The days grew shorter; and the green grass of the flat mountain park began to yellow in the cool nights. After the first day the men spent in the valley, it rained nearly every afternoon, so that they soon got in the habit of leaving their work at about three and lying about the camp under a tarpaulin stretched from the high sides of the wagon and pegged into the ground. They talked little during these moments of rest; they listened to the light irregular patter of the rain, broken by the sheltering pines, as it dropped on the canvas tarpaulin; and they watched beneath the high belly of the wagon the small rain. Sometimes it was misty and gray like a heavy fog that nearly obscured the opposite rise of tree-grown mountain; and sometimes it was bright and silvery, as the drops, caught by the sun, flashed like tiny needles from the sky into the soft earth. After the rain, which seldom lasted for an hour, they would resume their chase and slaughter of the buffalo, working usually until late in the evening.
Deeper and deeper into the valley the herd was pushed, until Andrews, Miller, and Schneider were rising in the morning before the sun appeared so that they could get in a good day; by the middle of the first week they had to ride more than an hour to get to the main herd.
“We’ll chase them once clean to the end of the valley,” Miller said when Schneider complained of their long rides. “And then we’ll chase them back up this way. If we keep them going back and forth, they’ll break up in little herds, and we won’t be able to get at them so easy.”
Every two or three days Charley Hoge hitched the oxen to the wagon and followed the trail of the slaughter, which was marked by a bunched irregular line of stretched skins. Andrews and Schneider, and sometimes Miller, went with him; and as the wagon moved slowly along, the three men flung the stiff flintskins into the wagon. When all the skins were picked up, the wagon returned them to the main camp, where they were again tossed from the wagon upon the ground. Then the men stacked them one upon another, as high as they could reach. When a stack was between seven and eight feet in height, green thongs, stripped from the skin of a freshly killed buffalo, were passed through the cuts on the leg-skins of the top and bottom hides, and pulled tight and tied. Each stack contained between seventy-five and ninety hides, and each was so heavy that it took the combined strength of the four to boost it under the shelter of the trees.
At the skinning, Will Andrews’s skill slowly increased. His hands toughened and became sure; his knives lost their new brightness, and with use they cut more surely so that soon he was able to skin one buffalo to Schneider’s two. The stench of the buffalo, the feel of the warm meat on his hands, and the sight of clotted blood came to have less and less impact upon his senses. Shortly he came to the task of skinning almost like an automaton, hardly aware of what he did as he shucked the hide from an inert beast and pegged it to the ground. He was able to ride through a mass of skinned buffalo covered black with feeding insects, and hardly be aware of the stench that rose in the heat from the rotting flesh.
Occasionally he accompanied Miller in his stalking, though Schneider habitually stayed behind and rested, waiting for enough animals to be slaughtered for the skinning to begin. As he went with him, Andrews came to be less and less concerned with Miller’s slaughter of the beasts as such; he came to notice the strategy that Miller employed at keeping the buffalo confined to a reasonable area, and at keeping the felled animals in such a pattern that they might be easily and economically skinned.
Once Miller allowed Andrews to take his rifle and attempt a stand. Lying on the ground on his stomach, as he had so often seen Miller do, Andrews chose his buffalo and caught him cleanly through the lungs. He killed three more before he shot badly and the small herd dispersed. When it was over he let Miller go ahead while he remained on his stomach, toying with the empty cartridges he had used, trying to fix the feelings he had had at the kill. He looked at the four buffalo that lay nearly two hundred yards away from him; his shoulder tingled from the heavy recoil of the Sharps rifle. He could feel nothing else. Some grass-blades worked their way into his shirt front and tickled his skin. He got up, brushed the grass away, and walked slowly away from where he had lain, away from Miller, and went to where Schneider lay on the grass, near where their horses were tethered to one of the pines that stood down from the mountainside, slightly into the valley. He sat down beside Schneider; he did not speak; the two men waited until the sound of Miller’s rifle became faint. Then they followed the trail of dead buffalo, skinning as they went.
At night the men were so exhausted that they hardly spoke. They wolfed the food that Charley Hoge prepared for them, drained the great smoked coffeepot, and fell exhausted upon their bedrolls. In their increasing exhaustion, to which Miller drove them with his inexorable pursuit, their food and their sleep came to be the only things that had much meaning for them. Once Schneider, desiring a change of food, went into the woods and managed to shoot a small doe; another time Charley Hoge rode across the valley to the small lake where the buffalo watered and returned with a dozen fat foot-long trout. But they ate only a small part of the venison, and the taste of the trout was flat and unsatisfying; they returned to their steady diet of rich, strong buffalo meat.
Every day Schneider cut the liver from one of the slain buffalo; at the evening meal, almost ritually, the liver was divided into roughly equal portions and passed among them. Andrews learned that the taking of the raw liver was not an ostentation on the part of the three older men. Miller explained to him that unless one did so, one got what he called the “buff sickness,” which was a breaking out of the skin in large, ulcerous sores, often accompanied by fever and general weakness. After learning this, Andrews forced himself to take a bit of the liver every evening; he did not find the taste of it pleasant, but in his tiredness the faintly warm and rotten taste and the slick fiberless texture did not seem to matter much.
After a week in the valley, there were ten thonged stacks of hides set close together in a small grove of pines, and still Andrews could see no real diminution of the herds that grazed placidly on the flat bed of the valley.
The days slid one into another, marked by evening exhaustion and morning soreness; as it had earlier, on their overland voyage when they searched for water, time again seemed to Andrews to hold itself apart from the passing of the days. Alone in the great valley high in the mountains the four men, rather than being brought close together by their isolation, were thrust apart, so that each of them tended more and more to go his own way and fall upon his own resources. Seldom did they talk at night; and when they did, their words were directed to some specific business concerned with the hunt.
In Miller especially Andrews perceived this withdrawal. Always a man whose words were few and direct, he became increasingly silent. At evening, in the camp, he was by turns restless, his eyes going frequently from the camp to across the valley, as if he were trying to fix the buffalo herd and command it even though he could not see it; and indifferent, almost sullen, staring lethargically into the campfire, often not answering for minutes after his name was spoken or a question was asked of him. Only during the hunt, or when he was helping Andrews and Schneider with the skinning, was he alert; and even that alertness seemed to Andrews somehow unnaturally intense. He came to have an image of Miller that persisted even when Miller was not in his sight; he saw Miller’s face, black and dull with powder smoke, his white teeth clenched behind his stretched-out leathery lips, and his eyes, black and shining in their whites, surrounded by a flaming red line of irritated lids. Sometimes this image of Miller came into his mind at night, in his dreams; and more than once he came awake with a start and thrust himself upward out of his bedroll, and found that he was breathing quickly, shallowly, as if in fright, as the sharp image of those eyes upon him dulled and faded and died in the darkness around him. Once he dreamed that he was some kind of animal who was being pursued; he felt a relentless presence that chased him from cover to cover, and at last penned him in a corner of blackness from which there was no retreat; before he awoke in fear, or at a dreamed explosion of violence, he thought he caught a glimpse of those eyes burning at him from the darkness.
A week passed, and another; the stacks of hides beside their camp grew in number. Both Schneider and Charley Hoge became increasingly restless, though the latter did not give direct voice to his restlessness. But Andrews saw it in the looks that Charley Hoge gave to the sky in the afternoon when it clouded for the rain that Andrews and Schneider had grown to expect and welcome; he saw it in Charley Hoge’s increased drinking—the empty whisky crocks grew in number almost as fast as did the ricks of buffalo hides; and he saw it also at night when, against the growing cold, Charley Hoge built the fire to a roaring furnace that drove the rest of them away and covered himself when he bedded down with a pressing number of buffalo hides that he had managed to soften by soaking them in a thick soup of water and wood ash.
One evening, near the end of their second week, while they were taking their late evening meal, Schneider took from his plate a half-eaten buffalo steak and threw it in the fire, where it sizzled and curled and threw up a quantity of dark smoke.
“I’m getting damned sick of buffalo meat,” he said, and for a long moment afterward was silent, brooding at the fire until the steak was a black, twisted ash that dulled the red coals upon which it lay. “Damn sick of it,” he said again.
Charley Hoge sloshed his coffee and whisky in his tin cup, inspected it for a second, and drank it, his thin gray-fur-covered neck twisting as he swallowed. Miller looked at Schneider dully and then returned his gaze to the fire.
“God damn it, didn’t you hear me?” Schneider shouted, to any or all of them.
Miller turned slowly. “You said you were getting tired of buffalo meat,” he said. “Charley will cook up a batch of beans tomorrow.”
“I don’t want no more beans, and I don’t want no sowbelly, and I don’t want no more sour biscuits,” Schneider said. “I want some greens, and some potatoes; and I want me a woman.”
No one spoke. In the fire a green knot exploded and sent a shower of sparks in the air; they floated in the darkness and the men brushed them off their clothes as they settled.
Schneider said more quietly: “We been here two weeks now; that’s four days longer than we was supposed to be. And the hunting’s been good. We got more hides now than we can load back. What say let’s pack out of here tomorrow?”
Miller looked at him as if he were a stranger. “You ain’t serious, are you, Fred?”
“You’re damn right I am,” Schneider said. “Look. Charley’s ready to go back; ain’t you, Charley?” Charley Hoge did not look at him; he quickly poured some more coffee into his cup, and filled it to the brim with whisky. “It’s getting on into fall,” Schneider continued, his eyes still on Charley Hoge. “Nights are getting cold. You can’t tell what kind of weather you’re going to get, this time of year.”
Miller shifted, and brought his intense gaze directly upon Schneider. “Leave Charley alone,” he said quietly.
“All right,” Schneider said. “But just tell me. Even if we do stay around here, how are we going to load all the hides back?”
“The hides?” Miller said, his face for a moment blank. “The hides?...We’ll load what we can, leave the others; we can come back in the spring and pack them out. That’s what we said we’d do, back in Butcher’s Crossing.”
“You mean we’re going to stay here till you’ve wiped out this whole herd?”
Miller nodded. “We’re going to stay.”
“You’re crazy,” Schneider said.
“It’ll take another ten days,” Miller said. “Two more weeks at the outside. We’ll have plenty of time before the weather turns.”
“The whole god damned herd,” Schneider said, and shook his head wonderingly. “You’re crazy. What are you trying to do? You can’t kill every god damned buffalo in the whole god damned country.”
Miller’s eyes glazed over for a moment, and he stared toward Schneider as if he were not there. Then the film slid from his eyes, he blinked, and turned his face toward the fire.
“It won’t do no good to talk about it, Fred. This is my party, and my mind’s made up.”
“All right, god damn it,” Schneider said. “It’s on your head. Just remember that.”
Miller nodded distantly, as if he were no longer interested in anything that Schneider might want to say.
Angrily Schneider gathered his bedroll and started to walk away from the campfire. Then he dropped it and came back.
“Just one more thing,” he said sullenly.
Miller looked up absently. “Yes?”
“We been gone from Butcher’s Crossing now just a little over a month.”
Miller waited. “Yes?” he said again.
“A little over a month,” Schneider said again. “I want my pay.”
“What?” Miller said. His face was puzzled for a moment.
“My pay,” Schneider said. “Sixty dollars.”
Miller frowned, and then he grinned. “You thinking of spending it right soon?”
“Never mind that,” Schneider said. “You just give me my pay, like we agreed.”
“All right,” Miller said. He turned to Andrews. “Mr. Andrews, will you give Mr. Schneider his sixty dollars?”
Andrews opened his shirt front and took some bills from his money belt. He counted out sixty dollars, and handed the money to Schneider. Schneider took the money, and went to the fire, knelt, and carefully counted it. Then he thrust the bills into a pocket and went to where he had dropped his bedroll. He picked it up and went out of sight into the darkness. The three men around the fire heard the snapping of branches and the rustle of pine needles and cloth as Schneider put his bedroll down. They listened until they heard the regular sound of his breath, and then his angry snoring. They did not speak. Soon they, too, bedded down for the night. When they woke in the morning a thin rind of frost crusted the grass that lay on the valley bed.
In the morning light Miller looked at the frosted valley and said:
“Their grass is playing out. They’ll be trying to get through the pass and down to the flat country. We’ll have to keep pushing them back.”
And they did. Each morning they met the buffalo in a frontal attack, and pushed them slowly back toward the sheer rise of mountains to the south. But their frontal assault was little more than a delaying tactic; during the night the buffalo grazed far beyond the point they had been turned back from the day before. On each succeeding day the main herd came closer and closer to the pass over which it had originally entered the high park.
And as the buffalo pressed dumbly, instinctively, out of the valley, the slaughter grew more and more intense. Already withdrawn and spare with words, Miller became with the passing days almost totally intent upon his kill; and even at night, in the camp, he no longer gave voice to his simplest needs—he gestured toward the coffeepot, he grunted when his name was spoken, and his directions to the rest of them became curt motions of hands and arms, jerks of the head, and guttural growlings deep in his throat. Each day he went after the buffalo with two guns; during the kill, he heated the barrels to that point just shy of burning them out.
Schneider and Andrews had to work more and more swiftly to skin the animals Miller left strewn upon the ground; almost never were they able to finish their skinning before sundown, so that nearly every morning they were up before dawn hacking tough skins from stiff buffalo. And during the day, as they sweated and hacked and pulled in a desperate effort to keep up with Miller, they could hear the sound of his rifle steadily and monotonously and insistently pounding at the silence, and pounding at their nerves until they were raw and bruised. At night, when the two of them rode wearily out of the valley to the small red-orange glow that marked their camp in the darkness, they found Miller slouched darkly and inertly before the fire; except for his eyes he was as still and lifeless as one of the buffalo he had killed. Miller had even stopped washing off his face the black powder that collected there during his firing; now the powder smoke seemed a permanent part of his skin, ingrained there, a black mask that defined the hot, glaring brilliance of his eyes.
Gradually the herd was worn down. Everywhere he looked Andrews saw the ground littered with naked corpses of buffalo, which sent up a rancid stench to which he had become so used that he hardly was aware of it; and the remaining herd wandered placidly among the ruins of their fellows, nibbling at grass flecked with their dry brown blood. With his awareness of the diminishing size of the herd, there came to Andrews the realization that he had not contemplated the day when the herd was finally reduced to nothing, when not a buffalo remained standing—for unlike Schneider he had known, without questioning or without knowing how he knew, that Miller would not willingly leave the valley so long as a single buffalo remained alive. He had measured time, and had reckoned the moment and place of their leaving, by the size of the herd, and not—as had Schneider—by numbered days that rolled meaninglessly one after another. He thought of packing the hides into the wagon, yoking the oxen, which were beginning to grow fat on inactivity and the rich mountain grass, to the wagon, and making their way back down the mountain, and across the wide plains, back to Butcher’s Crossing. He could not imagine what he thought of. With a mild shock, he realized that the world outside the wide flat winding park hemmed on all sides by sheer mountain, had faded away from him; he could not remember the mountain up which they had labored, or the expanse of plain over which they sweated and thirsted, or Butcher’s Crossing, which he had come into and left only a few weeks before. That world came to him fitfully and unclearly, as if hidden in a dream. He had been here in the high valley for all of that part of his life that mattered; and when he looked out upon it—its flatness, and its yellow-greenness, its high walls of mountain wooded with the deep green of pine in which ran the flaming red-gold of turning aspen, its jutting rock and hillock, all roofed with the intense blue of the airless sky—it seemed to him that the contours of the place flowed beneath his eyes, that his very gaze shaped what he saw, and in turn gave his own existence form and place. He could not think of himself outside of where he was.
On their twenty-fifth day in the mountains they arose late. For the last several days, the slaughter had been going more slowly; the great herd, after more than three weeks, seemed to have begun to realize the presence of their killers and to have started dumbly to prepare against them; they began to break up into a number of very small herds; seldom was Miller able to get more than twelve or fourteen buffalo at a stand, and much time was wasted in traveling from one herd to another. But the earlier sense of urgency was gone; the herd of some five thousand animals was now less than three hundred. Upon these remaining three hundred, Miller closed in—slowly, inexorably—as if more intensely savoring the slaughter of each animal as the size of the herd diminished. On the twenty-fifth day they arose without hurry; and after they had taken breakfast they even sat around the fire for several moments letting their coffee cool in their tin cups. Though they could not see it through the thick forest of pines behind them, the sun rose over the eastern range of mountains; through the trees it sent diffused mists of light that gathered on their cups, softening their hard outlines and making them glow in the semishade. The sky was a deep thin blue, cloudless and intense; crevices and hollows on the broad plain and in the sides of the mountain sent up nearly invisible mists which could be seen only as they softened the edges of rock and tree they surrounded. The day warmed, and promised heat.
After finishing their coffee, they loitered around the camp while Charley Hoge led the oxen out of the aspen-pole corral and yoked them to the empty wagon. For several days hides had been drying where Andrews and Schneider had pegged them; it was time for them to be gathered and stacked.
Schneider scratched his beard, which was tangled and matted like wet straw, and stretched his arms lazily. “Going to be a hot day,” he said, pointing to the clear sky. “Probably won’t even get a rain.” He turned to Miller. “How many of the buff do you think’s left? Couple of hundred?”
Miller nodded, and cleared his throat.
Schneider continued: “Think we’ll be able to clean them up in three or four more days?”
Miller turned to him, as if only then aware that he had spoken. He said gruffly: “Three or four more days should do it, Fred.”
“God damn,” Schneider said happily. “I don’t know whether I can last that long.” He punched Andrews on the arm. “What about you, boy? Think you can wait?”
Andrews grinned. “Sure,” he said.
“A pocketful of money, and all the eats and women you can hold,” Schneider said. “By God, that’s living.”
Miller moved impatiently. “Come on,” he said. “Charley’s got the team yoked. Let’s get moving.”
The four men moved slowly from the camp area. Miller rode ahead of the wagon; Andrews and Schneider wound their reins about their saddle horns and let their horses amble easily behind it. The oxen, made lazy and irritable by their inactivity, did not pull well together; the morning silence was broken by Charley Hoge’s half-articulated, shouted curses.
Within half an hour the little procession had arrived at where the first buffalo had been killed and skinned more than three weeks before. The meat on the corpses had dried to a flintlike hardness; here and there the flesh had been torn away by the wolves before they had been killed or driven away by Charley Hoge’s strychnine; where the flesh was torn, the bones were white and shining, as if they had been polished. Andrews looked ahead of him into the valley; everywhere he looked he saw the mounded bodies. By next summer, he knew, the flesh would be eaten away by vultures or rotted away by the elements; he tried to imagine what the valley would look like, spread about with the white bones. He shivered a little, though the sun was hot.
Soon the wagon was so thickly surrounded by corpses that Charley Hoge was unable to point it in a straight direction; he had to walk beside the lead team, guiding it among the bodies. Even so, the huge wooden wheels now and then passed over an outthrust leg of a buffalo, causing the wagon to sway. The increasing heat of the day intensified the always present stench of rotting flesh; the oxen shied away from it, lowing discontentedly and tossing their heads so wildly that Charley Hoge had to stand many feet away from them.
When they had made their slow way to where a wide space was covered with pegged-out skins and fresh corpses, Andrews and Schneider got down from their horses. They tied large handkerchiefs about the lower parts of their faces, so that they could work without being disturbed by the horde of small black flies that buzzed about the rank meat.
“It’s going to be hot working,” Schneider said. “Look at that sun.”
Above the eastern trees, the sun was a fiery mass at which Andrews could not look directly; unhindered by mist or cloud, it burned upon them, instantly drying the sweat that it pulled from their faces and hands. Andrews let his eyes wander about the sky; the cool blueness soothed them from the burning they had from his brief glance toward the sun. To the south, a small white cloud had formed; it hung quiet and tiny just above the rise of the mountains.
“Let’s get going,” Andrews said, kicking at a small peg that held a skin flat against the earth. “It doesn’t look like it’ll get any cooler.”
A little more than a mile away, a slight dark movement was visible among the low mounds of corpses; a small herd was grazing quietly and moving slowly toward them. Miller abruptly reined his horse away from the three men who were busy loading the hides, and galloped toward the herd.
As the men worked, Charley Hoge led the oxen between them, so that neither would have to take more than a few steps to fling his hides upon the wagon bed. Shortly after Miller rode off, Andrews and Schneider heard the distant boom of his rifle; they lifted their heads and stood for a few moments listening. Then they resumed their work, unpegging and tossing the hides into the moving wagon more slowly, in rhythm with the booming sound of Miller’s rifle. When the sound ceased, they paused in their work and sat on the ground, breathing heavily.
“Don’t sound like we’re going to have to do much skinning today,” Schneider panted, pointing in the direction of Miller’s firing. “Sounds like he only got twelve or fourteen so far.”
Andrews nodded and lay back in a half-reclining position, resting his body on his elbows and forearms; he removed the large red bandana from his lower face so that his flesh might have the coolness of a faint breeze that had come up during their rest. The throbbing of his head gradually subsided as the breeze became stronger and cooled him. After about fifteen minutes, Miller’s rifle sounded again.
“He found another little herd,” Schneider said, rising to his feet. “We might as well try to keep up with him.”
But as they worked, they noticed that the rifle shots no longer came with the same regularity, marking a rhythm by which they could kick the stakes, raise the hides, and sail them onto the wagon. Several shots came briefly spaced, in a sharp flurry; there was a silence of several minutes; then another brief flurry of shots. Andrews and Schneider looked at each other in puzzlement.
“It don’t sound right,” Schneider said. “Maybe they’re getting skittish.”
The closely-spaced shots were followed by the brief sharp thunder of pounding hooves; in the distance could be seen a light cloud of dust raised by the running buffalo. The men heard another burst of rifle fire, and they saw the cloud of dust turn and go away from them, back into the depths of the valley. A few minutes later they heard another faint rumbling of hooves, and saw another cloud of dust rise at a different spot some distance east of the earlier stampede. And again they heard the brief, close explosions of Miller’s rifle, and saw the dust cloud veer and go back beyond the point from which it had begun.
“Miller’s got himself some trouble,” Schneider said. “Something’s got into them buff.”
In the minutes that the men had been standing still, listening to the gunshots and watching the dust trails, the burning heat had lessened perceptibly. A thin haze had come between them and the sun, and the breeze from the south had grown stronger.
“Come on,” Andrews said. “Let’s get these hides loaded while we’ve got a breeze.”
Schneider lifted his hand. “Wait.” Charley Hoge had left the oxen, and now stood near Schneider and Andrews. The rapid drumming of a running horse came to them; among the scattered flayed bodies of the buffalo Miller appeared, galloping toward them. When he came near the standing men, he pulled his horse so abruptly to a halt that it reared, its forehooves for a moment pawing the air.
“They’re trying to get out of the valley,” Miller’s voice came in a croaking rasp. “They’ve broke up in ten or twelve little herds, and I can’t turn them back fast enough; I need some help.”
Schneider blew his nose contemptuously. “Hell,” he said wearily, “let them go. There are only a couple of hundred of them left.”
Miller did not look at Schneider. “Will, you get on your horse and wait over there.” He pointed west to a spot two or three hundred yards from the side of the mountain. “Fred, you ride over there—” He pointed in the opposite direction, to the east. “I’ll stay in the middle.” He spoke to both Andrews and Schneider. “If a herd comes in your direction, head it off; all you have to do is shoot into it two or three times. It’ll turn.”
Schneider shook his head. “It’s no good. If they’re broke up in little herds, we can’t turn them all back.”
“They won’t all come at once,” Miller said. “They’ll come two or three at a time. We can turn them back.”
“But what’s the use?” said Schneider, his voice almost a wail. “What the hell’s the use? It ain’t going to kill you to let a few of them get away.”
“Hurry it up,” said Miller. “They’re liable to start any minute.”
Schneider raised his hands to the air, shrugged his shoulders, and went to his horse; Miller spurred toward the middle of the valley. Andrews mounted his horse, started to ride in the direction that Miller had pointed to him, and then rode up to the wagon to which Charley Hoge had returned.
“You got a rifle, Charley?” Andrews asked.
Charley Hoge turned nervously. He nodded and drew a small rifle from beneath the clip seat. “It’s just your little varmint rifle,” he said as he handed it to him, “but it’ll turn them.”
Andrews took the rifle and rode toward the side of the mountain. He pointed his horse in the direction that the buffalo would come from, and waited. He looked across the valley; Miller had stationed himself in the center, and he leaned forward on his horse toward the herds that none of them could see. Beyond Miller, small in the distance, Schneider slouched on his horse as if he were asleep. Andrews turned again to the south and listened for the pounding of hooves which would mark the run of a herd.
He heard nothing save the soft whistling of the wind around his ears, which were beginning to tingle from the coolness. The southern reaches of the valley were softening in a faint mist that was coming down from the mountains; the small cloud that had earlier hovered quietly above the southern peaks now extended over the boxed end of the valley; the underside of the cloud was a dirty gray, above which the sunlit white vapor twisted and coiled upon itself before a thrusting wind that was not felt on the ground here in the valley.
A heavy rumble shook the earth; Andrews’s horse started backward, its ears flattened about the sides of its head. For an instant Andrews searched the upper air about the southern mountains, thinking that he had heard the sound of thunder; but the rumbling persisted beneath him. Directly in front of him, in the distance, a faint cloud of dust arose, and blew away as soon as it had arisen. Then suddenly, out of the shadow, onto that part of the valley still flooded in sunlight, the buffalo emerged. They ran with incredible swiftness, not in a straight line toward him, but in swift swerves and turns, as if they evaded invisible obstacles suddenly thrust before them; and they swerved and turned as if the entire herd of thirty or forty buffalo were one animal with one mind, a single will—no animal straggled or turned in a direction that was counter to the movement of the others.
For several moments Andrews sat motionless and stiff on his horse; he had an impulse to turn, to flee the oncoming herd. He could not believe that a few shots from the small varmint rifle that he cradled in his right arm could be heard or even felt by a force that came onward with such speed and strength and will; he could not believe they could be turned. He twisted in the saddle, moving his neck stiffly so that he could see Miller. Miller sat still, watching him; after a moment Miller shouted something that was drowned in the deepening rumble of the buffalo’s stampede, and pointed toward them, motioning with his hand and arm as if he were throwing stones at them.
Andrews dug his heels into his horse’s sides; the horse went forward a few steps and then halted, drawing back on its haunches. In a kind of desperation and fear, Andrews dug his heels again into the heaving sides of his mount, and beat with his rifle butt upon the quivering haunches. The horse leaped forward, almost upsetting him; it galloped for a moment wildly, throwing its head against the bit that Andrews held too tightly; then, soothed by its own motion, it steadied and ran easily forward toward the herd. The wind slapped into Andrews’s face and swept tears from his eyes. For an instant he could not see where he was going.
Then his vision cleared. The buffalo were less than three hundred yards away from him, swerving and turning erratically, but heading toward him. He pulled his horse to a halt and flung his rifle to his shoulder; the stock was cold against his cheek. He fired once into the midst of the rushing herd; he barely heard the rifle shot above the thunder of hooves. He fired again. A buffalo stumbled and fell, but the others came around it, flowed over it like tumbling water. He fired again, and again. Suddenly, the herd swerved to his left, cutting across the valley toward Miller. Andrews heeled his horse and ran alongside the fleeing herd, firing into its rushing mass. Gradually the herd turned, until it was running with unabated speed back in the direction from which it had come.
Andrews pulled his horse to a stop; panting, he looked after the running herd and listened to the diminishing roar of pounding hooves. Then, upon that sound, faintly, came another similar to it. He looked across the valley. Another herd, slightly smaller than the first, sped across the flat land toward Schneider. He watched as Schneider fired into it, followed it as it swerved, and turned it back.
In all, the three of them turned back six rushes of the buffalo. When at last no sound of running hooves broke the silence, and after they had waited for many minutes in anticipation of another rush, Miller beckoned them to ride toward him in the center of the valley.
Andrews and Schneider rode up to Miller quietly, letting their horses walk so that they could hear a warning if the buffalo decided to charge again. Miller was looking across the valley, squinting at where the buffalo had run.
“We got them,” Miller said. “They won’t try to break out again like that.”
A tremor of elation that he could not understand went through Andrews. “I never thought anything like that was possible,” he said to Miller. “It was almost as if they were doing it together, as if they’d planned it.” It seemed to him that he had not really thought of the buffalo before. He had skinned them by the hundreds, he had killed a few; he had eaten of their flesh, he had smelled their stench, he had been immersed in their blood; but he had not thought of them before as he was thinking of them now. “Do they do things like that very often?”
Miller shook his head. “You might as well not try to figure them out; you can’t tell what they might do. I’ve been hunting them for twenty years and I don’t know. I’ve seen them run clean over a bluff, and pile up a hundred deep in a canyon—thousands of them, for no reason at all that a man could see. I’ve seen them spooked by a crow, and I’ve seen men walk right in the middle of a herd without them moving an inch. You think about what they’re going to do, and you get yourself in trouble; all a man can do is not think about them, just plow into them, kill them when he can, and not try to figure anything out.” As he spoke, Miller did not look at Andrews; his eyes were on the valley, which was still now, and empty, save for the trampled bodies of the buffalo they had killed. He took a deep breath and turned to Schneider. “Well, Fred, we got us some cool weather anyhow. It won’t be so bad working, now.”
“Wait a minute,” Schneider said. His eyes were fixed on nothing; he held his head as if he were listening.
“You hear them again?” Miller asked.
Schneider motioned with his hand for quiet; he sat in his saddle for a few minutes more, still listening; he sniffed twice at the air.
“What is it?” Miller asked.
Schneider turned to him slowly. “Let’s get out of here.” His voice was quiet.
Miller frowned, and blinked. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Schneider said. “But something is. Something don’t feel right to me.”
Miller snorted. “You’re spooked easier than a buffalo. Come on. We got half a day in front of us. They’ll quiet down in a while and I can get a good number before it’s dark.”
“Listen,” Schneider said.
The three men sat in their saddles, quiet, listening for something they did not know. The wind had died, but a slight chill remained in the air. They heard only silence; no breeze rustled through the pines, no bird called. One of their horses snorted; someone moved in the saddle, and there came the thin sound of leather creaking. To break the silence, Miller slapped his leg; he turned to Schneider and said loudly:
“What the hell—”
But he did not continue. He was silenced by Schneider’s outstretched arm and hand and finger, which seemed to point at nothing. Puzzled, Andrews looked from one of them to another; and then his gaze halted in the air between them. Out of the air, large and soft and slow, like a falling feather, drifted a single snowflake. As he watched, he saw another, and another.
A grin broke out on his face, and a nervous bubble of laughter came up in his throat.
“Why, it’s snowing,” he said, laughing, looking again from one of them to the other. “Did you ever think this morning that—”
His voice died in his throat. Neither Miller nor Schneider looked at him, and neither gave any sign that they knew he had spoken. Their faces were tense and strained at the thickening sky from which the snow was falling more and more rapidly. Andrews looked quickly at Charley Hoge, who was sitting motionless some yards from the others on his high wagon seat. Charley Hoge’s face was raised upward, and his arms were clasped together over his chest; his eyes rolled wildly, but he did not move his head or unclasp his arms.
“Let’s go,” Miller said quietly, still looking at the sky. “We might just make it before it gets too bad.”
He pulled his horse around and rode a few steps up to Charley Hoge. He leaned from the saddle and shook Charley Hoge roughly by the shoulder.
“Let’s haul, Charley.”
For a moment, Charley Hoge did not seem to know Miller’s presence; and when he turned to face him, he did not appear to recognize the large black-bearded face, which was beginning to glisten from the melting snowflakes. Then his eyes focused, and he spoke in a trembling voice:
“You said it would be all right.” His voice gained strength, became accusing: “You said we’d make it out before the snows came.”
“It’s all right, Charley,” Miller said. “We got plenty of time.”
Charley Hoge’s voice rose: “I said I didn’t want to come. I told you—”
“Charley!” Miller’s voice cracked. And then he said more softly: “We’re just wasting time. Get your team headed back to camp.”
Charley Hoge looked at Miller, his mouth working, but moving upon words that did not become sound. Then he reached behind him and took from its clip the long bull-whip, the braided leather of which trailed from the heavy butt. He whistled it over the ears of the lead team, in his fright letting the tip come too low, and drawing blood from the ear of the right lead ox. The ox threw his head around wildly and jumped forward, pulling the surprised weight of the other animals; for a moment the team floundered, each member pulling in a different direction. Then they settled together and pulled steadily. Charley Hoge cracked his whip again and the team broke into a lumbering run; he made no effort to guide the animals among the corpses of the buffalo. The wagon wheels, passing over the bodies, pitched the wagon wildly about. Stiff hides slithered off and fell to the ground; no one paused to retrieve them.
The three men on horseback rode close to the wagon; they had to pull back on their reins to keep the animals from bolting and running ahead. Within a few minutes the air was white with snow; dimly, on either side, they could see the veiled green of the mountainside; but they could not see ahead to their camp. The shadowy pine trees on either side of them guided their movement upon the flat bed of the valley. Andrews squinted ahead toward their camp, but all he could see was snow, the flakes circling and slowly falling, one against another and another and another; in his riding, they came at him, and if he looked at them, his head whirled as they did and he became dizzy. He fixed his eyes upon the moving wagon and saw the snow unfocused, a general haze that surrounded him and isolated him from the others, though he could see them dimly as they rode. His bare hands, holding the reins and clutching his saddle horn as his horse trotted and loped unevenly among the corpses of the buffalo, reddened in the cold; he tried to thrust one of them in a pocket of his trousers, but the rough stiff cloth was so painful that he removed his hand and kept it in the open.
After the first few minutes the ground was covered white with snow; the wagon wheels, cutting easily through it, left thin parallel ribbons of darkness behind them. Andrews glanced back; within seconds after the wheels cut the snow, the shallow ruts began to fill and only a few feet behind them were whitened so that he could not tell where they had been; despite their movement and the pitching of the wagon, he had the feeling that they were going nowhere, that they were caught on a vast treadmill that heaved them up but did not carry them forward.
The breeze that had died when the first snowflakes began to fall came up again; it swirled the snow about them, whipping it into their faces, causing them to squint their eyes against its force. Andrews’s jaws began to ache; he realized that for some moments he had been clenching his teeth together with all the strength he had; his lips, drawn back over his teeth in an aimless snarl, smarted and pained him as the cold pushed against the tiny cracks and rawness there. He relaxed his jaws and dropped his head, hunching his shoulders against the cold which drove through the thin clothing upon his flesh. He looped the reins about his saddle horn and grasped it with both hands, letting his horse find its own way.
The wind grew stronger and the snow came in thick flurries. For an instant Andrews lost sight of the wagon and of the other men; a numb, vague panic made him lift his head; somewhere to his left he heard, above the whistle of the wind, the creak and thump of the wagon wheels. He pulled his horse in the direction of the sound, and after a moment saw the heavy shape of the wagon careening over the littered ground and dimly saw the hunched figure of Charley Hoge swaying on the high clip seat, lashing the thick air with his bull-whip; softly, muffled by the snow and drowned by the wind, its wet crack sounded.
And still the wind increased. It howled over the mountains and blew the snow into stinging pellets; in great sheets, it lifted the snow off the ground and spread it again; it thrust the fine white freezing powder into the crevices of their clothing where it melted from their bodies’ warmth; and it hardened the moisture so that their clothing hung heavy and stiff upon them and gathered the cold to their flesh. Andrews clutched his saddle horn more firmly; there was no sensation in his hands. He removed one hand stiffly from the horn and flexed it, and beat it against the side of his leg until it began to throb painfully; then he did the same with the other hand. By then the first had grown numb again. A small pile of snow gathered in his saddle in the sharp V formed by his legs.
Above the wind he heard a faint shout; the wagon loomed up suddenly before him; his horse halted, pitching him forward. He heard the shout again and thought it was his name that was called. He guided his horse along the side of the wagon, hunching himself against the wind and peering out of his half-closed eyes every second or so, trying to see who had called him. Miller and Schneider, their horses close together facing the wind, waited for him at the front of the wagon. When he came up to them, he saw Charley Hoge huddled between the two horses, his back hunched to the wind.
Stiffly, leaning against the wind, their faces turned down so that the brims of their hats were blown against their cheeks, the men dismounted from their horses, and, crouching against the wind, thrusting themselves at an angle through it, came toward Andrews; Miller beckoned him to get down. As he dismounted, the force of the wind pushed his unsupported body forward and he stumbled, one foot for a moment caught in the stirrup.
Miller staggered up to him, grasped him by the shoulders, and put his bearded face—which was now stiff and icy in spots, where snow had melted and frozen—to Andrews’s ear. He shouted: “We’re going to leave the wagon here; it slows us up too much. You hold on to the horses while Fred and I unyoke the team.”
Andrews nodded and pulled the reins with him as he went toward the horses. His own horse pulled back, almost dislodging the reins from his numb hand; he jerked heavily on the reins and the horse followed him. Still holding the reins in one hand, he stooped and fumbled in the snow, which lifted and swirled about his feet as if disturbed by a long explosion, until he found the knotted reins of the other horses. As he straightened, Charley Hoge, whose back had been toward him, turned; the stump of his forearm was thrust inside his light coat, and his good arm pressed it close to his body as his body hunched over it. For a moment Charley Hoge looked at Andrews without seeing him; his pale eyes were open and unblinking against the stinging wind and snow, and they focused on nothing. His mouth was moving rapidly and his lips twitched one way and another, causing the beard about his mouth to jerk unevenly. Andrews shouted his name but the wind tore the word from his lips; Charley Hoge’s eyes did not move. Andrews came a little closer; shifting all three reins to one hand, he reached out his other to touch Charley Hoge on the shoulder. At his touch, Charley Hoge jerked back away and cowered, his eyes still glazed and his lips still working. Andrews shouted again:
“It’ll be all right, Charley. It’ll be all right.”
He was barely able to hear what Charley Hoge repeated over and over, to the wind, the snow, and the cold:
“God help me. Lord Jesus Christ help me. God help me.”
At a thump behind him, Andrews turned; a dim dark bulk loomed out of the whiteness and lumbered past him. The first of the oxen had been unyoked by Miller and Schneider. As the shape lumbered into the whiteness and disappeared, the horses which Andrews held bolted. Their quick movement caught him by surprise, and before he could throw his weight against the reins, one of the horses’ bellies had brushed heavily against Charley Hoge, knocking him to the ground. Andrews started involuntarily toward him, and as he did so the three horses moved together, pulling him around and forward, so that he was off balance; his feet flew into the air behind him, and he landed heavily on his stomach and chest in the snow. Somehow he managed to hold on to the reins. Flat on the snow, he grinned foolishly at his blue-red hands that clutched the thin strips of leather. Snow flew around him, and he was aware of the heavy lift and fall of hooves on either side of his head; he realized slowly and almost without surprise that he was being dragged along the ground on his stomach.
He pulled his weight against the moving reins and managed to get his knees under his body; then he pulled harder, so that his knees went before him as he leaned backward and sawed on the reins. The rear leg of one of the horses brushed against his shoulder, and he nearly lost his balance; but he regained it and lifted himself upward again, thrusting his legs down in a desperate leap, stumbling to his feet, and running along with the horses for several yards. Then he dug his heels into the snow and sawed again on the reins; he felt himself being carried along, but less swiftly. His heels went beneath the snow, caught on the grass, and plowed shallowly into the earth. The horses slowed, and halted. He stood for a moment panting; he was still smiling foolishly, though his legs were trembling and his arms were without strength, as he turned and looked behind him.
Whiteness met his eyes. He could not see the wagon, or the oxen, or the men who stood near them. He listened, trying to hear a sound to guide him; nothing came above the increasing moan of the wind. He knelt and looked behind him at the path he had scraped in the snow; a narrow, rough depression showed shallowly. He pulled the horses with him as he followed the path, stooping close to the ground and brushing at the snow with his free hand. After a few yards the trail began to fill, and soon it disappeared before the gusts of wind and blown snow. As nearly as he could guess, he continued to walk in the direction from which he had been pulled. He hoped that he had been carried away from the wagon in a straight line, but he could not be sure. Every now and then he shouted; his voice was whipped from his mouth and carried behind him by the wind. He hurried, and stumbled in the snow; from his feet and hands, numbness crept toward his body. He looked about him wildly. He tried to walk forward slowly and steadily, conserving his strength; but his legs jerked beneath him and carried him forward in an uneven gait that was half trot, half run. The horses, whose reins he carried, seemed an intolerable burden, though they moved docilely behind him; he had to use all his will to keep from dropping the reins and running blindly in the snow. He sobbed, and fell to his knees. Awkwardly, with the reins still clutched in his right hand, he crawled forward.
Distantly, he heard a shout; he paused and lifted his head. To his right, a little closer, the sound came again. He got to his feet and ran toward it, his sobbing breath becoming a rasping laugh. Suddenly, out of the white and gray of the driving snow, the blurred shape of the wagon loomed; and he saw three figures huddled beside it. One of them detached itself and walked toward him. It was Miller. He shouted something that Andrews did not understand, and took the reins that Andrews still held. When he lifted the reins, Andrews’s hand was lifted stiffly to chest level; he looked at it and tried to loose the fingers. He could not make them move. Miller took his hand and pried the fingers back from the leather. His hand empty, Andrews worked his fingers, opening and closing his hand until the cramp was gone.
Miller came near him and shouted in his ear: “You all right?”
Andrews nodded.
“Let’s get going,” Miller shouted. Bending against the wind, the two men struggled toward the wagon and Charley Hoge and Schneider. Miller drew Schneider’s and Andrews’s heads together and shouted again: “I’ll put Charley on with me. You two stay close.”
Beside the wagon the men mounted their horses. Miller pulled Charley Hoge up behind him; he tightly grasped Miller around the stomach and buried his head against Miller’s back; his eyes were screwed shut, and his mouth still worked upon the words that none of them could hear. Miller moved his horse away from the wagon; Andrews and Schneider followed. In a few moments the wagon was blotted from their sight by a solid wall of falling snow.
Shortly they passed beyond the ground that was curved by the white mounds of buffalo carcasses; Miller pushed his horse to a gallop, and the others followed. The gaits of their horses were awkward, jolting them in their saddles so that they had to hang on to their saddle horns with both hands. Now and then they came upon stretches of ground where the snow lay in heavy drifts; there the horses slowed to a walk and plowed through the snow which covered their forelegs halfway up to their knees.
Andrews’s sense of direction had become numbed by the swirling white vortex of snow. The faint gray-green of the pine trees that blanketed the opposing mountainsides, which had earlier guided them in the general direction of the valley’s mouth, had long been shrouded from the views of all of them; beyond the horses and the figures huddled upon them, Andrews could not see any mark that showed him where they went. The same whiteness met his eyes wherever he looked; he had the sensation that, dizzily, they were circling around and around in a circle that gradually decreased, until they were spinning furiously upon a single point.
And still Miller spurred his horse, and beat its flanks, which glistened with sweat even in the driving, bitter cold. The three horses were grouped closely together; with a kind of vague horror that he could not understand, Andrews saw that Miller had closed his eyes against the stinging gale, and kept them closed, his head turned downward and to the side so that it was visible to Andrews even in their heavy gallop. Miller kept a tight hold on the reins, guiding the horse in a direction that he did not see. The others followed him blindly, trusting his blindness.
Suddenly, out of the storm, a dark wall reared up before them; it was the mountainside of trees, upon which the snow, driven by the fierce wind, could not settle. The ghostly shape of the large chimney rock where they had built their fires loomed vaguely, a dirty yellow-gray against the white snow. Miller slowed his horse to a walk, and led the others to the aspen-pole corral that Charley Hoge had built. Trying to keep their backs to the wind, they dismounted and led their horses into the corral, tethering them close together in the farthest corner. They left their saddles on, hooking the stirrups over the horns so that in the wind they would not beat against the horses’ sides. Miller motioned for them to follow him; bent almost double in the face of the wind, they made their way out of the corral toward the spot where they had stacked and baled the buffalo hides. The stacks of hides were drifted high with snow; some of them had blown over, and rested lengthwise on the ground; others swayed sharply before the strong gusts of wind; the corners of two or three loose hides, scattered over the ground, protruded from the snow; Andrews realized that this was what remained of an unthonged pile of hides, half as high as the completed ricks. Most of them had been blown away by the powerful wind. For a few moments, the men stood still, huddled close together beside a stack of hides.
Half leaning against it, a great weariness came over Andrews; despite the cold, his limbs loosened and his eyelids dropped. Dimly he remembered something that he had been told, or that he had read, about death by freezing. With a shiver of fright he stood up away from the hides. He flailed his arms, beating them against his sides until he could feel the blood run through them more swiftly; and he began to jog around in a small circle, lifting his knees as he ran.
Miller pushed himself away from the rick of hides where he had been resting and stood in his path; he put both hands on Andrews’s shoulders, and said, his face close and his voice loud: “Be still. You want to get yourself froze to death, just keep moving around; that’ll do it right quick.”
Andrews looked at him dully.
“You work up a sweat,” Miller continued, “and it’ll freeze around you as soon as you’re still for a minute. You just do what I tell you and you’ll be all right.” He returned to Schneider. “Fred, cut some of them hides loose.”
Schneider fumbled in one of the pockets of his canvas coat and brought out a small pocketknife. He sawed at the frozen thongs until they parted and spilled the compressed hides out of their confines. Immediately, the wind caught half a dozen of them, lifted them high, and sailed them in various directions; some of them landed high in the branches of the pines, and others scudded along the snow toward the open valley and disappeared.
“Grab yourselves three or four of them,” Miller shouted; and he fell upon a small pile that slid from the larger stack. Quickly Andrews and Schneider did the same; but Charley Hoge did not move. He remained huddled, half crouching. Miller, on his stomach, carrying the hides with him, crawled across the snow to where a few of the skins remained in the unbound pile. He pulled at the stiff thong that Schneider had hacked and managed to extricate a length of it from the bottom hide, where it was fastened to the small hole in the skin of what had been a buffalo leg. He cut this length into a number of pieces of equal length. Schneider and Andrews crawled across the snow and watched him as he worked.
With his short knife, Miller punched holes in each of the legs of the hides which he secured beneath him. Then, turning two of the skins against each other, so that fur touched fur, he thonged the legs together. The two other furs he turned so that the fur of each was to the weather, and placed them crosswise, one above and one beneath the crude open-ended and open-sided sack he had fashioned. When he had thonged the legs of the last two skins, there lay on the ground a rough but fairly effective protection against the weather, a bag whose ends were open but whose sides were loosely closed, into which two men could crawl and protect themselves against the main fury of the wind and hurtling snow. Miller dragged the heavy bag across the snow, pulled it among some of the fallen ricks, and jammed one open end against a bank of snow that was collecting against the fallen pile. Then he helped Charley Hoge crawl into the bag, and returned to Andrews and Schneider. Andrews lifted himself a little off the ground, and Miller pulled two of the hides from beneath him and began thonging the legs together.
“This will keep you from freezing,” he shouted above the wind. “Just keep close together in this, and don’t let yourselves get wet. You won’t be warm, but you’ll live.” Andrews got to his knees and tried to grasp the edges of the hides, to pick them up and carry them to Miller, who had almost finished the first part of the shelter; but his fingers were so numb that he could not make them move with any precision; they hung at the ends of his hands and moved feebly and erratically over the frozen fur, without strength or sensation. Bending his hands from the wrists, shoving them through the snow under the hides, he staggered to his feet; pressing the hides against his lower body, he started to walk with them to Miller; but a gust of wind caught him, thrusting the hides heavily against him, and nearly lifted him off his feet. He fell to the ground again, near Miller, and pushed the hides through the snow to him.
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.