Paul awoke alone again. The first thing he saw when he sat up was Melody coming through the barn door. An excited flush glowed on her cheeks. “You should look outside,” she told him. “It’s beautiful blazing sunshine. The snow is melting everywhere.”
He went to the door, slid it back, and peered out. As she said, the sun twinkled on the snow and melted it from the barn roof. The sky rang clear bright blue above them.
“The snow is almost a foot and a half thick.” He pointed to the snow drifted against the door jamb. “But with this sun, it’ll be gone by the middle of the day. We can get down the road and head for home.”
She grinned up at him. “That’s what I thought myself.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have anything more for us to eat,” Paul grumbled. “Our only hope is to get home as quickly as possible.”
“Don’t worry,” Melody chirped. “We’ll be fine. Once the snow clears, we’ll make good progress on the road. We might even get home before the wagon. We’ll be able to travel much faster on a single horse.”
Her attitude lifted the weight of responsibility from his shoulders. “I’m glad you think so.”
She patted him on the arm. “Come. As soon as the horse is finished eating, let’s get out of here.” She started packing her shawls into her carpet bag.
Melody busied herself putting the fire out. She spread the coals out as much as she dared without setting the nearby straw on fire. Then she brought handfuls of snow from the doorway and dropped it onto the coals. The snow sizzled and melted, throwing up plumes of smoke and steam, until the fire drowned in a puddle of sooty water.
Paul wrapped his shawl around his shoulders and went to see to his horse. Once the animal finished its meal, Paul led it to the door of the barn and out into the slushy snow. Its feet penetrated straight down to the earth beneath the snow, leaving black prints around the door.
Melody waited in the doorway with her carpet bag in her arms. When Paul finally signaled to her, she came to him, and he lifted her up behind his saddle before mounting himself in front of her. He kicked the horse, and they set off in the direction of the road.
They found it almost immediately, and Paul turned his horse’s head to the east, toward their mountain. Once they gained the open road, their spirits lifted. To Paul’s surprise, Melody shifted her burden in her arms and held onto his belt with one hand. A charge of excitement coursed through him. He dared not mention it or even fidget in his saddle for fear of shaking her off.
They pressed on through the better part of the day. The snow continued to melt as long as the sun shone but by the middle of the afternoon, the sky clouded over again. The air chilled and Paul shivered under his shawl. Melody didn’t seem to notice. She probably had quite a few woolen undergarments on under her dress, in addition to her mittens and the shawl around her head, neck, and shoulders.
As he feared, the snow started again. The cloud cover came in so thickly, he couldn’t judge the time of day, but he couldn’t do anything other than keep driving forward. He cast around on either side of the road, but nothing offered any shelter from the snow.
Before he could make any alternate plan, the snow set in thick and hard, giving him only a faint view of the road in front of him.
“Maybe we should turn back,” he called over his shoulder.
But Melody didn’t answer him. Maybe she didn’t even hear him.
He squinted his eyes against the stinging flecks of ice stabbing him in the face. He couldn’t feel his cheeks, and the end of his nose burned from cold. His hands froze into balls of ice on the reins, and he wasn’t even sure anymore whether he still held them in his rock-hard fingers.
The horse stumbled once, and then again, trying to keep its footing in ever-mounting snow drifts. Paul looked around. Huge shadows closed them in on either side. Were those trees? He couldn’t see anything except a curtain of white.
Shivers racked his whole body now. How long could a body keep going in this cold before it fell over? He couldn’t feel Melody’s hand on his belt anymore, either. Maybe she’d fallen off somewhere behind them. He couldn’t force himself to turn around to check.
Somewhere in the fog of pain and cold and confusion, he realized that his mind wasn’t functioning properly. He wanted to formulate some coherent strategy to deal with their situation. Wasn’t that what a husband was supposed to do? Wasn’t a husband supposed to know how to protect his wife from dangers like this? But he couldn’t think. He couldn’t put one thought in front of the other.
He could only keep riding his horse. He wasn’t capable of doing anything else. Was that Melody calling to him? He heard only the constant sifting noise of the falling snow.
All of a sudden, out of his jumbled thoughts, he saw a black expanse rise up in front of him. Around it, jagged black shapes pointed up into the obscurity of the sky. He realized he was looking at the river. They’d left the road and wandered across country to the banks of the Snake River.
Paul struggled to grasp the frightful reality that they were utterly, hopelessly lost in this blizzard. But the next instant, his horse staggered forward, as snow-blind and frozen as its rider. Its feet crashed through the snow, through a thin shell of ice and marsh under the snow, and pitched forward into the water.
Paul observed the whole thing from a remote distance. Even as his head swung forward toward the black water, he only thought about the danger with numb detachment. This was it. He could relax now. There was nothing more for him to do but to sink beneath that icy water and forget.