Snowbound and Eclipse (25 page)

“We'll come soon. I'm some better,” Ben said.

“Put your packs in the cache at Point of Rocks. You won't miss any of it. Some of the men are camped there. McGehee's there. He's from your mess. You men look after each other.”

They nodded but said nothing.

The heat from the fire was welcome. It had warmed my backside. But now I faced my own walk five or six miles down. I was as weary as the rest, but somehow, maybe through sheer willpower, I kept on going. I was dragging two packs, the last we could find. I'd stash them with the rest.

The Kerns stared bleakly at me. They seemed better off than Cathcart, who was a walking scarecrow.

“We'll see you at the colonel's camp,” I said. “Help's coming.”

I stepped into the murderous wind and felt it burrow through my leather tunic and coat and leggins. But I plucked up the draw-lines and began tugging two parfleches of mess ware behind me, feeling the packs skid, resist, bounce, and sometimes slide ahead of me when I hit a steep grade. I kept my own advice, and when I got too cold, I holed up. There were plenty of refuges from the wind: copses of pinetrees, jagged cliffs, river brush, wind-carved hollows. I set aside my hunger, knowing it would do me no good to cater to it.

I stopped at the cache, where half a dozen men lingered, and stowed the last packs in the cave. These had been concealed with brush as best as my Creoles could manage it. It wouldn't fool an Indian, but we would be back soon enough to recover the goods. The Utes didn't roam far from their lodges in this sort of weather.

Somehow the colonel had gotten us off the mountain. Retreats are chaotic. Retreats are when commands fall apart, and it's every man for himself. But the colonel had held us together, sent for help, gotten most of his goods off the mountain, and so far, except for Raphael, he had kept his men alive. There was something admirable in it.

When I reached the colonel's camp, far below, I reported to Frémont.

“Raphael Proue's dead,” I said.

Frémont stared, registering that. “How?” he asked.

“Froze. Lay down and died, dragging a pack.”

“What do the men think?”

“He was the oldest of us.”

Relief filtered into Frémont's face. “I hoped no one would perish. It reflects badly.”

“Sir, it's no one's fault. I'll try to contact his people. I don't know that he had any.”

“Yes, do that,” he said, absently.

“There's men scattered far upstream; the Kerns are highest up. I've told them to work their way down here as soon as they can.”

“Philadelphia people,” Frémont said.

I knew what he meant. Yet they were all stouthearted. I thought they would make it.

“Ned is the worst off,” I said.

“That's strange,” the colonel replied. “He was with us before.”

“Ben and Richard seem stronger,” I said.

The colonel seemed puzzled. Ben and Richard were the city fellows.

The colonel seemed taut, and as soon as I had reported, he drifted to a place where he had a long view down the Rio del Norte Valley. An observer could see for miles across that barren landscape, where no tree grew and no rise or valley hid a party for long. The vista was so white we soon were squinting and leaking tears.

I joined him. “They're past due. We calculated sixteen days at the absolute worst.”

The wind was cutting straight through me in that unprotected valley, and I was more than ready to retreat to the nearest fire.

“They're overdue. Williams misled them again,” he said.

“Colonel, it took them four days just to get down that drainage. And they still had eighty miles after that, and they would be hunting, too. I think they're running far behind what we had calculated up on the mountain.”

“I never should have trusted him. Kit once told me to watch your back when Williams was around.”

“We'll see the relief any day now.”

Frémont shook his head. “Something went wrong. They'd be here.”

“It takes time to collect mules or burros and blankets and food and men,” I said.

“They failed me.”

I changed the subject. “Do you have hunters out?”

“Certainly. There's plenty of tracks, but no game in sight. And everyone's so snow-blind that they can't see much.”

That was bad news, actually. “I was hoping to see some meat.”

“It's an improvement on shoe leather,” he replied. He squinted out on the valley once more, with watering, snow-blind eyes ruined by the merciless white everywhere.

“My men are failing me. They're giving up. They don't have stout hearts,” he said.

I hoped he would keep such sentiments to himself. They sounded a little like an accusation, but I believed Frémont was too grand a man to permit himself such thoughts.

“I'll warm up and hunt,” I said.

“I'm taking a party out at dawn, if relief doesn't come,” Frémont said. “I intend to go to Taos, and on to California, one way or another, with or without this company. Of course, you'll come with me, Alex.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Tom Breckenridge

Godey joined our relief party for a while when we started from the Christmas camp, but when it was plain that the main party could not descend the drainage we were following, he returned. The four of us, with King in command, and Old Bill Williams as our guide, fought our way down that narrow canyon, struggling every minute. It was choked with snow, for one thing, and we had little understanding where the creek flowed or where its banks were.

We wrestled our way over or under fallen timber and fought through thickets, and once in a while the way was pinched off and there was no goddamn help for it but to doff our nether garments and wade the snowy creek and then put ourselves together on the far bank, numb and wet. The warm weather quit us, too, and the bitter cold bit our flesh, numbed our limbs, and ruined our handgrip so we couldn't hold a thing in our fingers.

When nights fell, we carved a cave out of snow and lit deadwood, which failed to warm us, so we shivered in the thin blankets. Because we were carrying everything on our backs, we had but one blanket apiece. We had three Hawken rifles, a fowling piece, and a pound of powder, enough to shoot game if we should be so lucky. As for food, we had very little: some mule meat, a pack of macaroni, and some sugar. And even the sugar was lost to us when the pack tipped and the white powder vanished.

The distance down the slope to the valley was not great, perhaps eight miles, but we consumed four days fighting our way out, and in the process we ate the last of our food. We
consoled ourselves that shortly we would reach the Rio Grande, would find plentiful game along its banks, and would soon stave off the hunger that was even then wrenching at our bellies. Fighting our way down a narrow defile choked with logs and rock and snow and brush made us hungry enough to eat bears and elephants. I'd of welcomed skunk stew.

King was a steady man, a veteran of the California expedition, and had a level head on him. He was heading out there to make a home for himself and his bride and had strong reasons to push on and triumph. Old Bill Williams was a different son of a bitch and soon was grumbling.

“This here gulch, it's not right. I didn't say for him to go this way. I know these hills and this isn't a place to go down. He wouldn't listen. He paid his guide no heed,” Williams was saying.

“We'll get out of this gulch and be on our way to the settlements, old man,” King replied quietly, while the four of us were roasting our bare feet at the fire, sitting around it like spokes on a wheel. “It's downhill, and that counts.”

“What'll we eat, tell me that,” Williams said.

“You're the hunter,” King replied.

I heard so much whining from the old man I wished he would just plain shut his damn trap while we got some blood moving through our frozen feet. Whining doesn't do a lick of good when you're out in the wilds and there's not a thing you can do but keep on going. He was the guide; the veteran of these mountains; the man who could find his way, turn almost anything into food, keep us warm and healthy. He had been silent the whole trip, clear from Hardscrabble, keeping his own counsel, but now he was belaboring poor King at every opportunity.

Still, Williams was voicing the things that were tormenting us. Up at Christmas Camp, Frémont and Preuss and
Williams himself had calculated that the relief party would reach the settlements a hundred miles distant in four or five days, organize help, and be back up the mountains with food and animals in a dozen days, sixteen at the outside. But we were not yet free of the mountains, which were clawing us every foot of the way. There was something dark in it, the horror of it unspoken as we pulled our thin blankets over and under us and shivered the long night away. The truth of it was that the settlements seemed impossibly far.

Frémont had selected us for our strength. He had pulled me aside and said that he had a mission for me, that he was selecting only the strongest of his men, because the task ahead would test us to our utmost. I was the last bastard he approached, apparently, because he said that King, Creutzfeldt, and Old Bill had all accepted. He had come to realize that the company was in trouble and needed relief. That was the first mention of it to escape his lips, as far as I knew. I accepted at once. I wanted to get off that mountain; I was willing to walk barefoot through snow to get off those peaks.

“I'll go,” I had told him, which was stupid of me. And so the party prepared that afternoon, and the next dawn, even as day broke, we began our downward trek, with Godey keeping us company.

I wondered whether we would do better in the next drainage, but so forbidding and high were the walls of the valley, and so thick with snow, that it was a foolish fancy. To add to our troubles, occasionally avalanches tumbled down those slopes, some of them beginning with a crack like a rifle shot and roaring their sinister way, raising a great cloud of powdery snow that choked the valley and stung our faces. It was a horror we spoke nothing of, knowing that any moment one of those snowslides could engulf us and end our worldly lives. And yet we escaped these random menaces
and finally reached a point where the miserable creek poured into another branch, and the San Juan Valley stretched ahead, a silent white and naked land that looked like a graveyard.

I had yearned to escape the mountains, thinking that things would improve the moment we reached the great plain. But now, as we absorbed the naked valley ahead, each of us knew the mountains had been our friend; that the bleak plain offered no comfort at all. I stared at my colleagues, wondering if the other poor bastards were thinking what I was thinking. That stretch to the river would be tenfold harder than our descent.

That was the last sheltered camp. We found wood enough to warm us that one last night, and we divided the last of our provisions, the tallow candles that Frémont had given us. Never did anything taste so good as that tallow. We each had a half a candle, the white tallow like a king's feast, and then we dug deep into the snowbank, to put ourselves out of the wind if we could, and huddled miserably.

Worse was to come. No sooner had we emerged from the shelter of the mountains than a bitter north wind engulfed us. If it was cold in the canyon, it was murderous here where not a tree, not a shrub, not a cliff stayed the winds. The winds caught us unprepared. Somehow we had expected the valley to be our sanctuary, with shelter and wood and game and quiet air and sunshine warming our frozen beards. Instead it was a blinding white hell that made our eyes hurt from squinting. Had a band of elk marched slowly before us, none of us would have seen them at all, much less shot any for the solace of our ravenous bellies.

How we continued I don't know. I shot a hawk, which we tore to pieces and devoured raw, but it did nothing to allay our misery. We struggled slowly ahead. Far in the distance
a thin band of trees marked the river. But the distance from where we saw it to there seemed impossible to negotiate on our frozen feet. We were stumbling now and could walk only a few yards at a time. No man complained, not even our guide.

It had become impossible to walk. Our frozen feet chafed in our boots, and each step tormented us. We would crawl, just to get off our feet, and when we could crawl through the snow no more, we would clamber to our feet and plunge forward another few yards. We were still following the tributary, and after a mile or so that day we stopped where some cottonwoods grew along the bank and dug a shelter for ourselves and our miserable fire. If we stayed upwind of it we got no heat out of it; if we edged downwind we didn't get much more heat, but we got the bitter smoke of cottonwood in our faces.

And for food we did what we had to do. We removed our tormenting boots, cut strips off of our blankets with which to wrap our swollen feet, and tied these makeshift moccasins tight. Then we sliced leather from our boots and set it to boiling. We stared at those slivers of leather, watched the boiling water percolate through them, extracting a thin yellowish paste and softening the leather itself. It took a long time and a lot of dead cottonwood before we had reduced the boot leather enough to eat it. We devoured it swiftly, and it did nothing at all to alleviate the howl of my innards. But we pronounced it tasty. We tied the boots together by their laces and would carry them with us, for that was the only food we had. That night, the temperature plummeted, and there was no way that our thin and diminished blankets could spare us from the brutal cold. Not even the fire was a solace.

I did not know where my feet were or whether they were connected to my body. They were severed from my senses
by cold, and only when the fire had warmed them did they start to hurt and prickle. I sat there, shivering, and wondering whether I would live to see any more dawns.

The next day was much the same. We stumbled ahead, ate more of our boots, fought snow blindness, cut more strips off our blankets to wrap around our feet, and in all we made only a mile or two. We had ceased talking: to speak was to waste energy. At one point Bill Williams sat down and wouldn't budge, but we urged him on, and so we reached another place where a little wood might be found, again dug into the snow to get out of the deadly wind, and again boiled up our boots. We had, in all, managed another mile or two; I could no longer reckon distances, and none of us could see a thing, having been so blinded by snow that all the world was a glinting blur.