T
HE SNOW WAS TWO INCHES DEEPER BY THE TIME THE PACK
train was underway. Parts of the trail were so drifted over it could be found only by watching for worn places on the bark of trees. William and old Toby moved ahead searching for this faint trail. As the drifting snow filled in their footprints almost at once, William had to blaze trees with his tomahawk, chipping away bark at eye level, to leave a way the pack train could see.
You wouldn’t think it could be so hard to keep to a trail that runs along a ridge, he thought. And yet he and the old Indian had to backtrack repeatedly; often their progress would lead them to cul-de-sacs or the edges of cliffs, even places where it would be impossible to turn horses around. So these places had to be followed to their dead ends before William could go back, find the true way, and only then make his marks on the trees.
They groped along this ridgetop for hours in this manner. The snow kept falling and the clouds they were in curtained everything beyond one or two hundred yards. The trail went along wooded saddles and over treeless knobs where the wind blew so strong that it was necessary to lean into it. The knobs were blank fields with grass-heads whipping wildly in the wind above waving currents of blowing snow. Far below there would be barely visible treetops, and below them, snow, mist and cloud. Some of these bald ridges seemed as narrow and steep as roof peaks. William, and even old sure-footed Toby, slipped and fell on their sides often on these slippery snowy edges, and William could see this was going to be exceedingly dangerous for the horses, top-heavy as they were with their loads. A horse tumbling from here
might go down like a sled for hundreds of yards before crashing into a tree or sailing off some invisible cliff down there, and would be almost impossible to bring back up, even if unhurt.
The same for a man with a pack, he thought.
Toby ranged here and there tirelessly, cowled like a monk in the buffalo robe wrapped around him, the feathers on his bow twirling in the wind. William remembered how scrawny he had looked naked, how fragile he looked compared with the brawny soldiers, and wondered from where he drew his strength and endurance. When the old guide would turn around to look at him, William would see that dark raisin of a face with the white shell through the nostrils, the hooded eyes darting and searching. The old face never looked worried. That helped William a great deal.
The snow was six to ten inches deep in the open now, and in drift places it was to the thighs. William’s moccasins and socks and leggings were soaked through and caked with snow. In the falls he had taken, his elk-hide tunic and mittens had gotten snow-packed and wet. He was as cold and wet all over as he had ever been in his life.
Got to consider, he thought, that my feet could freeze. They well might, even if I keep moving.
One wind-smoothed slope of snow proved to have nothing under it, and he fell through and began sliding down through a cold cascade of snow-clods. He felt a tree limb as he went down and grabbed it. He got to his feet on the slope, heart slamming violently. Toby’s face appeared over the crest above him, then broke into a relieved grin. William floundered back up onto the ridge. He stood shivering and brushed snow off his rifle, out of the muzzle and the crevices of the flintlock and the steel frizzen. He took off his mittens so he could work. He cleaned out the powder and recharged it, tilting the small end of the powder horn down into it. While he was doing this he felt a tug at his sleeve.
Toby was pointing forward and down the slope. A few yards below the place where William had fallen, a gray animal was moving, half obscured by blowing snow. William saw its black tail-tuft and the long ears, saw it spring once like a goat from the chest-deep snow onto a ledge, then turn to look curiously up toward the ridge.
A mule deer! It was within easy range, not more than twenty yards below. It was small, but would give the troops at least one mess of venison which they sorely needed.
William raised the rifle to get a bead, and saw as he did so that Toby was notching an arrow on his bowstring.
William squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped.
Damnation!
He thumbed the hammer back again and squeezed the trigger and again it snapped. He knew the primer was dry; he had just changed it. He cocked the rifle again. Now the animal was starting to move away. It turned and began winding down through a cleft in the ledge, passing for a moment behind a shrub. William heard the
thung!
of Toby’s bowstring at the same time he squeezed the trigger. The arrow touched a twig of the shrub and went awry just as William’s flintlock snapped for the third time. He clenched his teeth, cocked it and heard it snap again, and watched the deer, moving away slowly into the snow curtain, unhurried, unaware of its absurd good fortune so far. Toby notched another arrow and let it fly, while William examined his rifle again, but the deer was far down now. It apparently heard or saw the arrow pass by, spraddled and leaped a few more steps, then faded into the white whirl as William snapped three more times with the accursed rifle.
He felt even colder now that the excitement of the hunter’s chance had drained out of him. He shook his head sadly, and old Toby nodded with sympathy. William saw the trouble now: the flint was loose, apparently dislodged in his fall. He adjusted it and tightened the thumbscrew down—or thought he did, as he could not tell whether his benumbed fingers were giving it any pressure at all. Then he searched in the snow until he found his mitten. He pulled it on and worked his fingers vigorously inside it, but the mitten was soaked and cold. A great shudder shook him down the length of his body. He pointed his rifle down the trail, and Toby nodded and they proceeded on along the howling ridgeline.
A
T
MIDDAY THEY WENT BACK TWO MILES AND FOUND THE
pack train coming along. Lewis said several horses had fallen but had been returned to the trail with difficulty. Several men also had taken tumbles down the snowy slopes, but no one had been hurt. “You’re showing frostbite on your cheeks there,” Lewis said. “When we stop for soup, better get some grease and rub ’em.”
“There’s grass for the beasts about two hundred yards up yonder,” William said.
William looked anxiously around at the men as they huddled in the snow around a bonfire sipping the steaming brew. They were wasting, losing flesh. The horses were pulling at sparse grass in a steeply sloping little meadow where the scouring wind had kept the snow from getting deep.
“I hate to keep going in this snowstorm,” William murmured. “but I haven’t seen a place yet to make a camp.”
Lewis nodded. “Just have to keep ’em going,” he said. “Got to work our way over this blamed range before the snow gets over our heads.”
William rose, the hot soup eating like acid in the pit of his stomach. “We’ll go on ahead,” he said. “We’ll find a place, I swear it.”
“Take Colter with you. He hunted all morning and didn’t find so much as a sparrow. His luck’s due to change.”
William did not mention the mule deer and the failure of his rifle. The party did not need to hear that kind of a hard-luck story just now.
C
OLTER’S LUCK DID NOT CHANGE.
T
HREE MORE DEER WERE
seen during the rest of the long and torturous and chilling afternoon, but they vanished into the snow veil like ghosts before a sight could be put on them. The clouds stayed on the ridge and the snow kept falling It took the rest of the afternoon to go six more miles along the crest, the trail growing more and more faint as snow began sticking to the tree trunks.
T
HE SNOW WAS GRAYING WITH DUSK WHEN
W
ILLIAM AND
Colter found a heavily wooded cove with a running spring, just a few yards down the north slope from the ridge. There was not really any level ground, but there was the water and there was a little grass, and there was a wealth of fallen deadwood. “This is as good a home as we’re going to find this night,” William said. “Best thing we can do till they catch up is fix up bonfires.” Shivering, soaked, they dragged up wood and made high piles of it. “I hear ’em a-coming, now,” Colter said when it was almost dark.
“Good. Fire up those piles and I’ll walk back and lead ’em in.”
When William met the head of the column, Lewis was looking wild-eyed with anxiety. Then he saw the flames glimmering through the trees and managed a smile. “No game,” William said, “but we can warm up their outsides anyway.”
“Might have to let ’em kill another colt,” Lewis panted. “They’ve got to have some meat. Got to.”
York came alongside William as he led them along to the ridge toward the firelight. He had a scarf wrapped around his face up to his eyes. “Know what this night mind me of, Mast’ Billy?” he said in a muffled voice. “’Memmer when we was acrossin’ the Allegheny bringin’ you Ma an’ Pa an’ sisters, an’ you led us through th’ snow to that cabin?”
William’s mind leaped back across two decades and a continent, and he remembered. “Yes, by heaven, I do. Ha! Just like the old days, York, say what?”
“Just like,” York said.
“But I know one difference. I’m not fool enough to rassle you in any snowbank anymore. Y’ve outgrown me, old friend.” Tears suddenly smarted in William’s eyes as he said this. He didn’t remember ever having called his slave “old friend” before.
He’s no slave anymore anyhow, William thought. He’s a man like all the rest of us.
And that night as the men stood around in their steaming elkskins as close to the roaring bonfires as they could get without singeing their whiskers, almost giddy with the aroma of roasting colt meat, William took a long, loving look at York and made a decision.
I won’t tell ’im yet, he thought. But when we get back to Louisville, I’m going to sign that man free.
O
NE COLT OF COURSE MADE ONLY ONE MEAL, AND A SCANT
one, for three dozen men accustomed to eating eight or ten pounds of meat a day per man. And although they now were consuming their meat in the Indian manner—organs, brains, tongue, guts, suet, and marrow as well as the red flesh—their famished bodies, doing superhuman work in the cold, burned up the nourishment even as they slept, and so there would be nothing else to eat unless the hunters should have better luck today.
It was the seventeenth of September, and this morning it was clear to everybody that winter in these altitudes had arrived. What they had dreaded had happened. They were caught by winter in the Bitterroot ranges. This morning the snow had stopped, but it lay a foot deep in most places. The clouds overhead looked pregnant with more snow, but they had lifted enough to permit several miles’ visibility. And in a way this was bad; yesterday it had been possible to hope that beyond the next misty mile lay the end of the mountains. Today they could see high, jagged, snow-covered peaks towering around them in every direction, and every man had to rid himself of any hope that the ordeal of the mountains was nearly over. The men looked at those frightful ranges repeating themselves off into the purple distance, and their stomachs growled and their bones ached; their extremities stung with freezing and thawing, their faces were raw and flaking and suppurating; they shuddered uncontrollably with cold and hunger and, for the first time after nearly two years of eager and faithful following, they began talking discouragement
among themselves outside their captains’ hearing. The horses had foraged far through the snowy woods during the night, and most of the morning was spent in stumbling through the snow and catching them all. Every hour thus spent meant another hour’s delay in these mountains. Sergeant Ordway brought back to the captains those first murmurings of despair that he had been overhearing.
“Some are a-sayin’ these mountains are a trap without an exit,” he said. “I heerd ’em talkin’ about the wolves howlin’. I heard Bratton say, ‘I don’t like them wolves, they’re a bad sign.’ I told him, ‘Bratton,’ I said, ‘if a wolf tries t’ eat you, eat him.’ Well, sir, he laughed then, but others are a-talkin’ low-spirited too.”
“Thankee, Sarge,” said Lewis.
“Welcome, sir. I thought y’ oughter know what they’re a-sayin’.” He shivered and looked westward, and shook his head. “I’ll say this, sir. These are sure the most turrible mountains I ever beheld.”
Because of the delay caused by the strayed horses, there was little hope of making more than ten or twelve miles this day. William and Colter and Toby went out ahead again, and men who could be spared from the pack train to hunt went down into the woods on both slopes of the mountain. William heard a few gunshots during the afternoon and prayed that they would yield something.
The afternoon was a repetition of the day before, but in some ways worse. Branches of the evergreens were loaded with snow, and this was forever sliding off onto heads and shoulders, sliding down collars, wetting clothes and mittens and gun locks. The temperature came up near the freezing point during the afternoon, and the snow grew slick as grease. William fell countless times, and Colter fell, and even Toby fell, and William was almost sick imagining what it must be like back there in the pack train. He imagined, over and over, Sacajawea’s horse rolling down the snowy mountainside, crushing her and little Pomp under it, and somehow this was the worst possible mishap he could imagine. She had to ride, of course; she could not be expected to wade through this snowy wilderness carrying a baby. But under these circumstances the privilege of riding was surely no privilege at all.
As he expected, darkness was on them before they had progressed more than ten miles. He found a meadow on the mountainside near a gushing brook with a round deep sinkhole full of water nearby, and here again had a bonfire going by the time the rest of the party came creeping along the trail. The hunters had
shot only a few grouse, not enough even for a good mouthful of fowl for each man. One hunter had chased a bear “all over the blag-dagged mountain,” as he reported it, but had been unable to get a clear shot at it. And so this night the third and last of the colts was butchered. The men devoured its boiled flesh and guzzled the broth ravenously but without their usual delight. “They usually eat like happy pigs,” Ordway commented, watching them. “Now they mind me more o’ wolves, like.”