Snowbound and Eclipse (20 page)

He followed along in my path, daintily avoiding what labor he could, but that was the inferior nature of the man. The last portion was a steep ascent over unknown obstacles underfoot that tripped us, but in time we arrived, blowing, atop the knob, which afforded us a breathtaking view west and north and south. It was at once brilliant and forbidding. The heavens were a bold blue, and before us lay hundreds of square miles of whitened country. In the immediate foreground was a rolling plateau, but beyond was a great range of whited peaks. Overall, the snow lay so thick that it obscured all else, so one could not tell whether forest or plain or rockslide or brush lay underneath.

It was too bright; my eyes leaked tears, which froze in my beard.

“Ah, Mister Williams,” said I, “this gives us a view.”

He blinked, said nothing. The glare didn't seem to affect his vision at all, and I wondered whether his eyes had dimmed with age.

“Now, sir, we can peer into the future. Where are we going?”

“I don't rightly know from this distance, but I know close at hand, as we pass by,” he said.

It was not a response that gave me comfort.

“Now, where is Cochetopa Pass?”

“Oh, yonder there.” He waved an arm vaguely north, toward a formidable white range.

“Is that where we're heading?”

“I got my own way.”

“Well, then, kindly point it out to me.”

He eyed the distant ridges to the west, which probably were the actual divide, and finally shrugged. “I'll know her when we get there,” he muttered.

“This was the route you recommended because of its ease and good fodder?”

He smiled cheerfully. “Trust me or not,” he said. “It's better than the other.”

“What choice have I?”

He laughed, a low muttering that finally broke into an odd giggle. And yet I saw no alternative. He would lead us through, or not. Ahead of us were two or three or four days of passage over a rolling plateau, but it was snow-blanketed open country that afforded little shelter and no fodder unless we could turn the mules into a watercourse somewhere ahead.

We descended in a small avalanche, which in fact bruised
my shin, and I proceeded into camp, where my old stalwarts were waiting, having watched our ascent.

“Old Bill assures me that the pass is just ahead,” I said. “We have some snowy country to cross, mostly level, and then it's up and over. By Christmas, we'll be down in warm and grassy country, celebrating our deliverance.”

“We lost eight mules last night,” Godey said.

“And we'll lose more, I'm sure,” I replied. “The hardy stock will pull through. The inferior ones will surrender.”

I did not see skepticism in their faces, which was good. I've learned over the years that candor is the most excellent means to keep spirits high, and that is what was required at this crucial moment.

“Let's be off,” I said.

The men cheerfully finished loading the mules. They had rebalanced the loads, making sure that as our stores diminished the burdens were lighter. Godey took the lead, having fashioned a club of deadwood that would hammer a trail for the mules, and so we proceeded down the canyon where we had harbored ourselves from the icy gale of yesterday. At the van, half a dozen good men hammered the drifts into submission. It swiftly became plain that this day we would work through snows that could well be twenty or thirty feet deep. The V-shaped trench in the soft snow soon blotted out all horizons, save for a narrow strip of blue above. We fell into a world in which the surface of the snow was above our heads, even those of us who were riding the mules.

My men rotated the trail breaking frequently, gangs of four or five slowly making progress through the morning. Scarcely did we see more than the slit of heaven, and at no time did any of us observe the vast, chilling panorama of the San Juan range. I thought it was just as well that no man caught a glimpse of the larger world. This was a mild day,
with open skies, and no wind pierced into our trench to chill us. I thought in a way it was rather jolly, though some of my men were fearful of those looming walls of soft snow on either side of us.

A mule gave out, and it turned out to be Ben Kern's. He had urged it forward, only to feel the beast shiver and slowly capsize. Nothing he did could arouse it, and finally he abandoned it. He is an overly tender man but took it stoically. The remaining beasts had to step over the dead one, which they did unhappily, with ears flattened back. But in time we left our troubles behind and completed our descent, heading out on rolling plateau country, with great rounded shoulders of land driving us south and north as we kept as low as we could. The winds had swept some areas fairly clear, and sometimes we could peer over the lip of our trench upon a blank white world, a landscape without landmarks, perfectly submerged by the snows.

We made three and a half miles across that tumultuous tableland, but the plummeting sun compelled us to halt and make a dry camp on a slope. We had scrounged some deadwood and made use of it, for there was none at hand. There would be wood enough to boil some macaroni, but not enough to sustain a fire all night. It would be an unpleasant night for man and beast. I knew the sturdiest would never complain, and I heard not one word of distress. But the silent complaint rising from the mess of the greenhorns was palpable, and I could well imagine what the Kerns were scribbling in their diaries. No matter. I have learned to shrug off the mosquito droning of small men. I would set things straight in my own journals when the time came. My stalwarts soon had their rubberized sheets spread, affording them a dry place to unroll their beds, and I heard no more of trouble. I knew the night would claim more of the inferior
mules, and I knew there was no help for it. Let them perish. We did not need them.

I sent Saunders to fetch Godey to me. My deputy commander appeared at once.

“Some stew?” I asked, motioning toward the kettle. Saunders had boiled some jerky and cornmeal from my private stock.

Godey shook his head.

“A few quiet words, eh?”

Godey squatted beside me, mountain style.

“How are the men, Godey?”

“Doing well, sir. I don't hear any complaints.”

“What do they think of me?”

“Not a complaint, Colonel.”

“Do they know who got them into this difficulty?”

Godey paused. “Old Bill eats by himself, sir. That says all that you wish to know.”

“Ah, then they do know where the fault lies. Now, what about the Kerns' mess? That's where trouble will come.”

“Quite valiant, Colonel. Doctor Kern was severely frostbitten last night, but he carries on without complaint.”

“Yes, but what do they really think?”

Godey eyed me and finally shook his head. I didn't know how to interpret that but let it pass.

“Soft men are a burden to me, Alex.”

“I think Doctor Kern would like to save the mules. He headed for the creek and pushed snow aside until he opened up some brush, and pushed a mule into it.”

“They're poor stock. We're better off eating them.”

“We've lost twenty some and haven't butchered one, sir.”

“Choose the weakest,” I replied.

I dismissed Godey and watched him hurry into the darkness. He was my most reliable man.

A cruel north wind arose in the night, probing once again into men's bedrolls, ruining hope as well as comfort. My men were already badly frostbitten, with patches of white flesh on their hands and feet, their ears and noses and chins. They had endured these things stoically, as I did, but this night of December 16 seemed to herald a shift in the weather. We awoke to a sullen sky, as dark as the underside of a skillet, with polar air gliding relentlessly past us. Godey lumbered out into the snowfields and came back with the count. Another eight down, but several more so stupid with cold he doubted they could survive another hour.

“Butcher one,” I said. It was easy enough to butcher a live and warm animal, and I thought to take advantage of it. He nodded and summoned Sorel, who selected an animal that was barely standing and slit its throat with one sweep of his Green River knife, and we watched the beast sag into the snow with a final spasm as blood gouted from its throat. The butchering was left to the Creoles, who seemed to have a knack for it, and soon they were peeling back hide and slicing skinny loins and rib roasts from the half-starved beast. I wondered whether there would be meat enough to feed thirty-three men one meal.

The rest watched silently. It was so cold that the Creoles had to work swiftly, and soon their hands were covered with frozen red slush. Not even stuffing them under their coats or into their armpits helped much, but in time they did crudely butcher perhaps a hundred pounds of stringy meat and load the freezing red meat into panniers. The head of the mule, now severed from its body, was half buried in snow, its sightless eyes staring at nothing and its sliced-off tongue an open wound between its jaws. It would go hungry no more, and I had done it a favor.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Henry King

I was settling a blanket and a sawbuck on a mule when I spotted Colonel Frémont and Old Bill struggle up to that knob. I thought I knew what that was all about. I grinned and nudged Godey, who was overseeing the loading.

He winked. Pretty soon the rest of the colonel's men were observing the two climbers who were stumbling up that snowy grade. Old Bill could hardly keep up with the colonel. I nodded slightly to Breckenridge, who in turn nudged Scott, Bacon, and Beadle, and that caught the attention of Ferguson, Hubbard, and Carver. Pretty quickly, most of the colonel's veterans were staring up that slope, plainly entertained by the sight.

“Colonel's heading up there to get the Ten Commandments,” Ferguson said.

“No he isn't. He's going up there to give God ten or twelve commandments,” Hubbard said.

“Saddle those mules,” Godey said, but no one paid the slightest heed.

Frémont and Old Bill Williams reached the crown of that knob and began an animated conversation or maybe a dispute, with plenty of arm waving.

“I guess I know what's being said,” I announced.

“Maybe you don't,” Tom Martin retorted.

“That old coward Williams, he's calling it quits, and he's telling the colonel to turn around and head back the way we came,” I said.

“Could be, but I'd suppose they're just looking at the way west. All this snow, it gets hard to see what's what.”

“I've been watching that Williams,” I said, reaching for the girth that Martin was handing me under the mule's belly. “You know what he is? A loafer. He hasn't done a lick of work, but that's not what's galling me. He don't know the way, and he's pretending he does, and now the colonel's seen right through him and giving him what for.”

“I think he wants the colonel to turn around,” Joseph Stepperfeldt said from behind the next mule over. “He's half-crazy. He told me once he can see animal spirits. Maybe the mule spirits are telling him to turn around.” He laughed. It was a good joke.

I tightened the girth and buckled it. Martin began lifting panniers onto the trembling mule, who stood with locked legs, head low. They were all like that. They had gone three days without a meal, apart from a few twigs.

The wind was howling again, and cirrus clouds ribbed the sky. It would be snowing soon. It entertained me. I'm always wondering how bad it can get.

“I'd bet my last dollar we'll move ahead,” I said.

“Of course,” Martin said. “The colonel's commanding. There's not one soul over him now that he's out of the army. There is no one to say nay.”

I hadn't thought of it that way, but I saw the truth in it. I'd always seen the colonel as a man who let nothing stop him. Our gentlemanly commander would take orders from no one, not even God. And he would succeed in his design, even if he left the entire company behind him. I have the same nature. We were going to go over these mountains no matter what the cost, and that was already decided. We were going to do what no others could do. The Conqueror of California would conquer the San Juan Mountains.

“He's got him a wife waiting out in California,” Martin said. “If I had me a wife, maybe I'd be in a hurry, too.”

I smiled. “Mine's back East, but you don't see me hightailing it out of here.”

“It ain't a wife that's itching old Frémont,” said Breckenridge. “He's got some other kind of itch.”

No one had a reply to that.

Iron-bellied clouds were scudding in, and we faced another mean day. Breckenridge noticed the clouds, too. “Don't know where we'll be spending Christmas,” he said.

“We'll have a feast. Mule-meat pudding, with mule soup,” I replied.

He eyed the trembling mules, who stood lock legged with the packs on their backs. “It'd do them a favor,” Breckenridge said. “What's the new missus going to do this Christmas, Henry?”

“Pine for me,” I replied.

“Like you're pining for her, eh?” Breckenridge retorted.

I laughed. A gust of air wormed through my buckskin coat. I was already frostbit in half a dozen places, two fingers, my earlobes, and there was plenty of dead flesh around my ankles too. “She's not frostbit,” I said. “She's with her parents, I imagine.”

A burdened mule shivered and slowly buckled, slowly collapsing, resisting its own weakness to the last, but it went down in the snow, half-buried even as it shuddered and died.

“I suppose we ought to butcher him,” I said. “I'll ask Godey.”

I found the headman loading a trembling mule.

“We just lost one. You think we should butcher before he freezes up?”

“Leave him. We'll butcher another tonight,” Godey said.

So Breckenridge and I tugged the packs off the dead one. It was hard work, and I kept feeling I wasn't up to my usual. Sometimes I felt plumb faint. Half the men felt the way
I did. Maybe it was altitude, or bad food. We hadn't seen a green in weeks. But some of the company didn't seem affected at all. Preuss, the wiry German, seemed the way he always was, furiously measuring everything, getting the height of every peak in sight, making pencil sketches and notes, and ignoring every hardship. But others, like that Scot, Cathcart, seemed to shrink down every day, and now he was parchment over bones and had great hollow sockets around his eyes. You never knew about those foreigners, whether they could take it.