On the morning of the third day, Andrews turned weakly under the weight of the snow and burrowed through the long drift that had gathered at his head. Though he had grown somewhat used to the cold, which even in sleep enveloped the thin edge of warmth his body managed to maintain, he flinched and closed his eyes, hunching his neck into his shoulders as his flesh came against the packed coldness of the snow.
When he came from under the snow, his eyes were still closed; he opened them upon a brilliance that seared them over for an instant with a white hotness. Though melting snow clung in patches to his hands, he clapped them over his eyes and rubbed them until the pain subsided. Gradually, by squinting his eyelids open a little at a time, he accustomed his eyes to daylight. When at last he was able to look around him, he viewed a world that he had not seen before.
Under a cloudless sky, and glittering coldly beneath a high sun, whiteness spread as far as he could see. It lay thickly drifted about the site of their camp and lay like movement frozen, in waves and hillocks over the broad sweep of the valley. The mountainside, which had defined the valley’s winding course, now was softened and changed; in a gentle curve the snow lay in drifts about the dark pines that straggled from the mountain into the flat valley, so that only the tips of the trees showed dark against the whiteness of the snow. The snow was gathered high upon the mountainside, so that no longer did his eyes meet a solid sheet of green; now he saw each tree sharply defined against the snow which surrounded it. For a long time he stood where he had come out of his shelter and looked about him wonderingly, and did not move, reluctant to push through the snow which bore no mark of anything save itself. Then he stooped and poked one finger through the thin crust in front of him. He made his hand into a fist and enlarged the hole his finger had made. He scooped a handful of the snow, and let it trickle through his fingers in a small white pile beside the hole from which he had scooped it. Then, weak from lack of food and dizzy from his days and nights of lying in darkness, he stumbled forward a few steps through the waist-high drift; he turned around and around, looking at the land which had become so familiar to him that he had got out of the habit of noticing it, and which now was suddenly strange to him, so strange that he could hardly believe that he had looked upon it before. A clear and profound silence rose from the valley, above the mountains, and into the sky; the sound of his breathing came loudly to him; he held his breath to gather the quality of the silence. He heard the slither and drop of the snow as it fell from his trouser legs into the harder snow packed around his feet; in the distance there came the soft echoing snap of a branch that gave beneath its weight of snow; across the camp, from the drifted corral, came the sharp snort of a horse, so loud that Andrews imagined for a moment that it was only a few feet away. He turned toward the corral, expelling his clouded breath; beyond the drifted snow he saw the horses move.
Gathering air into his lungs, he shouted as loudly as he could; and after he had shouted, he remained with his mouth open, listening to the sound of his own voice that boomed as it grew fainter, and after what seemed to him a long time, trailed into the silence, dispersed by distances and absorbed by the snow. He turned to the mounds of snow, under one of which he had lain for two days; under the other Miller and Charley Hoge still lay. He saw no movement; a sudden fear caught him, and he took a few steps through the snow. Then he saw a tremor, saw the snow break from above the mound, and saw the break lengthen toward him. Miller’s head—black and rough against the smooth whiteness from which it emerged—came into sight; the heavy arms, like those of a swimmer, flailed the snow aside and Miller stood upright, blinking furiously. After a moment he squinted at Andrews and said hoarsely, his voice wavering and unsure: “You all right, boy?”
“Yes,” Andrews said. “You and Charley?”
Miller nodded. He looked across the expanse of their campsite. “I wonder how Fred made out. Likely as not he froze to death.”
“The last I saw, before we settled in, he was over there,” Andrews said, and pointed toward the chimney rock around which they had earlier arranged their camp. They walked toward it, their going uncertain; they sometimes plowed through drifted snow that came above their waists, and sometimes easily in snow that barely reached the middle of their calves. They went around the high rock, poking cautiously into the snow with their boots.
“No telling where he is now,” Miller said. “We might not find him till the spring thaw.”
But as he spoke, Andrews saw the snow move and break very close to him, beside the chimney rock.
“Here he is!” he shouted.
Between Miller and Andrews a rough shape came up through the snow. Great chunks of white ice clung to the matted hair of the buffalo hide and fell away, revealing the flat umber color; for an instant, Andrews drew back in fear, thinking irrationally that somehow a buffalo was rearing itself upward to confront them. But in the next instant, Schneider had thrown aside the skins in which he had wrapped himself like a mummy, and was standing blindly between them, his eyes screwed shut, an expression of pain furrowing the flesh between his eyebrows and pulling his mouth to one side.
“Jesus Christ, it’s bright,” Schneider said, his voice an unclear croak. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Are you all right?” Andrews asked.
Schneider opened his eyes to a slit, recognized Andrews, and nodded. “I think my fingers got a little frostbit, and my feet are damn near froze off; but I managed all right. If I ever get thawed out, I’ll know for sure.”
As well as they could—with their hands, their feet, and the folded buffalo hides that Schneider had discarded—the three men scraped away a large area of snow from around the chimney rock; upon the frozen ground, and over the charred, ice-coated remains of an old campfire, they piled what dry twigs they could strip from the snow-weighted lower branches of the pine trees. Miller dug into their cache of goods and found an old tinderbox, some crumpled paper that had not been wetted by the snow, and several unused cartridges. He laid the paper under the dry branches, worked the lead bullets loose from the cartridges, and poured the gunpowder upon the paper, crumpling more paper on the powder. He struck the tinderbox and ignited the powder, which flared powerfully, igniting the paper. Soon a small fire blazed, melting the snow that clung to the inward side of the rock.
“We’ll have to keep this going,” Miller said. “It’s mighty hard to start a fire in a blowing wind with wet wood.”
As the fire grew stronger, the men dug into the snow for logs and piled them, wet, upon the fire. They huddled about the warmth, so close that steam rose from their damp clothing; Schneider sat on his buffalo skins and thrust his boots close to the fire, almost into it. The smell of scorching leather mixed with the heavier smell of the burning logs.
After he had warmed himself, Miller walked across the campsite, following the irregular path that he and Andrews had made earlier, toward the place between the bales where Charley Hoge still lay. Andrews watched him go, following his progress with eyes that moved in a head that did not turn. The heat from the fire bit into his skin and pained him, and still he had the urge to get closer, to hover over the fire, to take the fire inside himself. He bit his lips with the pain of the heat, but he did not move away. He remained before the fire until his hands were a bright red, and until his face burned and throbbed. Then he backed away and instantly he was cold again.
Miller led Charley Hoge back across the snow toward the fire. Charley Hoge went before Miller, shambling loosely in the broken path, his head down, stumbling to his knees now and then. Once, when the path turned, he plowed into the unbroken snow, and halted and turned only when Miller caught at him and turned him gently back. When the two men came up before the fire, Charley Hoge stood inertly before it, his head still down, his face hidden from the others.
“He don’t quite know where he is yet,” Miller said. “He’ll be all right in a little while.”
As the fire warmed him, Charley Hoge began to stir. He looked dully at Andrews, at Schneider, and back at Miller; then he returned his gaze to the flames, and moved closer to them; he thrust the stump of his wrist close to the heat, and held it there for a long time. Finally he sat before the fire and rested his chin on his knees, which he cradled close to his chest with arms folded tightly around them; he gazed steadily into the flames, and blinked slowly, unseeingly, every now and then.
Miller went to the corral and inspected the horses; he returned leading his own horse, and reported to the men around the fire that the others seemed to be in good shape, considering the weather they had gone through. Digging again into the cache of their goods, he found the half-filled sack of grain that they had brought along to supplement the grass diet of the horses; he measured out a small quantity and fed it slowly to his horse. He told Schneider to feed the others after a while. He let his own horse wander about the area for a few moments until its muscles were loosened and it had gained strength from its food. Then, scraping the ice and snow off the saddle and tightening the cinch around its belly, he mounted.
“I’m going to ride up toward the pass and see how bad it is,” he said. He rode slowly away from them. His horse walked with head down, delicately lifting its forehooves out of the neat holes they made, and more delicately placing them on the thin crust and letting them sink, as if only by their own weight, through the snow.
After several minutes, when Miller was out of hearing, Schneider said to the fire: “It ain’t no use for him to go look. He knows how bad it is.”
Andrews swallowed. “How bad is it?”
“We’ll be here for a while,” Schneider said, and chuckled without humor; “we’ll be here for a spell.”
Charley Hoge raised his head and shook it, as if to clear his mind. He looked at Schneider, and blinked. “No,” he said loudly, hoarsely. “No.”
Schneider looked at Charley Hoge and grinned. “You come alive, old man? How did you like your little rest?”
“No,” Charley Hoge said. “Where’s the wagon? We got to get hitched up. We got to get out of here.”
Charley Hoge got to his feet and swayed, looking wildly about him. “Where is it?” He took a step away from the fire. “We can’t lose too much time. We can’t—”
Schneider rose and put a hand on Charley Hoge’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said, gruffly and soothingly. “It’s all right. Miller’ll be back in a minute. He’ll take care of everything.”
As suddenly as he had arisen, Charley Hoge sat back on the ground. He nodded at the fire and mumbled: “Miller. He’ll get us out of here. You wait. He’ll get us out.”
A heavy log, thawed to wetness by the heat, fell into the bed of coals; it hissed and cracked, sending up heavy plumes of blue-gray smoke. The three men squatted in the little circle of bare ground, which was soggy from the snow that had turned to water and seeped from the closely surrounding drifts. Waiting for Miller to return, they did not speak; torpid from the heat of the fire and weak from the two-day lack of food, they did not think of moving or feeding themselves. Every now and then Andrews reached over to the thinning bank beside him and lethargically took a handful of snow, stuffed it into his mouth, and let it melt on his tongue and trickle down his throat. Though he did not look beyond the campfire, the whiteness of the snow over the valley, caught and intensified by the brilliant sun, burned into his averted face, causing his eyes to smart and his head to throb.
Miller was gone from the camp nearly two hours. When he returned, he rode past the campsite without looking at anyone. He left his trembling and winded horse in the snow-banked corral and slogged wearily through the snow up to where they waited around the fire. He warmed his hands—blue-black from the cold and ingrained powder smoke that remained on them—and turned around several times to warm himself thoroughly before he spoke.
After a minute of silence, Schneider said harshly: “Well? How does it look?”
“We’re snowed in good,” Miller said. “I couldn’t get within half a mile of the pass. Where I turned back, the snow was maybe twelve foot deep in places; and it looked like it was worse farther on.”
Schneider, squatting, slapped his knees, and rose upright. He kicked at a charred log that had fallen from the fire and was sizzling on the wet ground.
“I knowed it,” Schneider said dully. “By God, I knowed it before you told me.” He looked from Miller to Andrews and back again. “I told you sons-of-bitches we ought to get out of here, and you wouldn’t listen to me. Now look what you got yourselves into. What are you going to do now?”
“Wait,” Miller said. “We get ourselves fixed up against another blow, and we wait.”
“Not this feller,” Schneider said. “This feller’s going to get his self out of here.”
Miller nodded. “If you can figure any way, Fred, you go to it.”
Andrews rose, and said to Miller: “Is the pass we came over the only way out?”
“Unless you want to walk up over the mountain,” Miller said, “and take your chances that way.”
Schneider spread his arms out. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Miller said, “if you’re fool enough to try it. Even if you rigged up some snowshoes, you couldn’t carry anything with you. You’d sink down in the first soft snow you came to. And you can’t live off the land in the high country in the winter.”
“A man with belly could do it,” Schneider said.
“And even if you was fool enough to try that, you take a chance on another blow. Did you ever try to wait out a blizzard on the side of a mountain? You wouldn’t last an hour.”
“It’s a chance,” Schneider said, “that could be took.”
“And even if you was fool enough to take that chance, without knowing the country you came out in, you might walk around for a week or two before you saw somebody to set you straight. There ain’t nothing between here and Denver, to speak of; and Denver’s a long way off.”
“You know the country,” Schneider said. “You could point us the way to go.”
“And besides,” Miller said. “We’d have to leave the goods here.”
For a moment Schneider was silent. Then he nodded, and kicked at the wet log again. “That’s it,” he said in a tight voice. “I might of knowed. It’s the goddamned hides you won’t let go of.”
“It’s more than the hides,” Miller said. “We couldn’t take anything with us. The horses would run wild, and the cattle would go off with the buffalo that’s still here. We’d have nothing to show for the whole try.”
“That’s it,” Schneider said again, his voice raising. “That’s what’s behind it. Well, the goods don’t mean that much to me. I’ll go over by myself if need be. You just point out a route to me and give me a few landmarks, and I’ll chance it on my own.”
“No,” Miller said.
“What?”
“I need you here,” Miller said. “Three—” He glanced at Charley Hoge, who was rocking himself before the fire, humming tunelessly under his breath. “Two men can’t manage the wagon and the hides down the mountain. We’ll need you to help.”
Schneider stared at him for a long moment. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You won’t even give me a chance.”
“I’m giving you your chance,” Miller said quietly. “And that’s to stay here with us. Even if I told you a route and some signs, you’d never make it. Your chance to stay alive is here with the rest of us.”
Again Schneider was silent for several moments. At last he said: “All right. I should have knowed better than to ask. I’ll sit here on my ass all winter and draw my sixty a month, and you sons-of-bitches can go to hell.” He turned his back to Miller and Andrews, and thrust his hands angrily toward the fire.
Miller looked at Charley Hoge for a moment, as if to speak to him. Then he abruptly turned to Andrews. “Dig around in our goods and see if you can find a sack of beans. And find one of Charley’s pots. We got to get some food in us.”
Andrews nodded, and did as he was ordered. As he was poking through the snow, Miller left the campsite and returned a few minutes later dragging several stiff buffalo hides. He made three trips back and forth between the campsite and the place where the hides rested, returning each time with more. After he had made a pile of about a dozen, he poked in the snow until he found the ax. Then, with the ax on his shoulder, he trudged away from the camp, up the mountain, among the great forest of pine trees, the lower branches of which curved downward under the weight of the snow. The tips of many of them touched the whitened earth, so that the snow that held them down and the snow upon which they rested appeared to be the same, eccentric and bizarre curves to which the trees conformed. Under the arches thus formed Miller walked, until it appeared, as he went into the distance, that he was walking into a cave of dark green and blinding crystal.
In his absence Andrews threw several handfuls of dried beans into the iron kettle he had dug out of the snow. After the beans he scooped in several masses of snow, and placed the pot at the back of the fire, so that the kettle rested against one side of the rock. He had not been able to find the bag of salt in the snow, but he had found a small rind of salt pork wrapped in oilskin and a can of coffee. He dropped the rind into the kettle and searched again until he found the coffeepot. By the time Miller returned from the forest, the kettle of beans was bubbling and the faint aroma of coffee was beginning to rise from the pot.
On his shoulders Miller balanced several pine boughs, thick and heavy at the raw yellow butts where they had been chopped, narrowing behind him where the smaller branches and pine needles swept a heavy trail in the snow, roughing it and covering the tracks he made as he stumbled down the side of the mountain. Bent beneath the weight of the boughs, Miller staggered the last few steps up to the fire and let the boughs crash to the snow on either side of him; a fine cloud like white dust exploded up from the ground and whirled for several minutes in the air.
Beneath the grime and dirt Miller’s face was blue-gray from cold and exhaustion. He swayed for several minutes where he had dropped the logs and then he walked with unsteady straightness to the fire and, still standing, warmed himself. He stood so, without speaking, until the coffee bubbled up over the sides of the pot and hissed on the coals.
His voice weak and empty, he said to Andrews: “Find the cups?”
Andrews moved the pot to the edge of the fire; his hand burned on the hot handle, but he did not flinch. He nodded. “I found two of them. The others must have blown away.”
Into the two cups he poured the coffee that he had brewed. Schneider walked up. Andrews handed one of the cups to Miller, and one to Schneider. The coffee was thin and weak, but the men gulped at the scalding liquid without comment. Andrews threw another small handful of coffee into the steaming pot.
“Go easy on that,” Miller said, holding the tin cup in both his hands, juggling it to prevent his hands from burning and cupping it to gather its heat. “We ain’t got enough coffee now to last us; just let it boil longer.”
With his second cup of coffee Miller seemed to regain some of his strength. He sipped from a third cup and passed it along to Charley Hoge, who sat still before the fire and did not look at any of the men. After his second cup, Schneider returned to the edge of the circle, beyond Charley Hoge, and stared gloomily into the coals, which glowed faintly and grayly against the blinding whiteness that filtered through the trees, intensifying the shadow in which they sat.
“We’ll build a lean-to here,” Miller said.
Andrews, his mouth loose and tingling from the hot coffee, said indistinctly: “Wouldn’t it be better out in the open, in the sun?”
Miller shook his head. “In the daytime, maybe; not at night. And if another blow came up, no lean-to we could build would last more than a minute on open ground. We build here.”
Andrews nodded and drank the last of his coffee, tilting the cup up and throwing his head back so that the warm rim of the cup touched the bridge of his nose. The beans, softening in the boiling water, sent up a thin aroma. Though he was not aware of hunger, Andrews’s stomach contracted at the odor and he bent over at the sudden pain.
Miller said: “Might as well get to work. Beans won’t be ready to eat for two or three hours, and we have to get this up before night.”
“Mr. Miller,” Andrews said; and Miller, who had started to rise, paused and looked at him, crouched on one knee.
“Yes, boy?”
“How long will we have to be here?”
Miller stood up, and bent to brush off the black peat mud and wet pine needles that clung to his knees. From his bent head and under his black, tangled brows, he raised his eyes and looked directly at Andrews.
“I won’t try to fool you, boy.” He jerked his head toward Schneider, who had turned in their direction. “Or Fred either. We’ll be here till that pass we come over thaws out.”
“How long will that take?” Andrews asked.
“Three, four weeks of good warm weather would do it,” Miller said. “But we ain’t going to have three or four weeks before winter sets in hard. We’re here till spring, boy. You might as well set your mind to it.”
“Till spring?” Andrews said.
“Six months at the least, eight months at the most. So we might as well dig in good, and get ourselves set for a long wait.”
Andrews tried to realize how long six months would be, but his mind refused to move upon the figure. How long had they been here now? A month? a month and a half? Whatever it was, it had been so filled with newness and work and exhaustion, that it seemed like no period that could be measured, thought about, or put up against anything else. Six months. He spoke the words, as if they would mean more coming aloud from his lips. “Six months.”
“Or seven, or eight,” Miller said. “It won’t do no good thinking about them. Let’s get to work before this coffee wears off.”
The rest of the day Andrews, Miller, and Schneider spent in constructing the lean-to. They stripped the smaller branches from the slender pine logs and piled them in a neat bundle near the fire. As Miller and Andrews worked on the logs, Schneider hacked from a stiff hide, the smallest and youngest he could find, a number of uneven but relatively slender thongs. His knives blunted quickly on the stonelike hides, and he had to sharpen a knife several times before it would peel off a single thong. After he had hacked a large number of thongs, he bent them so that they would fit into a huge kettle that he found among Charley Hoge’s things buried in the snow. From around the fire he raked what dead ashes he could and put them in the kettle with the thongs. Then he called Miller and Andrews over to where he stood and told them to urinate in the kettle.
“What?” Andrews said.
“Piss in it,” Schneider said, grinning. “You know how to piss, don’t you?”
Andrews looked at Miller. Miller said: “He’s right. That’s the way the Indians do it. It helps draw the stiffness out of the hide.”
“Woman piss is best,” Schneider said. “But we’ll have to make do with what we got.”
Solemnly the three men made water into the iron kettle. Schneider inspected the level to which the ashes had risen; shaking his head regretfully, he threw several handfuls of snow into the kettle to bring the sooty mixture up to a level that would cover the thongs. He set the kettle on the fire, and joined Andrews and Miller in their work.
They cut the stripped logs to lengths, and set four of them—two short and two long—in a rectangle before the fire. To secure the logs, they dug into the soggy ground, cutting through the spreading roots of the trees and breaking through scattered subterranean rock, to a depth of nearly two feet. Into these holes they set the logs, so that the taller ones were facing the fire. The more slender and longer boughs they notched so that they would fit firmly, and lashed them to the thick uprights set into the ground, thus forming a sturdy boxlike frame that slanted from the foot-high stubs at the rear to the height of a man’s shoulders at the front. They lashed the branches with the urine-and-ash-soaked thongs that were still so stiff they were barely workable. By that time it was midafternoon, and they paused, nearly exhausted, to eat the hard beans that had been boiling in the iron kettle. The four men ate out of a common pot, using whatever utensils they could salvage out of the snow, beneath which they lay scattered. The beans, without salt, were tasteless and lay heavy on their stomachs; but they worked them down and cleaned the heavy pot of its last morsel. When Miller, Schneider, and Andrews returned to their frame, the buffalo-hide thongs had hardened and contracted, and held the logs together like bands of iron. They spent the rest of the afternoon stringing buffalo hides to the frame, using the thongs which had softened in their bath of urine and wood ash. All around the frame they dug a shallow trench, into which they stuffed the ends of the hides, and covered them over with moist earth and peat, so that no air or moisture could run inside the shelter.
Before darkness came, the shelter was finished. It was a sturdy structure, walled and floored with buffalo skins, which were thonged and overlaid so that from the back and sides, at least, it was virtually water- and wind-proof. From the broad front, several hides were suspended loosely and arranged so that in a wind they could be secured by long pegs thrust into the ground. The men dug what remained of their bedrolls out of the snow, divided the remaining blankets equally, and spread them before the fire to dry. In the last light of the sun, which threw the snow-wrapped land into a glittering cold blue and a brilliant orange, Andrews looked at the shelter of log and buffalo hide that they had spent the day constructing. He thought: this will be my home for the next six or eight months. He wondered what it would be like, living there. He dreaded boredom; but that expectation was not fulfilled.
Their days were occupied with work. They cut narrow strips of softened hide in two-foot lengths, scraped the fur from them, made four-inch slits in the center of each, and wore these like masks over their eyes to cut down the blinding glare of the snow. From the pile of small branches of pine they selected lengths which they soaked and bent in oval shapes, and tied upon them a latticework of hide strips, using them as crude snowshoes to walk upon the thin hard crust of the snow without sinking down into it. From the softened hide they fashioned clumsy stockinglike boots, which they secured to the calves of their legs with thongs, and which kept their feet from freezing. They cured several hides to supplement the blankets that had blown away during the blizzard, and they even made for themselves loosely fitting robes which served in lieu of greatcoats. They cut wood for the fire, dragging the huge logs through the snow until the area around the camp was packed and hard, and they could slide them along the iced surface with little effort. They kept the fire going night and day, taking turns during the night getting up and walking into the sharp cold to thrust logs beneath the banked ashes. Once, during a heavy wind that lasted half the night, Andrews watched the campfire consume a dozen thick logs without once breaking into flame, the embers kept at a glowing intense heat by the wind.
On the fourth day after the blizzard, as Schneider and Andrews took axes and started into the woods to increase the stockpile of logs that grew beside the chimney rock, Miller announced that he would ride into the valley and shoot a buffalo; their meat was low, and the day promised to be fair. Miller mounted the lone horse in the corral—the other two had been turned loose to live with the oxen as best they could on what grass might be found in the valley—and rode slowly away from the campsite. He returned nearly six hours later, and slid wearily off his horse. He tramped through the snow to the three men who waited for him around the campfire.
“No buffalo,” he said. “They must have got out during the blow, before the pass was snowed in.”
“We ain’t got much meat left,” Schneider said. “The flour’s ruined, and we only got one more sack of beans.”
“This ain’t so high that game will be hard to find,” Miller said. “I’ll go out again tomorrow and maybe get us a deer. If the worst comes, we can live on fish; the lake’s froze over, but not so thick a body can’t chop through.”
“Did you see the stock?” Schneider asked.
Miller nodded. “The oxen came through. The snow’s blowed away enough in spots so they’ll manage. The horses are looking poorly, but with luck they’ll get through.”
“With luck,” Schneider said.
Miller leaned back from the fire, stretched, and grinned at him.
“Fred, I swear you ain’t got a cheerful bone in your body. Why, this ain’t bad; we’re set now. I recollect one winter I got snowed in up in Wyoming, all by myself. Clean above timber line, and no way to get down. So high they was no game; I lived all winter off my horse and one mountain goat, and the only shelter I had was what I made out of that horseskin. This is good living. You got no call to complain.”
“I got call,” Schneider said, “and you know it.”
But as the days passed, Schneider’s complaining became more and more perfunctory, and at last ceased altogether. Though he slept at night in the hide shelter with the other men, he spent more and more time alone, speaking to the others only when he was directly addressed, and then as briefly and noncommittally as he could. Often when Miller was off hunting for meat, Schneider would leave the campsite and remain away until late in the afternoon, returning with nothing to show for his absence. Through his apparent resolve to have little to do with the others of the party, he got into the habit of talking to himself; once Andrews came upon him and heard him speaking softly, crooningly, as if to a woman. Embarrassed and half-afraid, Andrews backed away from him; but Schneider heard him, and turned to face him. For a moment, the two men looked at each other; but it was as if Schneider saw nothing. His eyes were glazed and empty, and after a moment they turned dully away. Puzzled and concerned, Andrews mentioned Schneider’s new habit to Miller.
“Nothing to worry about,” Miller said. “A man by his self gets to doing that. I’ve done it myself. You got to talk, and for four men cooped together like we are, it ain’t good to talk too much among their selves.”
Thus, much of the time, Andrews and Charley Hoge were left to themselves at the camp while Miller hunted and Schneider wandered alone, speaking to whatever image floated before his mind.
Charley Hoge, after the first numb shock that came with his emergence from the snow, began slowly to recognize his surroundings and even to accept them. Among the debris of the camp that remained after the fury of the blizzard had spent itself, Miller had managed to find two gallon crocks of whisky that were unbroken; day by day he doled this out to Charley Hoge, who drank it with the weak thin bitter coffee made by boiling over and over the grounds used the previous day. Warmed and loosened by repeated doses of the coffee and whisky, Charley Hoge began to stir a little about the campsite—though at first he would not go beyond the wide circle between their shelter and the campfire which had been melted of the snow by the heat and their tramping upon it. One day, however, he stood bolt upright before the campfire, so suddenly that he sloshed and spilled a bit of his coffee-and-whisky. He looked around him wildly; dropping his cup to the ground, he slapped his hand about his chest, and thrust it into his jacket. Then he ran into the snow. Falling to his knees near the large tree where he had kept his goods, he began scrabbling in the snow, poking his hand downward and throwing the snow aside in small furious flurries. When Andrews went up to him and asked him what the matter was, Charley Hoge croaked only, over and over: “The book! The book!”, and dug more furiously into the snow.
For nearly an hour he dug, every few minutes running back to the campfire to warm his hand and the blue puckered stump at his wrist, whimpering like a frightened animal. Realizing what he was after, Andrews joined him in his search, though he had no way of knowing where he ought to look. Finally, Andrews’s numbed fingers, pushing aside a cake of snow, encountered a soft mass. It was Charley Hoge’s Bible, opened and soaked, in a bed of snow and ice. He called to Charley Hoge and lifted the Bible, holding it like a delicate plate in his hands, so that the soaked pages would not tear. Charley Hoge took it from him, his hand trembling; the rest of the afternoon and part of the next morning he spent drying the book page by page, before the campfire. In the days thereafter, he filled his idleness by sipping a weak mixture of coffee and whisky and leafing through the blurred, soiled pages. Once Andrews, tense and near anger because of his inactivity and the silence that came upon the camp in Miller’s absence, asked Charley Hoge to read him something. Charley Hoge looked at him angrily and did not answer; he returned to his Bible and thumbed through it dully, his forefinger laboriously tracing the lines and his brows drawn together in concentration.
Miller was most at ease in his isolation. Away from the camp in search of food during the day, he always returned shortly before twilight, appearing sometimes behind the men who waited for him, sometimes in front of them—but always appearing suddenly, as if he had thrust himself up out of the landscape. He would walk toward them silently, his dark bearded face often shagged and glittering with snow and ice, and drop whatever he had killed upon the snow near the campfire. Once he killed a bear and butchered it where it fell. When he appeared with the huge hindquarters of the bear balanced on each shoulder, staggering beneath their weight, it seemed to Andrews for an instant that Miller himself was some great animal, grotesquely shaped, its small head hunched between tremendous shoulders, bearing down upon them.
As the others weakened on their steady diet of wild meat, Miller’s strength and endurance increased. After a full day of hunting, he still dressed his own kill and prepared the evening meal, taking over most of the duties that Charley Hoge seemed no longer capable of performing. And sometimes, late, on clear nights, he went into the woods with an ax, and the men who stayed by the warmth of the campfire could hear the sharp hard ring of cold metal biting into cold pine.
He spoke infrequently to the others; but his silence was not of that intentness and desperation that Andrews had seen during the hunt and slaughter of the buffalo. In the evenings, hunched before the fire that reflected upon the shelter behind them and returned the warmth to their backs, Miller stared into the yellow flames whose light flickered over his dark, composed features; upon his flat lips there was habitually a smile that might have been of contentment. But the pleasure he took was not in the company, even silent, of the other men; he looked at the fire and beyond it into the darkness that was here and there lightened by the pale glow of moon or stars upon the drifted snow. And in the mornings before he set out for his hunting, as he fixed breakfast for the men and himself, he performed his tasks with neither pleasure nor annoyance but as if they were only a necessary prelude for his leaving. When he left the camp his movements seemed to flow into the landscape; and on his snowshoes of young pine and buffalo thongs, he glided without effort and merged into the dark forest upon the snow.
Andrews watched the men around him, and waited. Sometimes at night, crowded with the others in the close warm shelter of buffalo hide, he heard the wind, that often suddenly sprang up, whistle and moan around the corners of the shelter; at such moments the heavy breathing and snoring of his companions, the touch of their bodies against his own, and their body stench gathered in the closeness of the shelter seemed almost unreal. At such times he felt a part of himself go outward into the dark, among the wind and the snow and the featureless sky where he was whirled blindly through the world. Sometimes when he was near sleep he thought of Francine, as he had thought of her when he had been alone beneath the great storm; but he thought of her more precisely now; he could almost bring her image before his closed eyes. Gradually he let the remembrance of that last night with her come to him; and at last he came to think of it without shame or embarrassment. He saw himself pushing away from him her warm white flesh, and he wondered at what he had done, as if wondering at the actions of a stranger.
He came to accept the silence he lived in, and tried to find a meaning in it. One by one he viewed the men who shared that silence with him. He saw Charley Hoge sipping his hot thin mixture of coffee and watered whisky, warding off the bitter edge of cold that pressed against him at all times, even as he hunched over a blazing fire, and saw his blurred, rheumy eyes fixed upon the ruined pages of his Bible, as if desperately to keep those eyes from looking beyond into the white waste of snow that diminished him. He saw Fred Schneider withdraw into himself, away from his fellows, as if his lone sullen presence were the only defense he had against the great cold whiteness all around. Schneider tramped brutally through the snow, throwing as wide and rough a swath as his feet could make; through the thin slits in the narrow buffaloskin that he wore almost constantly tied over his eyes, he looked at the snow, Andrews thought, as if it were something alive, as if it were something against which he was waiting to spring, biding his time. He had taken to wearing again the small pistol that Andrews had first noticed back at Butcher’s Crossing; sometimes when he muttered and mumbled to himself, his hand would creep up to his waistband, and gently caress the stock of the pistol. As for Miller—Andrews always paused when he thought of the shape that he wished Miller to take. He saw Miller rough and dark and shaggy against the whiteness of the snow; like a distant fir tree, he was distinct from the landscape, and yet an inevitable part of it. In the mornings he watched Miller go into the deep forest; and he always had the feeling that Miller did not so much go out of his sight as merge and become so intrinsic to the landscape that he could no longer be seen.
He was unable to view himself. Again, as if he were a stranger, he thought of himself as he had been a few months before at Butcher’s Crossing, looking westward from the river at the land he was now in. What had he thought then? What had he been? How had he felt? He thought of himself now as a vague shape that did nothing, that had no identity. Once, on a bright cloudless day that threw blindingly dark shadows over himself and Charley Hoge and Schneider as they sat around the pale campfire, he had a restless urge, a necessity to get away from the two silent hulks on either side of him. Without a word to either, he strapped his seldom-used snowshoes to his feet and trudged away from the camp into the valley. For a long time he walked, his eyes upon his feet that shuffled sibilantly through the crusted snow. Though his feet were cold to numbness above the snow, the back of his neck burned beneath the unshadowed sun. When his legs began to ache from the constant awkward shuffling forward, he stopped and raised his head. All around him was whiteness which glittered with needlelike points of fire. He gasped at the immensity of what he saw. He raised his eyes a little more, and saw in the distance the wavering dark points of pine trees that lifted up the mountainside toward the pure blue sky; but as he looked at the dark-and-bright rim of the mountain that cut into the blue of the sky, the whole mountainside shimmered and the edge of the horizon blurred; and suddenly all was whiteness—above, below, all around him—and he took an awkward backward step as a sharp burning pain started in his eyes. He blinked and cupped his hands over his eyes; but even upon his closed lids he saw only whiteness. A small inarticulate cry came from his lips; he felt that he had no weight in the whiteness, and for a moment he did not know whether he remained upright or whether he had gone down into the snow. He moved his hands upon air, and then bent his knees and moved his hands downward. They touched the crusted softness of the snow. He dug his fingers into the snow, gathering small handfuls, and thrust his hands against his eyes. It was not until then that he realized that he had come away from the camp without his snow-blinders, and that the sun, reflected against the unbroken snow, had seared his eyes so that he could not see. For a long while he knelt in the snow, massaging his closed lids with the snow he scraped under his fingers. Finally, through barely-spread fingers that he kept over his eyes, he was able to make out what he thought was the dark mass of tree and rock that marked the campsite. With his eyes closed, he trudged toward it; in his blindness, he sometimes lost his balance and tumbled into the snow; when he did so, he risked quick glimpses through his fingers so that he could correct the direction in which he traveled. When he finally arrived at the camp, his eyes were so burned that he could see nothing, not even in brief glimpses. Schneider came out to meet him and guided him into the shelter, where he lay in darkness for the better part of three days, while his eyes healed. Thereafter, he did not look upon the snow again without his rawhide blinders to protect him; and he did not go again into the great white valley.
Week by week, and at last month by month, the men endured the changing weather. Some days were hot and bright and summery, so still that no breeze dislodged a flake of snow hanging on the tip of a pine bough; some days a cold gray wind whistled through the valley, funneled by the long reach of mountain on either side. Snow fell, and on quiet days it made the air a solid mass that moved gently downward from a gray-white sky; and sometimes it was driven hard by various winds, which piled it in thick banks about their shelter, so that from the outside it appeared that they lived in a hollowed cave of snow. The nights were desperately, bitterly cold; no matter how closely they put their bodies together, and no matter how heavily they weighted themselves down with buffalo hides, they slept in a tense discomfort. Day slipped into indistinguishable day, and week into week; Andrews had no sensation of passing time, nothing against which to measure the coming thaw of spring. Every now and then he looked at the notches in a stripped pine branch that Schneider had made to keep track of the days; dully, mechanically, he counted them, but the number had no meaning for him. He was made aware of the passing of the months by the fact that at regular intervals Schneider came up to him and asked him for his month’s pay. At such times, he solemnly counted from his money belt the money Schneider demanded, wondering vaguely where he kept it after he got it. But even this gave him no consciousness of passing time; it was a duty he performed when Schneider asked him; it had nothing to do with the time that did not pass, but which held him unmoving where he was.