomed high and jagged in the orange and blue light of the afternoon sky.
“My God!” he said again. “I never thought they’d get a railroad in this country.”
“Buffalo,” Schneider said. He remained on his horse, and spat at the rails. “Big herd. I never seen big herds yet, where a railroad’s been in a few years.”
Miller did not look up at him. He shook his head, and then rose to his feet and mounted his horse.
“Come on,” he said abruptly. “We got a long way to go before we set up camp.”
Though they passed several clear streams, Miller forced them to travel for nearly three hours after dark. The travel was slow, for as they approached the mountains the land was more broken; frequently, they had to skirt large groves of trees that grew near the streams, and had to bypass several sharp hills that rose vaguely out of the darkness. Once, in the distance, they saw the glimmering of a light that might have come from the open door of a house. They continued their drive until they were out of its sight, and for some time afterward.
Early the next morning, they were in the foothills. A few pines were scattered on the sharply rising sides of the hills that cut off their view of the mountains. Miller, riding ahead, guided the wagon along the land that gently rose up to the hills; he pointed to a sharp strip of pines that descended from one of these, and they made in that direction. The hills dropped sharply into a valley; at the bottom of the cut, the land leveled on either side of a small stream. They followed this draw onto a broad flat valley, which stretched to the very base of the mountains.
“We should hit the river by noon,” Miller said. “Then we start to climb.”
But it was shortly after noon when they came upon the river. The land on the side from which they approached was clear; a few sumacs, already tinged with yellow, and a few clumps of scrub willow straggled along the bank. The bed of the river was wide; it was perhaps two hundred yards from the rise on their side to a steep ledge on the other. But for many yards beyond either bank, and in the bed itself, grass was growing, and even a few small trees and shrubs. Through the years, the river had cut away at earth and solid stone; now it ran thin and shallow at the center of its path in a swath no more than thirty feet in width. It ran smoothly and clearly among rocks, some flat and some thrust sharply up from the bed, here and there breaking into whirling eddies and white-topped riffles.
They nooned at the point at which they had first approached the river. While the other stock was grazing, Miller mounted his horse and rode away in a northeasterly direction, following the river’s flow. Andrews wandered away from Charley Hoge and Schneider, who were resting beside the wagon, and sat on the bank. The mountain was a mass of pines. On the far bank the heavy brown trunks raised thirty or forty feet before the boughs spread to hold deep green clusters of pine needles. In the spaces between the huge trunks were only other trunks, and others, on and on, until the few trees that he could see merged into an image of denseness, impenetrable and dark, compounded of tree and shadow and lightless earth, where no human foot had been. He raised his eyes, and followed the surface of the mountain as it jutted steeply upward. The image of the pines was lost, and the image of the denseness, and indeed even the image of the mountain itself. He saw only a deep green mat of needle and bough, which became in his gaze without identity or size, like a dry sea, frozen in a moment of calm, the billows regular and eternally still—upon which he might walk for a moment or so, only to sink as he moved upon it, slowly sink into its green mass, until he was in the very heart of the airless forest, a part of it, darkly alone. He sat for a long time upon the bank of the river, his eyes and his mind caught in the vision he had.
He was still sitting on the bank when Miller returned from his downstream journey.
Miller rode silently up to the resting men, who gathered around him as he drew his horse to a halt and dismounted.
“Well,” Schneider said, “you been gone long enough. Did you find what you were looking for?”
Miller grunted. His eyes went past Schneider, and ranged up and down the line of the river that he could see from where he stood.
“I don’t know,” Miller said. “It seems like the country has changed.” His voice was quietly puzzled. “It seems like everything is different from what it was.”
Schneider spat on the ground. “Then we still don’t know where we are?”
“I didn’t say that.” Miller’s eyes continued to range the line of the river. “I been here before. I been all over this country before. I just can’t seem to get things straight.”
“If this ain’t the damndest chase I ever been on,” Schneider said. “I feel like we’re looking for a pin in a stack of hay.” He walked angrily away from the little group. He sat down at the wagon, his back against the spokes of a rear wheel, and looked sullenly out over the flat valley across which they had traveled.
Miller walked to the bank of the river where Andrews had sat during his absence. For several minutes he stared across the river into the forest of pines that thrust up through the side of the mountain. His legs were slightly spread, and his large shoulders slumped forward; his head drooped, and his arms hung loosely at his sides. Every now and then one of his fingers twitched, and the slight movements turned his hands this way and that. At last he sighed, and straightened.
“Might as well get started,” he said, turning to the men. “We ain’t going to find nothing as long as we sit here.”
Schneider protested that there was no use for them all to join in the search, since only Miller would know the spot he wanted (if even Miller would know it) when he came upon it. Miller did not answer him. He directed Charley Hoge to yoke the oxen; soon the party was making its way in a southwesterly direction, opposite to the way that Miller had taken alone earlier in the afternoon.
All afternoon they made their way upriver. Miller went near the riverbank; sometimes, when the bank became too brushy, he rode his horse into the river itself, where the horse stumbled over the stones that littered the bed nearly to the edge of either bank. Once a thick grove of pines, which grew up to the very bank of the river, deflected the course of the wagon; the men in the main party skirted the grove, while Miller kept to the river bed. Andrews, with Schneider and Charley Hoge, did not see Miller for more than an hour; when finally the wedge-shaped grove was skirted, he saw Miller far ahead of them, upriver, leaning out from his saddle to inspect the far bank.
They made camp early that night, only an hour or so after the sun went down behind the mountains. With darkness, a chill came in the air; Charley Hoge threw more branches on the fire and dragged upon the branches a sizable log, which Schneider, in an excess of energy and anger, had cut from a pine tree whose top had been snapped the winter before by the weight of snow and wind. The fire roared violently in the quiet, driving the men back from it and lighting their faces a deep red. But after the fire died down to large embers the chill came again; Andrews got an extra blanket from the wagon and added it to his thin bedroll.
In the morning, silently, they broke camp. Andrews and Charley Hoge worked together; Schneider and Miller, apart from each other, stood apart from the two who worked. Schneider whittled savagely on a slender bough of pine; the shavings piled up on the ground where he was sitting, between his upraised knees. Miller stood again at the bank of the river, his back to the others, and gazed into the shallow flow of clear water that came from the direction in which they were to travel.
The morning’s journey began lethargically. Schneider slumped in his saddle; when he looked up from the ground, his eyes came to rest sullenly upon Miller’s back. Charley Hoge snapped the long whip perfunctorily over the ears of the lead oxen, and drank frequently from one of the bottles he kept in the box under his spring seat. Only Miller, who seemed to Andrews to become less and less a part of the group, kept restlessly ahead, now on the bank, now on the edge of the river bed, now in the water itself, which flowed whitely around the fetlocks of his horse. Miller’s restlessness began to affect Andrews, and he found himself gazing with an increasing intensity at the anonymous green forest that edged the river and defined the course of their passage.
In the middle of the morning, ahead of them, Miller halted his horse. The horse stood near the center of the river bed; as the others came up close to him, Andrews could see that Miller was gazing thoughtfully, but without real interest, at a spot on the bank opposite them. When the wagon halted, Miller turned to the group and said quietly:
“This is the place. Charley, turn your wagon down here and come straight across.”
For a moment, none of them moved. Where Miller pointed was no different from any of the places along the unchanging stretch of mountainside that they had passed that morning or the previous afternoon. Miller said again:
“Come on. Turn your wagon straight across.”
Charley Hoge shrugged. He cracked his whip above the left ear of the off-ox, and set the hand brake for the descent down the heavily sloping riverbank. Schneider and Andrews went ahead, following closely behind Miller, who turned his horse straight into the thick forest of pines.
For a moment, as he and Schneider and Miller pressed their horses directly into the face of the forest, Andrews had a sensation of sinking, as if he were being absorbed downward into a softness without boundary or mark. The sound of their horses’ breathing, the clop of their hooves, and even the few words the men spoke, all were absorbed in the quiet of the forest, so that all sound came muted and distant and calm, one sound much the same as another, whether it was the snort of a horse or a spoken word; all was reduced to soft thuds which seemed to come, not from themselves, but from the forest, as if there beat within it a giant heart, for anyone to hear.
Schneider’s voice, made soft and dull and unconcerned by the forest, came from beside Andrews: “Where the hell are we going? I don’t see no sign of buffalo here.”
Miller pointed downward. “Look what we’re on.”
The horses’ hooves, Andrews saw, were sliding the smallest bit upon what he had thought was the grayish-green bed of the forest; a closer look showed him that they were riding over a series of long flat stones that grew up from the base of the mountain and wound among the trees.
“They don’t leave no track here that a man would notice,” Miller said. Then he leaned forward in the saddle. “But look up there.”
The stone trail ended abruptly ahead of them, and a natural clearing widened among the trees and wound gradually up the side of the mountain. The bed of this clearing held a broad, regular swath of earth worn bare of grass; raw earth and stones showed the boundaries of the path. Miller kicked his horse up to the point where it began, and dismounted; he squatted in the middle of the path and inspected it carefully.
“This is their road.” His hand caressed the hard-packed contours of the earth. “There’s been a herd over it not too long ago. Looks like a big one.”
“By God!” Schneider said. “By God!”
Miller rose. “It’s going to be hard climbing from now on. Better tie your horses to the tail of the wagon; Charley’ll be needing our help.”
The buffalo trail went up the mountainside at an irregular angle. The wagon made its way up the steeply pitched incline; it went slowly upward, and then dipped sharply down in a hollow, and then went upward again. Andrews, after he had hitched his horse to the tailgate, strode beside the wagon with long, strong steps. The fresh high air filled his lungs, and gave him a strength he was not aware of having felt before. Beside the wagon, he turned to the two men, who were lagging some distance behind.
“Come on,” he called in an excess of exuberance and strength; he laughed a little, excitedly. “We’ll leave you behind.”
Miller shook his head; Schneider grinned at him. Neither man spoke. They shuffled awkwardly over the rough trail; their movements were slow and resigned and deliberate, as if made by old men walking to no purpose and with great reluctance.
Andrews shrugged and turned away from them. He looked ahead at the trail, eagerly, as if each turn would bring him a new surprise. He went in front of the wagon, striding along easily and swiftly; he loped down the small hollows, and climbed the rises with long, heavy thrusts of his legs. At a high rise, he paused; for a moment the wagon was out of his sight; he stood on a large stone that jutted up between two pines, and looked down; the mountain fell off sharply from the trail, and he could see for miles in either direction the river they had crossed only a few minutes before, and the land stretching level to the foothills that lay behind them. The land looked calm and undisturbed; he wondered idly at the half-submerged fear he had had of it during their crossing. Now that they were over it, it had the appearance of a friend known for a long while—it offered him a sense of security, a sense of comfort, and a knowledge that he could return to it and have that security and comfort whenever he wished. He turned. Above him, before him, the land was shrouded and unknown; he could not see it or know where they went. But his view of the other country, the level country behind him, touched upon what he was to see; and he felt a sense of peace.
He heard his name called. The sound came to him faintly from the trail below where the wagon was making its way upward. He leaped down from the rock, and trotted back to the wagon, which had halted before a sharp rise of the trail. Miller and Schneider were standing at the rear wheels; Charley Hoge sat on the clip seat, holding the hand brake against the backward roll of the wagon.
“Give us a hand here,” Miller said. “This pull’s a little steep for the oxen.”
“All right,” Andrews said. He noticed that his breath was coming rapidly, and that there was a slight ringing in his ears. He set his shoulder to the lower rear wheel, as Schneider had to the one pitched at a higher level on the other side of the trail. Miller faced him, and pulled at a large round wheel spoke, as Andrews pushed. Charley Hoge’s whip whistled behind them, and then cracked ahead of them, over the oxen’s heads, as his voice raised in a long, loud “Harrup!” The oxen inched forward, straining; Charley Hoge released the hand brake, and for an instant the men at the wheels felt a heavy, sickening, backward roll; then the weight of the oxen took hold; and as the men strained at the wheels, the wagon slowly began to move forward and upward on the trail.
The blood pounded in Andrews’s head. Dimly, he saw muscles like large ropes coil around Miller’s forearms, and saw the veins stand out heavily on his forehead. As the wheel turned, he found another spoke and put his shoulder to it; his breath came in gasps that sent sharp pains in his throat and chest. Bright points lighted the dimness in his eyes, and the points whirled; he closed his eyes. Suddenly he felt air in front of his hands, and then the sharp stones of the trail were digging in his back.
As from a great distance, he heard voices.
Schneider said: “He looks kind of blue, don’t he?”
He opened his eyes; the brightness danced before him, and the dark green needles of the pines were very close, then very far away, and a patch of blue sky was revealed above the needles. He heard the rasping sound of his own breath; his arms lay helplessly at his sides, and the heaving of his chest pushed the back of his head against a rock; otherwise he did not move.
“He’ll be all right.” Miller’s voice was slow and measured and easy.
Andrews turned his head. Schneider and Miller were squatting to his left; the wagon was some distance away, atop the rise which had momentarily halted it.
“What happened?” Andrews’s voice was thin and weak.
“You passed out,” Miller told him. Schneider chuckled. “In these mountains, you got to take it easy,” Miller continued. “Air’s thinner than what a body’s used to.”
Schneider shook his head, still chuckling. “Boy, you was sure going great there for a while. Thought you’d get clean over the mountain before it hit you.”
Andrews smiled weakly, and raised himself on one elbow; the movement caused his breath, which had quieted somewhat, again to come rapidly and heavily. “Why didn’t you slow me down?”
Miller shrugged. “This is something a body’s got to find out for his self. It don’t do no good to tell him.”
Andrews got to his feet, and swayed dizzily for a moment; he caught at Miller’s shoulder, and then straightened and stood on his own strength. “I’m all right. Let’s get going.”
They walked up the rise to the wagon. Andrews was breathing heavily again and his hands were shaking by the time they had gone the short distance.
Miller said: “I’d tell you to ride your horse for a while till you get your strength back, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. Once you get your wind broke, it’s better to keep on going afoot. If you rode your horse now, you’d just have it all to do over again.”
“I’m all right,” Andrews said.
They started off again. This time, Andrews kept behind Miller and Schneider and tried to imitate their awkward, stumbling gait. After a while he discovered that the secret was to keep his limbs loose and let his body fall forward, and to use his legs only to keep his body from the ground. Though his breath still came in shallow gasps, and though after a slightly steep ascent the lights still whirled before his eyes, he found that the peculiar shambling rhythm of the climb prevented him from becoming too tired. Every forty-five minutes Miller called for a halt and the men rested. Andrews noticed that neither Miller nor Schneider sat when they rested. They stood upright, their chests heaving regularly; at the instant the heaving subsided they started off again. After discovering the agony of getting up from a sitting or lying position, Andrews began standing with them; it was much easier and much less tiring to resume the climb from a standing position than from a sitting one.
Throughout the afternoon the men walked beside the wagon; and when the trail narrowed they walked behind it, putting their shoulders to the wheels when a slope caused the hooves of the oxen to slip and slide on the hard trail.
By midafternoon, they had pushed and tugged halfway up the side of the mountain. Andrews’s legs were numb, and his shoulder burned from repeated pushings against the wagon wheel. Even when he rested, the sharp thin air, cool and dry, pricked against his throat and caused sharp pains in his chest. He longed to rest, to sit on the ground, or to lie on the soft pine needles just off the trail; but he knew what the pain of rising would be; so he stood with the others when they rested, and looked up the trail to where it disappeared among the thick pines.
Late in the afternoon the trail made a turning so abrupt that Charley Hoge had to back the wagon up several times, angling it more to his right each time, so that finally it could negotiate the angle, its right wheels brushing against the pines, the left coming dangerously close to the brink of a sheer gully that descended three or four hundred feet. Past the turning, the party halted. Miller pointed ahead; the trail went steeply up to a point between two rough peaks, dark and jagged against the bright afternoon sky.
“There it is,” Miller said. “Just beyond them peaks.”
Charley Hoge cracked his whip above the oxen’s ears, and whooped. Startled, the oxen lurched forward and upward; their hooves dug into the earth, and slipped; the men again put their shoulders against the wheels of the wagon.
“Don’t push them too hard,” Miller called to Charley Hoge. “It’s a long pull, all the way to the top.”
Foot by foot, they pulled and pushed the wagon up the last steep ascent. Sweat came out on their faces, and was instantly dried by the high, cool air. Andrews heard the groaning sound of air pulled into lungs, and realized that the sound he heard was his own, so loud that it almost drowned out the breathing of the other men, the creak of the wagon as it strained unnaturally upward, and the heavy sounds of the oxen’s breathing and plodding and slipping on the trail. He gasped for air, as if he were drowning; his arms, hanging loose as his shoulder ground against the spokes, wanted to flail, as if they might raise him to more air. The numbness of his legs intensified, and suddenly they were numb no longer; he felt that hundreds of needles were pricking into his flesh, and that the needles warmed, became white-hot, and burned outward from his bone to his flesh. He felt that the sockets of his bones—ankle, knee, and hip—were being crushed by the weight they impelled forward. Blood pounded in his head, throbbed against his ears, until even the sound of his own breathing was submerged; and a red film came over his eyes. He could not see before him; he pushed blindly, his will supplanting his strength, becoming his body, until his pain submerged them both. Then he pitched forward, away from the wagon; the sharp stones on the path cut into his hands, but he did not move. He stayed for several moments on his hands and knees, and watched with a detached curiosity the blood from his cut palms seeping out and darkening the earth upon which they rested.
After a few moments, he was aware that the wagon had come to a halt just as he had pitched away from it, and that it was standing level now, no longer at an angle from the trail. On his right the sheer side of a rock thrust upward; to his left, above the wagon, no more than thirty feet away, was another very like it. He tried to get to his feet, but he slipped to his knees and remained there for a moment more. Still on his hands and knees, he saw Charley Hoge sitting erect on the wagon seat, looking out before him, not moving; Miller and Schneider were hanging on the wheels they had pushed; they, too, were looking before them, and they were silent. Andrews crawled a few feet forward, and pushed himself upright; he wiped his bloody hands on his shirt.
Miller turned to him. “There it is,” he said quietly. “Take a look.”
Andrews walked up to him, and stood looking where he pointed. For perhaps three hundred yards, the trail cut down between the pines; but at that point, abruptly, the land leveled. A long narrow valley, flat as the top of a table, wound among the mountains. Lush grass grew on the bed of the valley, and waved gently in the breeze as far as the eye could see. A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where no human foot had touched. Andrews found that despite his exhaustion he was holding his breath; he expelled the air from his lungs as gently as he could, so as not to disturb the silence.
Miller tensed, and touched Andrews’s arm. “Look!” He pointed to the southwest.
A blackness moved on the valley, below the dark pines that grew on the opposite mountain. Andrews strained his eyes; at the edges of the patch, there was a slight ripple; and then the patch itself throbbed like a great body of water moved by obscure currents. The patch, though it appeared small at this distance, was, Andrews guessed, more than a mile in length and nearly a half mile in width.
“Buffalo,” Miller whispered.
“My God!” Andrews said. “How many are there?”
“Two, three thousand maybe. And maybe more. This valley winds in and out of these hills; we can just see a little part of it from here. No telling what you’ll find on farther.”
For several moments more, Andrews stood beside Miller and watched the herd. He could, at the distance from which he viewed, make out no shape, distinguish no animal from another. From the north a cool wind began to rise; it came through the pass; Andrews shivered. The sun had fallen far below the mountain opposite them, and its shadow darkened the place where they stood.
“Let’s get down and set up camp,” Miller said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
Slowly, as if a procession, the group made its way down the incline to the valley. They were at the level ground before dark rolled from the mountain.