Late in March and early in April, the weather settled; and day by day, with an agonizing slowness, Andrews watched the snow melt in the valley. It melted first where it had drifted most thinly, so that the once level valley became a patchwork of bleached grass and humped banks of dirtying snow. The days became weeks; and from the moisture that seeped into the earth from the melting snow, and from the steadying heat of the season, new growth poked up among the matted winter grass. A light film of green overlaid the grayish yellow of last year’s growth.
As the snow melted and seeped into the quickening soil, game became more plentiful; deer wandered into the valley and cropped the fresh young blades of grass, and grew so bold that often they grazed within a few hundred yards of the camp; at a sound they would raise their heads, and their small conical ears would pitch upward as their bodies lowered and tensed, ready for flight; then, if the sound were not repeated, they would resume their grazing, their tawny necks bent in a delicate curve toward the earth. Mountain quail whistled among the treetops above them and lighted beside the deer, and fed with them, their mottled gray-and-white-and-buff bodies blending into the earth upon which they moved. With game so close and available, Miller no longer wandered in the forest; almost contemptuously, cradling Andrews’s small repeater in the crook of his elbow, he walked a few steps away from the camp, and throwing the rifle butt casually to his shoulder brought down as much game as they needed. The men were replete with venison, quail, and elk; what dressed game they could not eat spoiled in the growing warmth. Every day, Schneider trudged through the melting snow toward the pass to inspect the snow mass slowly melting between them and the outside world. Miller looked at the sun and calculated with his somber glances the widening patches of bare earth that were beginning to eat toward the mountainside, and did not speak. Charley Hoge kept to his worn Bible; but every now and then, as if with surprise, he lifted his head and gazed upon the changing land. They gave less care to the fire they had attended all winter long; several times they let it go out, and had to start it again with the tinderbox that Miller carried in his shirt pocket.
Even though the valley was almost cleared, the snow still lay in heavy drifts where the flat land rose upward into tree and mountain. Miller let out to graze the horse they had kept corralled all winter; gaunt from its meager supply of grain and what little forage it had been able to find, the horse cropped the new grass to the bare earth around the area that fronted their campsite. When it had regained some of its lost strength, Miller saddled it and rode away from the camp into the valley, and returned after several hours with the two horses that had run loose during the winter. After their long freedom, they were nearly wild; when Miller and Schneider tried to hobble them, so that they would not stray from the camp, they reared and turned their heads, manes flying and eyes rolling upward so that the whites were visible. After a few days of grazing on the young grass their coats began to take on a faint shine and their wildness decreased. At last the men were able to saddle them; the cinches they passed under their bellies could not be tightened, so gaunt had they become during their lean winter.
“A few more days of bad weather,” Miller said bleakly, “and we wouldn’t have had any horses. We’d of had to walk back to Butcher’s Crossing.”
The horses saddled and tamed, Miller, Andrews, and Schneider rode into the valley. They paused at the wagon, which had endured on the open plain the fury of the winter; a few of the floor boards had warped and the metal fittings showed thin layers of rust.
“It’ll be all right,” Miller said. “Needs a little grease here and there, but she’ll do the job we need her to do.” He leaned from his horse and touched with his forefinger the heavy metal band that encircled the wagon wheel; he looked at the bright rust on his fingertip and wiped his finger on his dirt-stiffened trousers.
From where the wagon rested, the men rode off in search of the oxen that had been loosed during the storm.
They found them all alive. Not so gaunt and bony as the horses had been, they were much wilder. When the men approached them, they broke into motion and pounded away in clumsy fright. The three men spent four days rounding up the eight oxen and leading them back to the camp, where they were hobbled and set to graze. As their bellies filled on the rapidly growing grass, they too lost some of their wildness; and before the week was out, the men were able to yoke them to the wagon and work them for a few hours aimlessly about the valley, among the wasted corpses of the buffalo killed in the fall. In the growing warmth, these corpses began to give off a heavy stench, and around them the grass grew thick and green.
As the weather warmed, the chill that had been in his bones all winter began to leave Andrews. His muscles loosened as he worked with the stock; his sight sharpened upon the greening earth; and his hearing, accustomed winter-long to noises absorbed in heavy layers of snow, began to take in the myriad sounds of the valley—the rustling of breezes through stiff pine boughs, the slither of his feet through the growing grass, the creak of the leather as his saddle moved on his horse, and the sound of the men’s voices carrying across distances and diminishing into space.
As the stock fattened and became once again used to working under human hands, Schneider spent more and more time moving between the camp and the snow-packed pass that would let them out of the high valley and down the mountain into the flat country. On some days he returned, excited and eager, going up to each of them and speaking in a rapid, hoarsely whispering voice.
“It’s going fast,” he would say. “Underneath the rind, it’s all hollow and mushy. Just a few days, now, and we can get through.”
At other times he came back glumly.
“The god damned crust keeps the cold in. If we could just have a warm night or two, it might loosen up.”
And Miller would look at him with a cool, not unfriendly amusement, and say nothing.
One day Schneider rode back from an inspection of the snow pack with more excitement than was usual.
“We can get through, men!” he said, his words running upon each other. “I went clean through, to the other side of the pack.”
“On horseback?” Miller asked, not rising from the buffalo skin on which he lay.
“On foot,” Schneider said. “Not more than forty or fifty yards of deep snow, and it’s clean as a whistle from there on.”
“How deep?” Miller asked.
“Not deep,” Schneider said. “And it’s soft as meal mush.”
“How deep?” Miller asked.
Schneider raised his hand, palm downward, a few inches over his head. “Just a mite over a body’s head. We could go through it easy.”
“And you walked through it, you say?”
“Easy,” Schneider said. “Clean to the other side.”
“You god damned fool,” Miller said quietly. “Did you stop to think what would happen if that wet snow caved in on you?”
“Not Fred Schneider,” he said, and pounded himself on the chest with a closed fist. “Fred Schneider knows how to take care of his self. He takes no chances.”
Miller grinned. “Fred, you’re so hot for some soft living and easy tail, you’d burn your ass through hell if it would get you to it quick.”
Schneider waved his fist impatiently. “Never mind about that. Ain’t we going to get loaded?”
Miller stretched himself more comfortably on the buffalo hide. “No hurry,” he said lazily. “If it’s as deep as you say it is—and I know it ain’t any less—we still got a few days.”
“But we can get through now!“ Schneider said.
“Sure,” Miller said. “And take a chance on a cave-in. Get those oxen buried under a couple of ton of wet snow, not to say anything about ourselves, and then where would we be?”
“Ain’t you even going to look?” Schneider wailed.
“No need to,” said Miller. “Like I said, if it’s anywhere near as deep as you say, we still got a few days. We’ll just wait for a while.”
So they waited. Charley Hoge, coming slowly out of his long dream during the winter, worked the oxen with the wagon for an hour or so every day, until they pulled, without a load at least, as easily as they had the previous fall. Under Charley Hoge’s direction, Andrews smoked quantities of foot-long trout and great strips of venison to sustain them on their journey down the mountain and across the plain. Miller took to wandering again upon the mountainside, which was still drifted heavily in softening snow, with two rifles—his own Sharps and Andrews’s varmint rifle—cradled in the crook of his arm. Frequently the men who remained at camp heard the booming of the Sharps or the smart crack of the small rifle; sometimes Miller brought his kill back to camp with him; more often he let it lie where it had dropped. At camp, his eyes constantly roved over the long valley and about the rising contours of surrounding mountainside; when he had to look away for one reason or another, he seemed to do so with reluctance.
Schneider’s sullenness, which followed upon Miller’s first refusal to leave the valley, turned into a kind of silent ferocity, of which Miller was the apparently unaware object. Schneider spoke to Miller only to insist that he accompany him to the pass, virtually every day, to inspect the snow pack that remained. When Schneider asked, Miller complied, neither good-naturedly nor bad-naturedly. He rode impassively away with Schneider, and returned impassively, his face set in calm untroubled lines beside Schneider’s anger-reddened features. And to Schneider’s half-articulate insistence, he replied only:
“Not yet.”
To Andrews, though he said nothing, the last few days were the most difficult to endure. Again and again, at the imminent prospect of leaving, he found his hands clenched into fists, his palms sweaty; yet he could not have said where his eagerness to be gone came from. He could understand Schneider’s impatience—he knew of Schneider’s simple desire to fill his belly with civilized food, to surround his body with the softness of a clean bed, and to empty his gathered lust into the body of any waiting woman. But his own desire, though it may have included in some way all of those, was at once more intense and more vague. To what did he wish to return? From where did he wish to go? And yet the desire remained, for all its vagueness, sharp and painful within him. Several times he followed the trampled path in the snow that Miller and Schneider took to the pass, and stood where the snow lay thickly drifted in the narrow cut between the twin peaks that marked the entrance to the valley. Above the drifts, the raw brown-red rock of the peaks cut into the blue sky. He peered down the narrow open trench that Schneider had worn in the snow, but it twisted so that he could not see through it to the open country beyond.
Helpless before Miller’s calm, they waited. They waited even when the snow, gathered in the solid shadow of the forest, began to melt and run in narrow rivulets past their campsite. They waited until late in April. Then one night before the campfire, suddenly Miller spoke:
“Get a good night’s sleep. We load up and pull out tomorrow.”
After he spoke, there was a long silence. Then Schneider rose to his feet, jumped in the air, and let out a loud whoop. He slapped Miller on the back. He turned around two or three times, laughing wordlessly. He slapped Miller on the back again.
“By God, it’s about time! By God, Miller! You really ain’t a bad feller, are you?” He walked in a tight circle for several minutes, laughing to himself, and speaking senselessly to the other men.
After an instant of elation at Miller’s announcement, Andrews felt a curious sadness like a presentiment of nostalgia come over him. He looked at the small campfire burning cheerily against the darkness, and looked beyond the campfire into the darkness. There was the valley that he had come to know as well as the palm of his own hand; he could not see it, but he knew it was there; and there were the wasting corpses of the buffalo for whose hides they had traded their sweat and their time and a part of their strength. The ricks of those hides lay also in the darkness, hidden from his sight; in the morning they would load them on the wagon and leave this place, and he felt that he would never return, though he knew he would have to come back with the others for the hides they could not carry with them. He felt vaguely that he would be leaving something behind, something that might have been precious to him, had he been able to know what it was. That night, after the fire died, he lay in darkness, alone, outside the shelter, and let the spring chill creep through his clothing into his flesh; he slept at last, but in the night he awoke several times, and blinked into the starless dark.
In the first clear light of morning, Schneider roused them from their sleep. As celebration of their last day, they decided to drink what remained of the coffee, which they had been hoarding for several weeks. Charley Hoge made the coffee strong and black; after the weak brew made from reused grounds, the fresh bitter fragrance went to their heads and gave a new strength to their bodies. They yoked the oxen to the wagon, and drew the wagon up to the open area where the hides lay in their tall bales.
While Andrews, Schneider, and Miller boosted the great bales onto the wagon bed, Charley Hoge cleaned their camp area and packed the smoked fish and meat with the other trail goods into the large crate that had stood covered in canvas beside their campsite all winter. Weakened by their long diet of game meat and fish, the three men struggled against the weight of the bales. Six of the huge bales, laid in pairs, covered the bed of the wagon; upon these, the men managed to boost six more, so that the bound hides rose to the height of a man above the sideboards of the wagon. And though they were gasping and half faint from their labor, Miller urged them to pile six more bales upon the twelve, so that at last the hides balanced precariously ten or twelve feet above the spring clip seat which Charley Hoge was to occupy.
“Too many,” Schneider gasped, after the last bale had been shoved in place. Breathing hoarsely, his face beneath its grime and smoke paler than his light hair and beard, he moved away from the wagon and looked at its towering load. “It’ll never make it down the mountain. It’ll tip over the first time it gets off level.”
From the pile of goods that Charley Hoge had been sorting beside the wagon, Miller gathered what pieces of rope he could find. He did not answer Schneider. He knotted odd pieces of rope together, and began securing rope to the gussets and eyes along the top of the sideboard. Schneider said:
“Trying them down will just make it worse. And this wagon wasn’t meant to carry this heavy a load. Break an axle, and then where’ll you be?”
Miller threw a rope over the top of the bales. “We’ll steady her as we go down,” he said. “And if we take it careful, the axles will hold up.” He paused for a moment. “I want us to go back into Butcher’s Crossing with a real load. And watch their eyes bug out.”
They lashed the hides to the wagon as tightly as they could, straining against the ropes, pulling them so heavily that the hides, flattened, pushed against the sideboards of the wagon and made them bulge outward. When the load was secure they stood away and looked at it, and then looked at the baled hides that remained. Andrews estimated that there were nearly forty of them on the ground.
“Two more wagon loads,” Miller said. “We can come back for these later this spring. We’re carrying around fifteen hundred hides—and there’s better than three thousand here. Say forty-six, forty-seven hundred hides in all. If the price holds up, that’s better than eighteen thousand dollars.” He grinned flatly at Andrews. “Your share will come to better than seven thousand dollars. That ain’t bad for a winter of doing nothing, is it?”
“Come on,” Schneider said. “You can count your money when you get it in your hand. Let’s finish loading and get out of here.”
“You ought to of held out for shares, Fred,” Miller said. “You’d of made a lot more money. Let’s see—”
“All right,” Schneider said. “I ain’t complained. I took my chance. And you ain’t got your load back to town yet, either.”
“Let’s see,” Miller said. “If you’d held out for a sixth, you’d—”
“All right,” Andrews said; his own voice surprised him. He felt a faint anger at Miller rise in him. “I said I’d take care of Schneider. And I’ll give him a share above and beyond his salary.”
Miller looked at Andrews slowly. He nodded very slightly, as if he recognized something. “Sure, Will. It’s yours to do with.”
Schneider, his face reddening, looked angrily at Andrews. “No, I thank you. I asked for sixty a month, and I been getting it. Fred Schneider takes care of his self; he don’t ask nothing of nobody.”
“All right,” Andrews said; he grinned a little foolishly. “I’ll buy you one big drunk back in Butcher’s Crossing.”
“I thank you,” Schneider said gravely. “I’ll be obliged to you for that.”
They stowed their camp goods and their smoked food under the high wagon seat, and looked around them to see if anything had been left. Through the trees, the shelter in which they had spent their winter looked small and insufficient for the task it had performed. It would be here, Andrews knew, when they returned later in the spring or summer for the other hides; but in the following seasons, dried by the heat of the sun and cracked in the bitter cold of snow and ice, it would begin to disintegrate, crumble into patches and shreds; until at last it would be no more, and only the stumps of the logs they had set in the ground would remain to show their long winter. He wondered if another man would see it before it rotted in the weather and trickled down into the deep bed of pine needles upon which it stood.
They left the other bales of hides where they were, not bothering to push them back out of sight among the trees. Using the last of his strychnine, Charley Hoge sprinkled the hides to discourage vermin from nesting in the bales. Miller, Andrews, and Schneider saddled their horses, wrapped their blankets and small goods in softened buffalo hides, and strapped these behind their saddles. Charley Hoge clambered atop the high clip seat; at a signal from Miller, he leaned far to one side of the piled bales of hides, unfurled his long bull-whip behind him, and brought it smartly alongside the team of oxen. The splayed leather at the tip cracked loudly, and the crack was followed immediately by Charley Hoge’s thin howling shout: “Harrup!” The startled oxen strained against the weight of the wagon, and dug their cloven hooves deep into the earth. The wooden yokes cut into their shoulder flesh, and the wood, strained in the pulling, gave sounds like deep groans. The freshly greased wheels turned on their axles and the wagon inched forward, gaining speed as the oxen found their balance against the weight they pulled. Under the weight of the hides, the wheels sank past their rims in the softened earth and left deep parallel ruts that were dark and heavy in the light yellow-green. Behind them, the men could see the ruts as far as they extended.
At the pass the snow was still fetlock deep; but it was soft, and the oxen made their way through it with comparative ease, though the wagon wheels sank in the wet earth halfway up to their hubs. At the highest point of the pass, precisely between the two peaks that were like the gigantic posts of a ruined gate that let them in and out of the valley, they paused. Schneider and Miller inspected the wagon brake that would keep the wagon from spilling too rapidly down as they descended the mountainside. As they did so, Andrews looked back upon the valley which in a few moments would be gone from his sight. At this distance, the new growth of grass was like a faint green mist that clung to the surface of the earth and glistened in the early morning sun. Andrews could not believe that this same valley had been the one he had seen pounding and furious with the threshings of a thousand dying buffalo; he could not believe that the grass had once been stained and matted with blood; he could not believe that this was the same stretch of land that had been torn by the fury of winter blizzards; he could not believe that a few weeks ago it had been stark and featureless under a blinding cover of white. He looked up and down its length, as far as he could see. Even from this distance, if he strained his eyes, he could see the expanse dotted with the dark carcasses of the buffalo. He turned away from it and pushed his horse over the pass, away from the other men and the wagon which remained immobile at the summit. After a few moments he heard behind him the slow thud of the horses’ hooves and the slow creak of the wagon. The party began its long descent.
A few yards beyond the pass, the three men on horseback dismounted and tied their horses loosely together, letting them trail behind them as they made their way down the mountain. The buffalo path, which they had followed up the mountain in the fall, was soft, though not so muddy as the earth had been back in the valley. Because of the softness, the wheels of the wagon had a tendency to slip sideways off the trail whenever it pitched from a level and followed the slope of the mountain; Miller found three lengths of rope in Charley Hoge’s goods crate, and secured these lengths high upon the load. As the wagon descended, the three men walked beside it and above it, level with the top of the load, and pulled steadily against the ropes, so that the wagon did not topple over as it angled broadly away from the mountain. Sometimes, when the trail turned sharply, the tottering weight of the high-piled wagon nearly pulled them off their feet; they slid downward on the slick grass, their heels digging for a hold in the earth, their hands burning on the ropes they pulled.
They went down the mountain more slowly than they had come up. Charley Hoge, dwarfed by the hides piled behind him, sat erect upon his wagon seat, angling as the wagon angled, regulating its speed by a judicious mixture of cracking whip and applied hand brake. They stopped frequently; animal and man, weakened by the long winter, were unable to go for long without rest.
Before midday they found a level plateau that extended a short way out from the mountain. They took the bits from their horses’ mouths and unyoked the oxen and let them graze on the thick grass that grew among the small rocks that littered the plateau. On a broad flat rock, Charley Hoge cut into equal portions a long strip of smoked venison, and passed the portions among the men. Andrews’s hand received the meat limply, and put it to his mouth; but for several minutes he did not eat. Exhaustion pulled at his stomach muscles, sickening him; tiny points darkened and brightened before his eyes, and he lay back on the cool grass. After a while he was able to tear at the tough leatherlike meat. His gums, inflamed by the long diet of game, throbbed at the toughness; he let the meat soften on his tongue before he chewed it. After he had forced most of it down his throat, he stood, despite the tiredness that still pulsed in his legs, and looked about him. The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue. The dark green of the pine boughs was lightened to a greenish yellow at the tips, where new growth was starting; scarlet and white buds were beginning to open on the wild-berry bushes; and the pale green of new growth on slender aspens shimmered above the silver-white bark of their trunks. All about the ground the pale new grass reflected the light of the sun into the shadowed recesses beneath the great pines, and the dark trunks glowed in that light, faintly, as if the light came from the hidden centers of the trees themselves. He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth. A light breeze rustled among the boughs, and the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together; from the grass came a mumble of sound as innumerable insects rustled secretly and performed their invisible tasks; deep in the forest a twig snapped beneath the pad of an unseen animal. Andrews breathed deeply of the fragrant air, spiced with the odor of crushed pine needles and musky from the slow decay that worked upward from the earth in the shadows of the great trees.
Just before noon the men resumed their slow journey downward; Andrews turned back and looked up the mountain they had descended. The trail had wound so erratically that he was no longer sure where he ought to look to find where they had come from. He looked upward, toward where he thought the summit of the mountain might be; but he could not see it. The trees that surrounded their trail cut off his view, and he could not see where they had been, or gauge how far they had come. He turned again. The trail twisted below him, out of sight. He took his place between Schneider and Miller, and again the group began its torturous descent of the mountain.
The sun beat upon him, and released the stench of his own body and that of the two men on either side of him. Sickened, he turned his head one way and another, trying to get the odor of a fresh breeze. He realized suddenly that he had not bathed since that first afternoon, months before, when he had been soaked by the blood of the buffalo; nor had his clothing been washed, or even removed. All at once his shirt and his trousers were stiff and heavy on his body, and the thought of them unpleasant in his mind. He felt his skin contract from the touch of his own clothing. He shuddered, as if caught in a chill wind, and let his breath come in and out of his opened mouth. And as they more steeply descended the mountain and came nearer to the flat country, the consciousness of his own filth grew within him. At last he was in a kind of nervous agony of which he could give no evidence. When the group rested, Andrews sat apart from the others and held himself rigid so that he could not feel his flesh move against his clothing.
In the middle of the afternoon there came to their ears a low faint roar, as of wind rushing through a tunnel. Andrews paused to listen; on his right, Schneider, who kept his eyes straight ahead on the swaying wagon, bumped into him. Schneider grunted a curse, but did not take his eyes from the wagon, as Andrews moved ahead to an equal distance between Schneider and Miller. Gradually the sound of the roaring became louder; the steadiness and intensity of it made Andrews revise his first impression that it was a wind sweeping upon the edge of the mountain, where the flat land came up to meet it.
Miller turned and grinned at Andrews and Schneider. “Hear that? We ain’t got much further to go.”
Then Andrews realized that the sound he heard must be the river, swollen with the spring run-off.
The thought of the end of their descent, and of cool water, quickened their steps and gave them a new strength. Charley Hoge cracked his whip and released his hand brake a few inches. The wagon swayed perilously on the uneven trail; at one point, the wheels on the side facing the three men lifted several inches off the ground; and as Charley Hoge whooped and set his brake, and as the three men pulled desperately on their ropes, the wagon shuddered for an instant before it was pulled back on all four wheels, rocking from one side to another beneath the unbalanced weight of the hides. After that they proceeded somewhat more slowly; but still the imminence of rest conserved their strength, and they did not stop again until they reached the flat moss-covered rock that gently sloped into the river bank.
On the flat bed of rock, they dropped their ropes and sprawled in rest. The rock was cool and moist from the spray flung by the river that ran alongside it, and the sound of the water rushing was so heavy that they had to shout above it.
“High for this time of year,” Schneider yelled.
Miller nodded. Andrews squinted against the fine spray. The water flowed from bank to bank, broken at places into whirling ripples by unseen rock deep in the river bed. Here and there, the flowing stream broke into white foam; the foam and stray bits of bark and green leaves rushing upon the surface of the water were the only indications of the speed and thrust that the water gained in its long drop from the mountains. In the early fall, when they had crossed it last, the river had been a thin trickle that barely covered the bed of rock; now it stretched from bank to bank and cut away the earth opposite where they rested. Andrews looked up and down the river; on either side of him, the narrowest part stretched to at least a hundred yards.
Charley Hoge unyoked the oxen and let them join the horses at the edge of the bank. The animals touched their muzzles delicately upon the surface of the rushing water and flung their heads upward as the spray hit their eyes and nostrils.
On the rock, Schneider half crawled and half slid past Andrews and Miller. He knelt beside the river, cupped his hands into the water, and drank noisily from the streaming bowl of his hands. Andrews went across the rock and sat beside him. After Schneider had finished drinking, Andrews let his legs slide over the rock into the river; the force of the water caught him unprepared, and swung his lower body halfway around before he could stiffen his legs against the cold sharp thrust. The water broke in swirls and white riffles around his legs, just below the knees; the cold was like needles, but he did not move his legs. Little by little, holding to the rock behind him, he let his body into the stream; his breath came in gasps from the shock of the cold. Finally, his feet found the rocky bottom of the stream, and he leaned away from the bank toward the water that rushed at him, so that he stood free of the bank, balanced against the force of the river. He found a knobby protuberance on the rock to his right; he grasped the knob, and let his body fully down into the water. He squatted, submerging himself to his shoulders, holding his breath at the intense cold; but after a moment the cold left him and the feel of the water flowing about his body, washing at the accumulated filth of a winter, was pleasant and soothing, and almost warm. Still tightly grasping the rock with his right hand, he let his body be carried with the rushing of the stream, until at last it lay loose and straight in the course of the water, held near the foaming surface by the river’s flow. Nearly weightless, holding to the knob of rock, he lay for several moments in the water, his head turned to one side and his eyes closed.
Above the roar of the water, he heard a noise. He opened his eyes. Schneider squatted on the rock above and to one side of him, grinning widely. His hand cupped, and went into the water; it came up suddenly, and pushed water into Andrews’s face. Andrews gasped and drew himself out, bringing his free hand up quickly as he did so, splashing water at Schneider. For several moments, the two men, laughing and sputtering, dashed water toward each other as if they were playing children. Finally Andrews shook his head and sat panting on the rock beside Schneider. A light breeze chilled his skin but there was sunlight to warm him. Later, he knew, his clothes would stiffen on his body; but now they were loose and comfortable to his skin, and he felt almost clean.
“Jesus God,” Schneider said, and stretched to lie on the sloping rock. “It’s good to be down off that mountain.” He turned to Miller. “How long you think we’ll be, getting back to Butcher’s Crossing?”
“Couple of weeks at the most,” Miller said. “We’ll go back quicker than we came.”
“I ain’t hardly going to stop,” said Schneider, “except to get my belly full of greens and wash it around with some liquor, and then see that little German girl for a bit. I’m going straight on to St. Louis.”
“High living,” Miller said. “St. Louis. I didn’t know you liked it that high, Fred.”
“I didn’t either,” Schneider said, “until just a minute ago. Man, it takes a winter away from it to give you a taste for living.”
Miller got up from the rock and stretched his arms out and up from his sides. “We’d better find our way across this river before it starts getting dark.”
While Miller gathered their horses from around the banks where they were cropping at the lush grass, Andrews and Schneider helped Charley Hoge round up the oxen and yoke them to the wagon. By the time they finished, Miller had brought their horses up near them, and, mounted on his own, had found what looked like a crossing. The other men stood side by side on the bank and watched silently as Miller guided his horse into the swift water.
The horse was reluctant to go in; it advanced a few steps into the graveled bed of a shallow eddy and halted, lifting its feet, one by one, and shaking them delicately just above the surface. Miller patted the animal on its shoulder, and ran his fingers through its mane, leaning forward to speak soothingly in its ear. The horse went forward; the water flowed and parted whitely around its fetlocks, and as it advanced the water rose upward, until it flowed around the shanks and then around the knees. Miller led the horse in a zigzag path across the river; when it slipped on the smooth underwater rocks, Miller let it stand still for a moment and soothed it with small pats, speaking softly. In the middle of the river, the water rose above Miller’s stirruped feet and submerged belly of the horse, parting on its shoulder and thigh. Very slowly, Miller zigzagged to shallower water; in a few minutes, he was across the river and on dry land. He waved, and then pushed his horse back into the water, zigzagging again so that the lines of his return intersected the lines of his going.
Back on the bank where the others waited, Miller got down from his horse and walked over to them; his water-filled boots squished with each step, and water streamed behind him, darkening the rock.
“It’s a good crossing,” Miller said. “Nearly flat all the way, and straight across. It’s a little deep right in the middle, but the oxen can make it all right; and the wagon’s heavy enough to weight itself down.”
“All right,” Schneider said. “Let’s get going.”
“Just a minute,” Miller said. “Fred, I want you to ride alongside the lead team and guide them across. I’ll go in front, you just follow along behind me.”
Schneider squinted at him for a few moments, and then shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I think maybe I’d better not do it. I never have liked oxen, and they ain’t too fond of me. Now if it was mules, I’d say all right. But not oxen.”
“There’s nothing to it,” Miller said. “You just ride a little downstream from them; they’ll go right straight across.”
Schneider shook his head again. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t figure it’s my job.”
Miller nodded. “No,” he agreed, “I guess it ain’t, rightly speaking. But Charley ain’t got a horse.”
“You could let him have yours,” Schneider said, “and you could double up with Will, here.”
“Hell,” Miller said, “there ain’t no use making a fuss over it. I’ll lead them across myself.”
“No,” Charley Hoge said. The three men turned to him in surprise. Charley Hoge cleared his throat. “No,” he said again. “It’s my job. And I don’t need no horse.” He pointed with his good hand to the off-ox in the lead team. “I’ll ride that one acrost. That’s the best way to do it, anyhow.”
Miller looked at him narrowly for a moment. “You feel up to it, Charley?” he asked.
“Sure,” Charley Hoge said. He reached into his shirt and pulled out the warped and stained Bible. “The Lord will provide. He’ll turn my steps in the right path.” He contracted his stomach and thrust the Bible inside his shirt under his belt.
Miller looked at him for another moment, and then abruptly nodded. “All right. You follow straight along behind me, hear?” He turned to Andrews. “Will, you take your horse across now. Go just like I did, only you go straight across. If you find any big rocks, or any big holes, stop your horse and yell out so we can see where they are. It won’t take a very big jolt to turn this wagon over.”
“All right,” Andrews said. “I’ll wait for you on the other side.”
“Now be careful,” Miller said. “Take it slow. Let your horse set her own speed. That water’s mighty fast.”
“I’ll be all right,” Andrews said. “You and Charley just take care of the hides.”
Andrews walked to his horse and mounted. As he turned toward the river, he saw Charley Hoge pull himself up on one of the oxen. The beast moaned and pulled away from the strange weight, and Charley Hoge patted it on the shoulder. Schneider and Miller watched Andrews as he set his horse into the first shallow.
The horse shuddered beneath him as the water climbed above its fetlocks and swirled about its knees. Andrews set his eyes upon the wet and trampled earth across the river where Miller had emerged, and kept his horse pointed straight toward it. Beneath him he felt the uncertainty of the horse’s footing; he tried to make himself loose and passive in the saddle, and slackened the reins. In the middle of the river, the water, sharply cold, came midway between his ankle and his knee; the heavy thrust pressed his leg against the horse’s side. As the animal stepped slowly forward, Andrews felt for brief instants the sickening sensation of weightlessness as he and the horse were buoyed and pushed aside by the swift current. The roaring was intense and hollow in his ears; he looked down from the point of land that dipped and swayed in his sight, and saw the water. It was a deep but transparent greenish brown, and it flowed past him in thick ropes and sheeted wedges, in shapes that changed with an incredible complexity before his gaze. The sight dizzied him, and he raised his eyes to look again at the point of earth toward which he aimed.
He reached the shallows without coming across a hole or rock that was likely to cause difficulty for the wagon. When his horse clambered upon dry land, Andrews dismounted and waved to the men who waited on the opposite bank.
Miller, small in the distance that was intensified by the water rushing across it, raised his arm in a stiff response and then let it drop to his side. His horse started forward. After he had gone fifteen or twenty feet into the river, he turned and beckoned to Charley Hoge, who waited astride one of the lead oxen, his oxgoad held high in his good left hand. He let the goad down lightly upon the shoulder of the lead ox, and the team lumbered forward into the shallows. The load of skins swayed as the wagon wheels came off the tiny drop of the bank into the river.
On the bank upstream from the wagon, Schneider waited on his horse, watching intently the progress of the wagon as it went deeper in the swirling river. After a minute, he too turned his horse and followed the wagon, eight or ten yards upstream from it.
When the lead oxen sank to their bellies in the heavy stream, the oxen farthest back, next to the wagon, still had not gone above their knees. Andrews then understood the safety of the crossing; by the time the farthest oxen were insecure and had the struggle to maintain their footing, the other oxen would be in the shallows and could pull the main weight of the wagon; and when the wagon was sunk to its bed, and the sides would receive the full force of the river, all the oxen would be in shallower water, and could maintain a steady pull upon it. He smiled a little at the fear he had not known he had until the instant he lost it, and watched Miller, who had pulled many yards ahead of the lead oxen, hurry his horse through the shallows and up on dry land. Miller dismounted, nodded curtly to Andrews, and stood on the riverbank, guiding Charley Hoge toward him with quick beckoning gestures of both hands.
When the lead oxen were in the shallows within ten feet of the bank, Charley Hoge slipped off the bull he had ridden across and sloshed in the knee-deep water beside them, looking back at the wagon, which was nearing the deepest part of the river. He slowed the oxen and spoke soothingly to the lead team.
Miller said: “Easy, now. Bring them in easy.”
Andrews watched the wagon dip toward the hollow in the center of the river. He turned his head a little, and saw that Schneider, still upstream, had pulled up even with the wagon. Water curled about the belly of his horse; Schneider’s eyes intently watched the water before him, between the ears of his slowly moving horse. Andrews looked away from Schneider, swinging his gaze upriver, following the dense line of trees that in some spots grew so close to the bank that their trunks were darkened halfway up by the flung spray. But suddenly his gaze fixed itself upon the river. For an instant paralyzed, he raised himself as tall as he could and looked intently at that point that had caught his eye.
A log, splintered at the downstream end, nearly as thick as a man’s body and twice as long, bobbed like a matchstick and hurtled forward, half in and half out of the swirling water. Andrews ran to the edge of the bank and shouted, pointing upstream:
“Schneider! Look out! Look out!”
Schneider looked up and cupped his ear toward the faint voice that came across the roaring of the water. Andrews called again, and Schneider leaned forward a little in his saddle, trying to hear.
The splintered end of the log thrust into the side of Schneider’s horse with a ripe splitting thud that was clearly audible above the roar of the water. For an instant the horse struggled to keep upright; then the log tore away, and the horse gave a short high scream of agony and fear, and fell sideways toward the wagon; Schneider went into the water as the horse fell. The horse turned completely over, above Schneider, and for an instant the great gaping hole that had been its belly reddened the water around it. Schneider came up between the fore and hind legs of the horse, facing the men who stood on the bank. For an instant, the men could see his face quite clearly; he was frowning a little, as if vaguely puzzled, and his lips were twisted in a slight grimace of annoyance and contempt. He put out his left hand, as if to push the horse away from him; the horse turned again and one of its hind hooves thudded heavily high on Schneider’s head. Schneider stiffened to his full length and quivered as if in a chill; his expression did not change. Then the blood came down solidly over his face like a red mask, and he toppled slowly and stiffly into the water beside his horse.
The horse and the log hit the wagon broadside at almost the same instant. The wagon was pushed sideways over the rocks; the high load swayed, and pulled the wagon; water gathered over the feebly threshing horse, and piled upon the bottom of the wagon bed. With a great groan, the wagon toppled on its side.
As it toppled, Charley Hoge jumped out of the way of the oxen, which were being pulled back into the river by the weight of the overturned wagon. For a moment, the wagon drifted lazily at the middle of the river, held to some stability by the weight of the near oxen, which threshed against their yokes and beat the water to a froth; then, caught more firmly, the wagon scraped against the rock bottom of the river, and swung lazily around, dragging the oxen with it. As the oxen’s footholds on the river bed were loosened, the wagon drifted more swiftly away and began to break up on the heavier rocks downstream. The lashing that held the load broke, and buffalo hides exploded in all directions upon the water, and were rapidly borne out of sight. For perhaps a minute, the men who stood on the bank could see the oxen struggling head over heels in the water, and could see the smashed wagon turning and drifting into the distance. Then they could see nothing, though they stood for several minutes more looking downstream where the wagon had disappeared.
Andrews dropped to his hands and knees and swung his head from side to side like a wounded animal. “My God!” he said thickly. “My God, my God!”
“A whole winter’s work,” Miller said in a flat dead voice. “It took just about two minutes.”
Andrews raised his head wildly, and got to his feet. “Schneider,” he said. “Schneider. We’ve got to—”
Miller put his hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy, boy. Won’t do no good to worry about Schneider.”
Andrews wrung his hands; his voice broke. “But we’ve got to—”
“Easy,” Miller said. “We can’t do anything for him. He was dead when he hit the water. And it would be foolish to try to look for him. You saw how fast them oxen was carried down.”
Andrews shook his head numbly. He felt his body go loose, and felt his legs shamble away from Miller. “Schneider,” he whispered. “Schneider, Schneider.”
“He was a blasphemer,” Charley Hoge’s voice cracked high and thin. Andrews stumbled over to him, and looked blearily down at his face.
Charley Hoge looked unseeingly down the river; his eyes blinked rapidly, and the muscles of his face twitched uncontrolled, as if his face were falling apart. “He was a blasphemer,” Charley Hoge said again, and nodded rapidly. He closed his eyes, and clutched at his belly, where his Bible was still strapped. He said in a high thin singsong voice: “He lay with scarlet women and he fornicated and he blasphemed and he took the name of the Lord in vain.” He opened his eyes and turned his unseeing face toward Andrews. “It’s God’s will. God’s will be done.”
Andrews backed away from him, shaking his head as Charley Hoge nodded his.
“Come on,” Miller said. “Let’s get out of here. Nothing we can do.”
Miller led Charley Hoge up to his horse and helped him to mount behind the saddle. Then he swung himself up and called back to Andrews: “Come on, Will. The sooner we get away from here, the better it’ll be.”
Andrews nodded, and stumbled toward his horse. But before he mounted he turned and looked again at the river. His eye was caught by something on the opposite bank. It was Schneider’s hat, black and sodden and shapeless, caught and held by the water between two rocks that jutted out from the bank.
“There’s Schneider’s hat,” Andrews said. “We ought not to leave it there.”
“Come on,” Miller said. “It’s going to get dark soon.”
Andrews mounted his horse and followed Miller and Charley Hoge as they rode slowly away from the river.