Snowbound and Eclipse (28 page)

“Are we going to say a word over this man?” Godey asked.

“A word? I've asked you not—oh, you mean a prayer. We'll have a moment of silence,” I said, and doffed my fur hat and felt the icy fingers of the north wind filter through my ragged hair.

Later, I wondered how his widow would receive the news.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Tom Breckenridge

I hated Creutzfeldt. I despised Williams. I peered at them through snow-ruined eyes, the tears freezing on my lashes. I had partaken of the meat; I was helpless to stop myself. I swallowed it as soon as it was half-cooked over the windblown fire. King ham. Precious little of it, too. What good were two skinny thighs of a half-starved man? There were hardly ten pounds of flesh for the three of us. I have no recollection of the taste; it didn't matter. It could have been chicken or elk or beefsteak. It was poor food, and it went down with my stomach clawing at it, and my revulsion vomiting into my soul.

I could never again walk through the doors of my church. I could never receive the bread and wine of communion into my mouth.

I looked at Creutzfeldt and loathed him. He was the devil. He had tempted me. He had turned into something grotesque, some gargoyle or griffin guarding a dark building.
His cheeks had sunk, his eyes bulged, his matted hair flapped out from his grimy hat. Williams was quieter, and I loathed the man. It was he who had built up the fire, sliced meat from King's hambone, and set it sizzling in the miserable snow pit we occupied. I stared at myself, at fingers that had held the dreadful meat, the devil's fingers. And yet my belly stopped gnawing at me, at least for the moment.

By unspoken agreement, we set the rest aside. We could go two days on it, a pound of King a day for each of us. It would get us a few miles farther toward the northern settlements. Or Taos on the Rio Grande. I didn't care which. If we made it, we would walk into the village and they would know. The mark of Cain would be on our foreheads. We could not hide ourselves.

I looked into the sorry sky, knowing nothing had been hidden. Later, I imagined our conduct might be hidden; life would go on. But there are no secrets; every foul deed is made known, sooner or later. By agreement, the three of us dragged King into some brush, hoping wild animals would obscure our sin, then fled the abattoir and stumbled southward once again, carrying six or eight pounds of King. The snow wounded my eyes; I could see nothing through the frozen tears but followed mutely along. Williams led the way; we stumbled behind, Creutzfeldt and I. And so we passed a day, camped in some sheltering brush that night, hid under the cutbank against the wind, and ate another parcel of King. We had made only a few miles before we had all given out. And then we tackled the next day, crueler than the previous, and made a few more miles. Who knows how many? That eve, Old Bill settled us in a riverside woods, where shelter and firewood were plentiful. And there we demolished the last of King. Our friend had given us only a reprieve. We were still forty miles from the Chama River
villages. What had King's flesh bought us but a stone in the bosom for the rest of our days?

The next day, with wind lifting and whipping snow, we set off again, this time aware that no meal would await us at the end of the day. We resolved to hunt; I checked my load. I fantasized. I would find a few deer; I would steady myself, aim, and drop one, and we would be saved. There would be venison enough to see us through. But in my feverish imagination, I saw myself shooting an antlered King and slicing him up. Still, we had put King behind us; we were three days along the river road from that horror. If I could have run, I would have run and run, day and night, run away from that place. And we were seeing signs of game in the snow; hoofprints, tracks, marks of passage everywhere. Surely, surely, I would find a deer, and that would somehow wipe away our shame. We would eat clean, well-cooked venison, and be freed of the stain. I even pushed ahead, weary as I was, so that I might have first crack at any game we found. But the afternoon stretched away in silence, and the winter sun plummeted, and we made camp in a good place where we would be warm—and starving once again.

None of us could see much anymore, and that was why we scarcely knew what was coming upon us until men and horses plunged into our camp. I arose, startled, to see the hazy shapes of horses, some bearing men. Other men were walking. They collected silently around us, peering down.

“Breckenridge? Is that you?”

The voice was Colonel Frémont's.

“Yes, sir,” I croaked.

“And Williams? And who is this?”

He was pointing to Creutzfeldt, and indeed, the scarecrow in rags bore no resemblance to the man the colonel knew.

“I'm Creutzfeldt, sir.”

“I see now,” Frémont said.

He dismounted and peered about, and I suddenly was glad there was no meat in camp and no sign of any cooking.

“I have men with me; we thought you were lost. I'm the relief this time,” Frémont said.

I could not tell what men were with him, so terrible were my eyes. There was an Indian among them.

“Have you food?” Williams asked.

Frémont ignored him. “Twenty-two days ago you started out. What happened?”

“We had food only for four,” I said. “It took that just to get out of the mountains.”

“Rough country, like I say,” Williams added. “I been saying it.”

“Two or three miles a day?” Frémont asked.

This was accusation, and I didn't care for it. “No one could have done better,” I replied.

“Have you chow?” Williams persisted.

“Not up to your tastes?” That was Preuss talking. I still hadn't figured out who all was with Frémont.

“We got a little jerky from the Ute,” Godey said. I knew the voice.

I managed to focus long enough to see the whole party. Frémont had the German with him, Preuss, tough little devil. And his manservant, Saunders, and Godey's nephew, Theodore. And an ancient Ute.

“His horses, not ours,” Frémont said, to allay any instinct of mine to slice the throat of one of the miserable animals. What those starved beasts fed on, I could not imagine. “He's taking us to the settlements. We'll get help there.”

Now I could see that these scarecrow horses were the poorest I had ever seen. They carried packs, except that the
strongest carried Frémont. There were four. The rest of the company, along with the Ute, walked. Or maybe they exchanged rides.

Preuss studied our camp, poked around its periphery, as if looking for something, but we had nothing to show him. We had bedrolls, a few tools, and a rifle or two. I thought they would stay, but Frémont had other ideas.

“We're going to put in another hour,” he said. “I've got hungry men upriver waiting for relief. We can't dally.”

He let the word hang in the air. We had dallied. On the other hand, we had not met any Utes with horses and food to trade, either.

“We have no food,” I said.

“I can imagine,” Frémont replied. He studied us a moment. “Alex, how much jerky is there?”

Godey dug into a pack on the back of a scrawny horse. “Maybe thirty pounds,” he said.

“Give them a third,” Frémont ordered.

Godey parceled out a third of the jerky and handed it to Williams. Old Bill instantly handed a piece of jerky to Creutzfeldt and me, and I jammed it between my teeth.

“Follow along. I'll send relief out as soon as I can.”

“How do we get to the settlements?”

Frémont stared at Old Bill Williams and me. “Charts show some hills west of the river below here a mile or two. Leave the river there. Circle around the hills and bear southeast across open country. There won't be any running water, and not much wood.”

“Our feet have given out,” I said, wanting leather or blanket or anything I could get. We were walking on strips of blanket.

“We could use some canvas for our feet,” Williams said.

“So could we,” Frémont replied.

“You'll send the Mexicans?” I asked.

“I'll send relief as fast as possible. And I'll be outfitting for the California leg while you others come in.”

“California?”

“The next leg. We'll head south and then west to the Gila River and across. I'll be buying livestock and stores. I'm going to reorganize, recruit a company, head down the Rio Grande. The place where we head west is near Socorro. That will take us to the Gila drainage. It should be a warm and pleasant trip, that far south.”

“California?” I whispered.

“Don't lose heart,” Frémont replied. “You'll make it.”

With that, he reined his pony and the whole party drifted away, leaving us behind. I watched, hating Frémont and Godey. I hoped the Ute would steal away with his ponies in the middle of the night. I loathed the man. They could have taken us along. Abandoning us was probably a death sentence.

Preuss had looked through me, as if I were transparent. The others were cold. Godey, usually the most affable of men, had stared quietly. Surely we had been found out. But I was beyond caring. I stuffed another stick of jerky in my mouth and tried to make a meal of it, but there is nothing less satisfying. It is nothing but an emergency ration, and not a good one at that. Still, if we resisted the temptation to devour it all, right then and there, we might make it.

“Bill, maybe we should divide up that jerky,” I said.

He grinned wolfishly, but then he did arrange the sticks of meat into three piles and beckoned. I grabbed one, the others caught up theirs. It would suffice us or we would die. I ate mine in small crumbs, letting my saliva release the flavor. If I could not really eat, at least I could pretend to and let the juices linger in my mouth.

We stumbled back to our campfire and collapsed in the
small circle of heat it threw out. We ate more jerky than we intended, since none of us could slow down.

There was something gnawing at me: “He didn't ask,” I said.

“No, I reckon he didn't,” Old Bill said. “Like maybe he had that part of it all figured out.”

“They know,” I said.

“Anyone coming by, they'd sure enough know,” Williams said. “So what? It don't matter none. Happens all the time, and a man can be glad of it.”

The unasked question haunted me. They knew. It was in all their faces. It was in the ginger way they talked. It was in their politeness. It was in their silence when I asked for food.

I should have just accepted it, but instead I was enraged.

“They'd have done the same,” I snapped.

“Maybe more,” Williams said. “There's a lot more to King than a pair of hams.”

I stared into the twilight. Not far south the second relief party was cheerfully marching into the dusk, accusations in the minds of them all. Still, maybe none of them would say a word. If I knew Frémont, I knew he would bury it deep.

We started the next morning in a whip of snow. The restless wind would not leave it alone but drove it into drifts and carved hollows in it. Still, we made our way slowly along the route that angled away from the river. It would save us miles by cutting across the oxbow, but we would lack shelter.

In many ways, those legs of our trip were hardest of all. There was no wood for fires, no shelter from the wind, no comforts at night. We could only huddle in our thin blankets, one beneath the three of us, the other rags heaped over us, and endure until the next cruel sun would blind us but offer no heat. We sucked our jerky, gathered our strength, and marched out on another blinding day.

But our feet were failing us. They were frostbitten, bleeding, numb, and painful all at once. We left pink trails behind us. We took to crawling for a hundred yards at a time, just to relieve the pain that was lancing our every step. We exhausted ourselves on our hands and knees; that consumes more energy than walking, but our feet rebelled at every step we took, and we had no leather or cloth to ease our torment.

I raged because Frémont didn't take us with him. They could have carried us. They saw our feet, the ragged bits of blanket, and yet they paused only for an hour and then hurried on.

But we didn't die, and I credit the jerky for it. By the third day we had consumed the last of it and were more starved than ever, but we pushed on. The settlements were nigh, and the reality that we were close to help and comfort was the only food we possessed.

I gazed ahead, with snow-blind eyes, aching to see our rescuers coming toward us, bearing food and blankets, mules and warmth. But we saw nothing at all, nothing but the great, hollow snow-swept valley, and we stumbled on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Benjamin Kern, MD

It was only later that I grasped the horror of Frémont's intent. With men starving to death and frozen and weakened, his thought was of his equipment. We spent days ferrying the truck that had been scattered up that creek down to the cache, days spent consuming the last of our energy.

I was too numb to see it, and so were the rest. If the colonel wanted his equipment collected and cached, then it was
up to us to do it. I heard in that awful span of time no complaint at all. The colonel had a mesmerizing effect on all of us, and we would have followed his instruction unto death. I do not know where or how he acquired that grip over other mortals, but he had it and used it, his soft polite voice sealing our doom.

His choice of Vincenthaler is instructive to me now. The man was a dutiful sergeant, incapable of doing anything but following the colonel's command no matter what new circumstances arose. I think Frémont intuitively understood that; in Lorenzo Vincenthaler he had the man whose will was a slavish copy of the colonel's own. So without question or cavil, our new commander set us to the task, no matter that his own eyes told him we were all on the brink of collapse and our sole chance lay in leaving the mountains at once, reaching the bottoms of the Rio Grande, and finding game. But he did not abandon the mountains. He didn't send his best hunters ahead to scout for game. He didn't send the strongest of his men to prepare a warm camp that might sustain us for one more night. As the perfect surrogate of the colonel, he required us to drag the last of the colonel's stuff over the snow and stow it in the cache. Then we set out across the valley, in a gale out of the north that began murdering men before we were a mile or two out of the mountains.