Authors: Blake Crouch,J. A. Konrath
“You not think we’d make fit traveling companions?” Nathan asked.
“Course not.”
“What then?”
“Just started out early is all.”
Nathan gave a nod, though it didn’t appear to be one of understanding.
He glanced back at Dan, as if to say something, but stopped himself.
“You care to ride on with us?” Nathan asked.
“I’ll probably just catch a few more winks and then—”
“How about you saddle your horse right now, come along with us like you said you was
goin
to.”
Oatha
rode between
McClurg
and Dan in the early morning cold, the trail winding up a long drainage through a dense stand of spruce.
By
, a thick cloud deck had darkened the sky, and when the men stopped to lunch at timberline, tiny flakes of snow stood out on the wool of
Oatha’s
coat.
They were making a leisurely go of it, no chance of reaching Abandon by nightfall at this pace, but
Oatha
held his tongue, even as they lounged for two hours, smoking and nipping from Nathan’s jar of whiskey, the men fair drunk by the time they finally decamped.
It was cold riding, and
Oatha’s
glow soon faded.
They climbed out of the trees, the snow blowing sideways over this exposed, open terrain.
The Teats, those twin promontories
Oatha
had been using as a guide since yesterday, had vanished in the storm.
They camped miserable, cold, and wet just below timberline in a grove of dead spruce, got a sheet of canvas strung up between the trees, a fire going underneath, but even the whiskey jar making the rounds couldn’t lift
Oatha’s
spirits.
He sat leaning against a spruce, watching the snow pour down and the light recede, thinking he should be in Abandon by now.
“How much you figure they keep on hand?”
McClurg
asked.
“Few thousand.
Ten if we’re lucky,” Nathan said.
“Enough to make it worth our trouble,” Dan said.
Oatha
cut his eyes at the three men, and
McClurg
noticed, said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Nathan smiled.
“Nobody told him he
felled
in with road agents.”
The men laughed.
“What do you do for a
livin
?” Nathan asked.
Oatha’s
mouth had run dry.
“Been prospecting, bar mining, picking up work in the mines where I can—”
“Like honest work, do you?” Dan said.
“I guess.”
“But the question,”
McClurg
said, “is how you feel about dishonest work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well think on it, get back to us.”
The men laughed again and Nathan swiped the jar from Dan, tilted it back.
McClurg
hoisted a log onto the fire, a spray of ashes engulfing
Oatha
.
He rummaged through his satchel, located the loaf of sourdough he’d bought before leaving Silverton.
“Break me off a hunk a that,” Nathan said, and
Oatha
tore off a piece.
“Got a round a cheese in here, too.”
“Don’t be stingy.”
They cut cheese onto the bread, set the slices on hot stones in the fire’s vicinity to let it melt.
The storm brought a premature night, and in the firelight,
Oatha
watched the snow fall without respite.
They played cards until the fire ran out of wood, won the last of
Oatha’s
money, drank up his quart of whiskey, smoked all of his tobacco.
As the other men snored,
Oatha
lay awake.
If it hadn’t been snowing so hard, he’d have attempted to sneak out of camp,
resaddle
his horse, and get the hell away from Nathan and the boys.
He didn’t want to look it in the eye, but the truth of the matter was that he’d backed himself into a bind, and if he didn’t slip away from them tomorrow, he’d probably never reach Abandon.
Oatha’s
eyes opened.
As he sat up, his vision sharpened into focus and he saw the gray-white madness of the blizzard, the canvas sheet sagging to the ground at one end, the snow piled up three feet around the boundary of their little shelter.
He held his hands toward the low fire, his head throbbing again, a whiskey hangover that wouldn’t die until
at the earliest.
Nathan looked at him, shook his head.
“My horse and yours are dead.
We’ve caught a bad piece a luck here.”
They stayed under the canvas all day, taking turns venturing out to gather wood from the abundance of rotted spruce and melting snow in the emptied whiskey jars, a tenuous proposition, the fire and ice resulting in shattered glass in two out of three attempts.
By evening, the snow had quit but the wind raged on through the night, and the sound of limbs cracking kept
Oatha
from the depths of restful sleep.
The second morning dawned cloudless and bright.
They saddled the two remaining horses and broke camp as the first rays of sunlight struck the Teats,
Oatha
clinging to
Dan, Nathan to the substantial girth of
McClurg
.
A quarter mile out from the shelter, Dan’s horse stopped in its tracks and refused to take another step, snow to its belly, nostrils flaring in the thin air.
“I’ll make you go!”
He dismounted, grabbed the bridle strap and fought to drag the horse forward, but it wouldn’t budge, even when Dan drew his Colt and smacked the animal across the bridge of its nose.
“Enough,” Nathan said.
“These animals
ain’t
built for this.”
“Maybe just one of us should take a horse, try to make Abandon,”
Oatha
said.
“Who, you?”
“To what end?”
“To get help.
Bring back a sled or a—”
“Snow’s too deep,” Nathan said.
“Hell, it’s just early October.
We’ll get us a warm spell in a couple days.
Good sod-soaker.”
“We’re almost out a provisions,”
McClurg
said.
“We’re just supposed to wait around?”
“I
ain’t
in control of the weather,
Marion
.”
Oatha
climbed down from the horse, and Dan screamed at the animal, “Go on!
Get!”
“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said.
“We need ‘
em
.”
“For what?”
“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck out—”
“I
ain’t
eatin
my horse.”
“Circumstances like this
ain’t
the time to make declarations a what you will and won’t
do.”
It was snowing again by nightfall, and it didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.
Oatha
could tell by the brightness of the tarp that the sun was out.
McClurg
snored.
Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said, “He left.”
“Who?”
“Who
ain’t
here?”
Oatha
saw where the wall of snow had been broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown and sagging.
“Where are the horses?”
Oatha
asked.
“Dan took one.
The
other’n
keeled.”
Oatha’s
head was hurting again—dehydration instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger.
He’d eaten the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.
“We botched it,” Nathan said.
“Should’ve walked out after the first storm.
Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve froze, but we’d of had a chance.”
“You don’t think we got one now?”
They butchered the calico that had just died, cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them over a low fire.
The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of what little fat there was burning off gave
Oatha
a charge of energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.
The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it and slept for the rest of the day.
“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later as they roasted the last of
McClurg’s
horse.
“God’s been
waitin
for this, and I know he’s
enjoyin
ever minute of it.
You just had the misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my ass.”
“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or Silverton,”
McClurg
said.
“I hope he’s froze.
Don’t mention his name again.”
“He might come back and save us.”
“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings toward the man.”
“So tell me,”
Oatha
said, “you boys weren’t going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”
Nathan glanced at
McClurg
, let slip a little smirk.
“Let me put it this way.
This horrible weather saved your life.”
“I don’t get your meaning.”
“Sure you do.
You was
gonna
try and take your leave of us your first chance.
If I’m wrong, you can have my portion a Barney the horse.”
“You was
gonna
kill me?”
“Dan would of done the honors, him
bein
our resident cutthroat.”
Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over the horse’s leg.
“Why?”
Oatha
asked.
“For whatever money you had.
For your horse.
Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-
eatin
pelados
, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take you apart.”
Oatha’s
heart pounded under his coat, his windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever been in his life.
“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.
“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a luck, we’re in it together now.”
Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife.
“Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”
Two days hence, their eleventh in the shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the task of cutting
cookable
portions out of the horses that had frozen straight through.
He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day wandering through snow deeper than he was tall,
McClurg
and
Oatha
waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their reentry into civilization.
Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.
Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”
“I’ll make one,”
Oatha
said.
“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”
The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but
Oatha
ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.
He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.
At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.
The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill.
Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.