Snow Mountain Passage (10 page)

He hears the laughter of his children, long-ago and distant laughter from the yard in Springfield. He begins to hear the voices of his pals back home on the starry nights when they would step out onto a porch with their cigars and regard the Milky Way that spans the heavens like a million-pointed bridge and take comfort in its vaulting arch, sure evidence of the Guiding Hand that holds this universe in place.

Jim in exile, without the comfort of their full bellies and their many cigar ends in the balmy summer night and the scent of brandy on the air—Jim begins to wonder if there
is
a Guiding Hand. Could he be gazing at a million singular points of light, each one a ball of fire, as he has heard it said, our sun being one of them? And we revolve around the sun. Could this mean that other planets turn and float somewhere beyond what a human eye can see? And if that’s so, how many? Might there be, somewhere, another like our own? A duplicate, perhaps? Another world with other empty places like this land of silent sand and rock and flags of undulating steam? Imagine yourself across the void, marooned upon the lonesome face of a far-off planet, a hundred million miles out into space, looking back upon this rolling speck, as small as the smallest pinpoint in the vault of stars …

It is a fearful thought. He lets it fade, glad for Walter slumbering nearby. At night a man needs company in such a place. “Walter,” he says, and hears a wheeze, and waits, and hears another.

“Walter. You awake?”

* * *

ONE MORE DRY
day and they reach the cooling channel of the Truckee River. Along its banks they see many footprints, some fresh, but they see no Indians. Maybe the Indians are going to stay out of sight and let them pass, these two bedraggled whites who have nothing but their blankets and one horse not worth taking.

Alders and cottonwoods tremble in the breeze above the water. Russet leaves and golden leaves make torches, a corridor of flame, which Jim and Walter follow until the river’s winding canyon opens into a broad bowl bounded by dry and treeless slopes. A line of willows continues on through marshy meadowlands to mark the river’s path across the bowl, the meadow spreading on the farther side, where the river leaves the Sierra Nevada Range.

These famous mountains are rising to the west, rising and rising, a light blue and hazy bulk against the sky, the higher peaks already capped with snow. Hastings described them. So did Fremont. But reading has not prepared him, nor has the look of the Wasatch Range prepared him. From the high plain his party followed out of Fort Bridger, the Wasatch made a subtler rise. These peaks, seen from the east, have a massive and eternal thickness that stirs the blood and makes the arm hairs prickle.

When the sun drops behind the farthest rippled ridge, a lemony glow sifts upward to fill the sky. The lemon slowly turns to tangerine. The snowy caps seem lit by fire. Now the crevices and creases are lost in shade. The canyon of the Truckee appears to be a low spot, a dip underneath the canopy of smoldering orange. The burnished sky softens, and the mountain contour almost looks benign, as if a way through this final barrier has been preordained, and all one has to do is follow it.

The next morning they set out from Truckee Meadows, passing through groves of tule higher than their hats. The river flows east, out into the desert, while they move west along its rocky channel, below thickening stands of yellow pine and fir. The second day in, they reach a lake with the same name as the river, named for the Paiute chief who guided an early wagon party along this route. It is a sparkling jewel of an alpine lake, profoundly blue, cobalt blue, between evergreen slopes of pine and fir and cedar.

Game is ever scarcer the higher they have climbed. Now they’re out of food. For two days they’ve had nothing but berries and a few wild onions. Walter wants to stop and set up camp and hunt a while, but Jim won’t do it. Beyond the lake a knobby barricade of stone swells for what looks to be a thousand feet or more. He knows they have to scale it. From here there is no other way. Meanwhile, the wind is colder. Clouds are gathering higher up. They’re not prepared for heavy weather. He wants to make the summit before they lose their strength.

The looping switchback trail is broken by spills of scree and slick, treacherous granite chunks. Laboring upward, he imagines what it will be like bringing wagons over such a pass, with a track so narrow, toward the top, that a horse can barely pick its way. What do you do with a team of oxen? You lead them up one at a time, so he’s heard, and reyoke them at the top, and down below you unload each wagon and carry your belongings on your back, however many trips it takes. As for the wagons, you take them apart. Axles, wheels, and wagon beds are fastened to ropes and chains. By block and tackle or by brute power of the teams, you haul them up the final yards of precipice.

From the top, looking back and down toward the blue oval of the lake, he imagines hauling up his double-decker Palace Car, the number of teams this will take, the number of hands, and wonders if the oxen have enough muscle left. Maybe he will be able to ride back this far with provisions and tell them to leave all the wagons down below and come ahead with whatever they can carry. Or maybe not. He’ll see what lies ahead.

They are almost at the tree line here. Humps and parapets of granite soar above the trees. Wind like ice water spills toward them across the gray-white rock. They camp in a valley beyond the summit, spotted with patches of recent snow. The stream is low, waiting for another full winter to fill the many channels that flow both ways out of the high country. Up here all game has vanished. It is another night without dinner. Walter wants to shoot the horse.

“She’s a lot worse off than we are, Mr. Reed. You’d be doing her a favor. Her and us too.”

“We’re not that far gone, not yet.”

“Ain’t doing us a lick a good.”

“It can’t be that long till we get where we’re going.”

Walter leaps to his feet and calls out toward the treetops. “Goddam it! We ain’t gettin’ nowhere if we don’t find something to eat!”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Then gimme that rifle.”

“We’re not shooting the horse!”

Walter looks at the rifle, propped against a tree trunk. Before Reed can stop him he has grabbed it.

“Don’t do this, Walter!”

“Cut ‘er up. Jerk the meat.”

Reed’s hand is on his Bowie knife. “Drop the rifle.”

Walter’s eyes are large. He swings the barrel from the horse to Jim to the horse, and Jim is moving toward him.

“Right now!” he says.

He sees John Snyder’s whip handle cutting through the chalk-dusty hides of the oxen, and that same anger rises. Why must animals be punished for our thoughtless misdeeds? Jim sees his racing mare, fallen over in the Salt Desert, dehydrated, too weak to lift her head. He had to shoot her there. It still haunts and burdens him. He would sooner take Walter’s life….

“We could keep going for days,” Walter says.

“You shoot that horse, you better shoot me too.”

In Walter’s hand the barrel is a crazy compass needle looking for direction, pointing everywhere, finally swinging straight up beside his head. With a cry of anguish he fires into the overhanging branches. The blast startles them both, reverberating through the summit valley like thunder.

He looks at Jim and throws the rifle down and squats by the fire and spits onto a glowing ember and spits again and listens to it sizzle.

TWO DAYS LATER
they are both delirious, wandering off the meager trail, finding it again, and losing it. They lead the horse, too thin and weary to bear a rider. Descending now, they come upon a wagon left to rot after a wheel tore loose. Where it veered into a trailside gully, it hangs at a tilt, like a schooner tacking in a gale.

They ransack the wreckage for any scraps or leavings, ripping boards loose, digging in the dirt. On hands and knees Jim the scavenger finds a tar bucket beneath the broken axle. He scrapes through black skin to uncover a layer of rancid fat, from the days when it had served as a tallow bucket.

He digs out a gob and sniffs it and draws back. But Walter does not hesitate. With greedy eyes and a triumphant shout he scoops it off the paddle and pops it into his mouth.

Hunkered next to the wagon, Jim watches to see what effect this will have. He digs out another gob and sniffs and again can’t bear the smell, despite his gnawing hunger. Walter snatches it from the paddle, gives it half a chew and swallows it, and this too he manages to keep down.

They are both studying the bottom of the bucket. Jim digs out one more mouthful. If he doesn’t swallow it, Walter will. He looks at Walter, who is watching the gob like a mountain lion ready to pounce. Jim takes it into his mouth, feels the tallow slide along his throat and instantly regrets the move. His shrunken stomach begins to convulse. It is like poison. It weakens his knees, makes him blind. His head is ready to explode. The world spins around him, and he falls to his knees, doubled with cramps. Cold sweat coats his body. His face goes white.

Walter is frantic, standing over him. “Don’t die now, Mr. Reed! Please! Please! You can’t die now!”

After ten minutes of agony he vomits out a vile and stringy yellow soup that looks like melting wax. Gradually the convulsive waves let go. He can see again. Half an hour later he can stand weakly, leaning on the horse. Quelling his nausea, he moves one foot, the other, staggers, finally walks. Before long they have reached another precipice, looking down into another valley where wagons are scattered about. But these are not abandoned wagons. They see animals grazing, horses, mules, a few cattle standing in a well-watered pasture, with a stream nearby, a long green meadow bordered with rising stands of pine and fir.

Jim cries out “Hallelujah!” his voice cracked and feeble but full of joy, as they lunge down the incline, the starving horse too weak to ride, the beleaguered pilgrims tumbling and falling toward the wagons.

O
NCE AGAIN HE
is at the summit looking down a rocky wall that drops and drops. Below, beyond, he sees the lake, from here a blue medallion in a bowl made of steeply sloping timber, but not a pleasing blue, not the blue you yearn to plunge into and swim away your cares. It is a heartless blue, the dark pit his wagon will fall into if the chains don’t hold.

He hears the oxen grunt, straining at their yokes. How many, he cannot tell. Four. Eight. Twelve. More? Every animal they have. He hears the lash snap in mountain air so still and crisp each flicking whiplash seems to shatter it. He turns to see whose whip can crack open the air itself and knows before he turns that it is John Snyder standing on a rock above the heaving animals, lashing and snapping and cursing. It is Johnny in his trail hat, with his sleeves rolled back.

Jim calls, “Back off now! Let them be!”

But the teamster doesn’t hear. Jim sees that chain links are spreading open. The load is too heavy. What’s inside the wagon? Who’s inside? Did Margaret unload all the children? Right beside his boot he can see the link stretch across a stony ledge, as the metal spreads and separates.

“Back off, Johnny! She’s gonna tear loose!”

Again the whip falls on the backs of bleeding oxen. A link snaps. A chain breaks, then another, flying out above the void while the wagon is released to tumble down the cliff face. He watches it bounce from crag to crag, as boards fly loose and wheels spin away like pinwheels at a festival, and flour spills over the side. The wagon turns and tumbles, but it does not hit the blue-medallion lake, which grows smaller as the wagon plunges. A waterfall of flour spills from splitting sacks to coat the rocks with white dust.

A voice calls, “Mr. Reed.”

Again he turns, expecting to see Johnny. But the teamster is gone. The oxen are gone. The wagon is gone. There is no lake below. He stands alone at the summit while the voice calls from farther away. It is not Snyder’s voice.

“Mr. Reed!”

Nor is it Walter’s.

“Mr. Reed! Wake up!”

His tongue is thick and dry as sand. His stomach is queasy. He holds still, waiting until the voice comes again, closer this time, very close. Is it right above him?

“Wake up. It’s Charlie.”

Behind his closed eyes Jim lets the summit dissolve. His head aches, feels larger, as if expanding, as if pushing outward from within. He feels his bones against the earth, his bedroll. On the whole long trail behind him and ahead of him, there is only one Charlie he can think of, pint-size Charlie Stanton. Jim remembers watching him ride away, so silly-looking perched atop his mule, so out of place, like a banker who’d been lifted off the streets of Chicago and carried a thousand miles west and dropped down in the middle of the desert. He remembers wondering if he would ever see this fellow again.

Jim opens his eyes to make sure it’s him, then sits up with a hand outstretched. “You are a mighty welcome sight.”

Charlie grabs his hand in both of his, seeming on the verge of tears. “Fella told me someone had come through on foot. I wondered if it could be from our party. But I swear, Mr. Reed, I saw you laying here and I hardly recognized you at all.”

Charlie can’t conceal his alarm. In the other man’s face Jim sees how he must look to others now. He touches a hand to his gaunt and thinning features, his matted beard. The hair his daughters cut away has grown a bit but not enough to cover the unhealed welts, raw and crimson. Charlie is gazing at the welts.

“We had a few hard days,” Jim says, nodding toward a nearby heap of blankets and oilskins. “Walter and me, we came ahead.”

Charlie’s eyes are full of questions he doesn’t ask.

“… to get more help,” Jim says.

“How long since you’ve eaten?”

“We ate last night. Some folks here cooked up some meat. We’re all right now. I think I’m all right. Walter might still be sick. He ate till he threw up …”

The words come slow. His throat feels closed and ragged. Charlie hunkers next to him, opens a shoulder pack, and pulls out what was going to be his lunch, a couple of biscuits, a strip of jerky. “Here,” he says with a grin. “‘Bout time for breakfast.”