T
he day turned hot. Not much air was moving. The sun pummeled them. Black horseflies circled like dreadnoughts waiting to bite. The blue was bleached out of the sky. The mountains to the west slid into white haze.
It was the time of year Skye liked least of all. The land was parched. The spring monsoons had ended in June, and now the grasses had been toasted to a tan color, and the stalks of dried-out weeds skipped over the ground with every gust of furnace air. The heat sapped the horses and slowed the caravan as it struggled north. The Musselshell River water wasn't cold enough to refresh man or beast, but it helped to pour it over one's head. Skye soaked his hair in it and clamped his black top hat over the soggy hair and got some relief out of it.
The teamsters took the wagon along the higher ground west of the river, where there were fewer impediments such as fallen logs to stay their progress. Away from the stream the way was easier. Skye roamed ahead, wary of trouble, while his women trailed their ponies along their own route, different
from the wagon's. Mercer had fallen into deep silence, wearing his frustration like a hair shirt. This would not be a good trip, and his plain objective was to get it over with as soon as he could manage it.
Burying the bodies had turned the day sour, but the unbearable heat worsened the mood of them all. Skye yearned for some mountain valleys with icy creeks tumbling through them. But as far as he could see there was only haze and white skies and air so hot it sapped his will.
It also made him edgy. He couldn't say what it was, but the whole world seemed poised at the edge of disaster.
Mercer rode up to Skye.
“It's bloody awful. It drains me. How long do these hot spells last?”
Skye shrugged. “Long time, sometimes.”
“You mean we're stuck with it.”
“I don't know of any way to escape it unless you want to head due west into those mountains and find a cool valley. But that's fifty miles at the least.”
Mercer shook his head. “Take me to the Missouri. At this point I don't care about seeing some bones. I don't care about anything except floating my way out of here.”
“As you wish, Mister Mercer.”
The adventurer turned his sweat-stained horse away and retreated to his wagon and the patient teamsters.
Skye spotted an antelope racing north, and then a pack of them, maybe a dozen. Something had stirred them up. Some crows flapped due north.
There was something on the breeze that troubled Skye, some portent of trouble he could not pin down. As always, when his instincts were jabbing him, he paused to consider what danger there might be. He sucked the hot air into his
lungs and then got it: fire. Smoke. The first tendrils of smoke hastened along by a quickening south wind.
Now he saw mule deer racing north, and some coyotes loping steadily north, and a nervous bull elk on a crown of a hill. At a high point he turned in his saddle to take a sharp look at his back trail, and saw what he dreaded most. Maybe ten or fifteen miles to the south, a gray wall of billowing smoke crossed the whole horizon, and he could see no break or end to it east or west. It was a prairie fire, a grandfather of all prairie fires, loping along.
Just about then Victoria and Mary figured it out, and Victoria spurred her pony to reach Skye. She pointed. Skye nodded. He needed to find a safe harbor. He needed a wide river or a massive cliff. He needed some place to shelter the livestock and protect the wagon. And he saw none at all. Whatever decision he made now would determine their fate. If he chose wisely, they might have a chance. If not, they would die the most miserable of deaths, not necessarily of flame and furnace heat, but of asphyxiation. A prairie fire sucked oxygen out of the air; there would be nothing left to breathe.
Now Mercer spotted the ominous dark wall behind them and so did the teamsters. The sinister wall, sometimes yellow-gray, sometimes almost purple, was rolling along and would overtake them soon. Who could say when?
“Where, Skye?” Mercer yelled.
“I don't know.”
“Tell me, man. Are we dead?”
Skye shook his head. His gaze raked the rolling plain, the river bottoms, the horizons. Jawbone shifted under him, his terror evident in his every twitch. It was all Skye could do to rein him tight.
“Head for the river. Don't head for an island. An island in
a narrow river's worthless. Head for a pool deep enough for your horses. Deep enough for your wagon. Make it a pool in a grassy area. Not a pool where the river runs through woods or brush. Then unhitch your draft horses. Go!”
Mercer didn't argue. The teamsters had already made their own decisions, and were veering downslope toward the river, toward a broad island in the braided stream.
Skye heard Mercer yelling at them.
Jawbone trembled.
“River's all we've got,” he said to Victoria. She would do the best she could with whatever she had.
But the next mile of stream bottom was packed with dense cottonwoods and willows and chokecherry brush, all of which would turn into a furnace that would snuff life out of anyone or anything trying to shelter in the river itself. A ten-yard-wide shallow stream would hardly shelter a mouse. If they could get to the river downstream, where the bankside forest thinned and gave way to brush, that would help. If they managed another mile, where the river flowed through a grassy flat, that would be best, especially if they hit a hole where they could stay submerged.
He pointed, the best he could manage, and the whole caravan careened toward the north. Now small animals raced by them; frenzied hares, raccoons, otter, skunks, all of them oblivious of the men and livestock. Rattlesnakes coiled and slithered, thousands of them, racing north.
Victoria's ponies began running, their travois careening and bobbing and threatening to pitch out everything in Skye's household. Victoria and Mary fought the animals, barely keeping them from bolting. But one of the travois snapped loose, dumping parfleches of pemmican and kitchen supplies.
Behind, the gray smoke to the south had climbed the sky, rising into a giant wall that would soon obscure the sun. The teamsters had the worst of it, working their way down the bluffs to the floor of the valley, doing their utmost to keep Mercer's heavy wagon from toppling over. Behind them, the smoke advanced like the shadow of night, streamers of gray extending far in front, and reaching directly overhead.
Skye felt parched. Jawbone's sweated flanks had dried, leaving a white rime on them. The horse wanted to run. But prairie fires often moved so fast they overtook everything in their paths. And this one, riding the hot wind out of the southwest, was wasting no time. Gusts of hot smoky air coiled through the river bottoms. A breeze rattled the parched cottonwood leaves. Skye steered toward the teamsters, who had gotten the wagon down from the high plains and were heading toward water.
“Get beyond the woods,” he yelled. “Look for a hole. Cut the horses free if you have to.”
“Can't. Got to save the wagon at all costs. Orders. Mercer's journals,” Winding yelled.
Mercer's journals. They could kill the teamsters, kill the horses, and perish anyway when the wagon burned. But there was no time to argue.
Still, these were savvy, trail-hardened men and Skye liked what he saw. They were keeping the draft horses at a steady trot, steering them away from boulders, fallen trees, ditches and ridges, somehow in control of twelve-hundred-pound draft horses.
Now live sparks began dropping, each an angry hornet capable of starting fires in advance of the main blaze. Skye watched Victoria and Mary race the ponies forward. Another
travois had fallen apart, this one carrying the lodgepoles. And the lodge cover was working loose from the third travois.
A dry cottonwood tree to the right suddenly exploded into flame, as if lightning had struck it. Skye felt heat at his back, sucked smoky air, and heard for the first time a rolling thunder behind him, the roar of a conflagration that was rolling down on them, eating everything in its path. Above, blue sky had vanished and a gray smoke cast deep shadow over the land. The sun died suddenly, and a great darkness slid over them. Still, the fire was far enough back that Skye saw no flames.
A deer burst from a thicket startling Jawbone, who reared and danced and then bolted ahead, while Skye hung on. Ahead, the woods surrendered to brush, walls of chokecherry lining the stream, as dangerous as the wooded bottoms they were leaving.
Mercer's wagon fell behind. Skye feared the teamsters would stick with it, killing themselves and their horses. But they were far from succor, far from a hole in the river, far from meadows. He heard shouts, turned, and saw Winding and Mercer yelling at each other, while Floyd Corporal was unhitching the big draft horses. Mercer was screaming. Then the draft horses were loose, and they lumbered forward at speeds Skye had never dreamed possible in such beasts. They raced past, with the teamsters and Mercer just behind. The wagon stood forlorn, cocked to one side, its wagon sheet smoking on the bows, doomed.
Skye took one last glance, lamenting not the journals but the cask of gin, and then spurred Jawbone ahead. A half mile up was open land where the river narrowed and ran quiet, a sign of some depth. A place of salvation. A slim chance, but
the only chance. Behind and gaining every second was a streak of orange flame higher than the tallest bankside trees, boiling into the heavens, ascending higher and higher until Skye thought the flame touched the sun.
F
light. Now it was a race to that pool. Heat behind them, heat beside them, a moving furnace gaining on them. Jawbone needed no encouragement, but plunged pell-mell toward the quiet waters ahead. Victoria rode a pony that trailed a broken travois behind it; Mary's pony bucked and leaped, but she held on.
Mercer, on a lean roman-nosed beast, sailed past, and amazingly the big Belgians thundered by, even as heat blistered hair. The teamsters were riding too, but one's hat was smoking and embers were driving their horses mad. A flash and boom behind them told Skye that the powder keg in Mercer's burning wagon had detonated. Some smaller booms from his own travois debris told him that fire had consumed his own powder, save for what was in the horn on his chest.
They reached the pool all at once. The draft horses plunged in, splashing deep into cool water. Jawbone hit the water with a giant splash, and Skye was shocked to discover him plunging straight toward a black bear sow, with two cubs, up to their noses. Two deer and an elk stood nervously at the far
side of the pond, their heads barely visible. With a great roiling of water, the rest plunged in. Skye dismounted, filled his top hat with water and poured it over himself. Then he poured more water over the horses' backs. Victoria dropped straight underwater and emerged draining water from her braids. Mercer and the teamsters struggled to dismount in all that turmoil and dipped themselves in water. The horses splashed furiously as fiery missiles dropped from the black sky frying any flesh they touched.
Skye coughed. It was hard to breathe. The air was so bad one wanted not to suck it into lungs. He filled his top hat over and over, splashing water on Victoria, on Mary, on Jawbone. The heat was so brutal it evaporated water as fast as he threw it on the horses; it pushed itself straight through their hair, his clothing, his beard.
The bears slid lower and lower in the frothing water, until their snouts barely showed. The deer and elk writhed in pain as a storm of embers blistered their backs. He saw rattlers swimming in every direction.
Now they were surrounded by orange walls, no succor, no air, no relief. But here the river ran through meadow, not woods, and Skye had been counting on that. The grasses flared briefly and moments later there was only charred earth as the wall of flame rolled past them, driven by sharp dry wind out of the south. But heat and smoke followed, the streamside trees and brush still burnt furiously, casting blankets of choking smoke straight over Skye and his party.
It was each to his own safety. Skye dipped under the water, which was clogged now with black debris, burst upward, tried to breathe air that would not support life, felt his lungs ache, threw water over the suffering horses, and plunged under again.
Jawbone shrieked as a burning missile landed on his rump, and he bucked furiously in the water, which actually sprayed lifesaving water everywhere.
Skye felt himself weakening. No air. He was gasping and drawing only brutal, acrid smoke into his lungs. A quick glance told him that the others were done for too. They hung on to horses' manes, worn-out, not far from doom. Skye saw the future clearly. They had escaped the worse burning but were going to die of asphyxiation. And there wasn't anything anyone could do.
He slid backward into the roiling water, and discovered blue sky above him. The black wall of smoke had vanished. The hot south wind had driven most of the smoke to the north. But it didn't matter. He couldn't breathe. None of them could. He clung to Jawbone's mane. He saw Victoria faint, and somehow reached her before she slid into the water and drowned. He tugged her close and kept her head up and tried to keep her from sucking water into her lungs.
The river itself had turned hot, as if it would soon begin to boil, and there was no more coolness to comfort a body. So this was how it would end. Rattlers swam by. His mind was so fogged that he no longer cared. He could not think. Thinking required air and without air his mind simply drifted toward oblivion.
And so life was suspended. He didn't know how the others fared. Black river debris slid past him, bumped into his arms. He was holding Victoria above the surface with his last strength; that is all he knew.
Then oddly a tendril of clean air reached him. He knew it was good air. He sucked it into his chest, exhaled it, sucked again, exhaled again, and did not cough as much. The merciless
south wind that had driven this galloping fire was also driving clean air past this place of death.
Yet no one moved. Not an animal stirred. The bears remained submerged, only their snouts showing. The horses, half out of water in that shallow pond, stood stock-still. They had terrible burns on their backs where the fire had scorched away their hair and fried their flesh.
“Help me,” said Mercer. He could no longer keep his head out of water, and slid under the surface. Skye bestirred himself, as if coming from some distant shore, and waded toward the explorer, catching him as he drifted downstream. Skye yanked Mercer's head up, clapped him on the back until Mercer coughed and began to breathe again. Skye held him up. He counted heads. Mary, Victoria, Mercer, Whiting, Corporal. Alive. Draft horses alive and suffering cruel flesh wounds. The ponies all suffering.
There was little he could do. Little anyone could do. He hadn't the strength to help himself, much less help the others. In every direction there was nothing but char, blackness, black earth, black rock, black forest debris. A blackened earth cleaved by the shallow river, under a harsh sky.
Some unfathomed amount of time passed. The river water cooled and cleared somewhat, but it still carried a full charge of charred limbs, logs, and debris, along with dead animals, rabbits, a skunk, a porcupine, an antelope, belly-up snakes, slowly floating and whirling as the waters carried them toward their final destiny. An acrid smell hung over the whole area, the smell of charred wood and grass, smoke-saturated clothing, ash that clogged one's nostrils and ears and collected around the eyes.
The bears were the first to leave. The sow herded her cubs
out of the pool and lumbered downstream without a glance backward toward those who had shared the refuge with her. The deer stood frozen, not ready to move anywhere. There was no place to go. Not a blade of grass or a leaf to succor the creature. Skye felt the need to return to hard ground, and pulled his way out, feeling dirty water run off his soggy buckskins. He fell to the charred ground and lay there. The act of getting out of the water had exhausted him.
The women seemed more resilient, pulled themselves out, wrung their skirts, and began walking upstream to see what might be salvaged. But one of the teamsters, Floyd Corporal, was in a bad way. He pulled himself out of the water and fell down on the black ground and wept softly. Mercer and Winding were better off. But no one was ready to look after the animals, and they spent another hour beside the Musselshell just recovering what they could of their strength and wits.
At last Skye led Jawbone out of the pool. The horse had a blister on his rump that looked ugly. There was little Skye could do about it. The saddle was charred but intact. Skye's old Hawken still rested in its sheath. It was soaked and Skye would have to pull the wet charge. He hoped he still had dry powder in his horn. The others were now unarmed unless some of their weapons had survived the conflagration that consumed their wagon.
Skye discovered that most of the hair on his head had been singed, and now it fell off whenever he touched it. Still, the hair had protected his neck and head. He could grow more. Much of Victoria's jet hair was gone. Mary's hair had survived. Somehow, Mary had done best of all, and except for some ruined buckskins and moccasins, seemed much the same. Mercer and Winding began to look after their horses. The big Belgians
had several blisters, and their other horses were little better off. No one would be riding them for a long time.
No one talked. Skye didn't want to. He nursed his thoughts deep down inside of himself, as if talking would shatter a healing process that had to occur in silence. He stood wearily, pulled the rifle from its sheath, and began to pull the wet charge. It involved a complex process in which a spiral worm on a hardwood stick was screwed into the lead ball until it could be pulled free.
He sat quietly, working the wet charge loose, and finally succeeded. Then he ran a patch down the barrel to wipe it clean, poured powder, which had stayed dry in the horn, patched a ball, and drove it home. The fulminate cap was still good, so he let it stay on the nipple. He was armed, but there were no animals to shoot and no defenses needed. Skye had no intention of shooting the deer that had shared the pool with them. The deer had survived; let it live.
Off to the north the wall of smoke continued to roll away, burning everything before it. They could no longer follow the river. There was not a blade of grass for the horses, not a deer or antelope or buffalo to eat. Nothing for man or beast. Blackness ahead, blackness behind. They would need to cut sideways, either east or west, and Skye already knew the answer. They would head west where the mountains still were dark green, unburnt. There, life could continue if they could find a way to start over.
Mercer broke the silence. “We don't have a thing. Everything in the wagon's gone. The blankets, stores, my journals, some tools. The rifles are twisted and worthless. We have only the clothing on our backs and some horses we can't use or ride. We're going to be hungry and haven't even a pound of
flour. It seems to me we survived that fire, only to perish in a few days from every imaginable want.”
Skye lifted his soggy top hat. “It's bad,” he said.
“Worse than bad. We have nothing. How will we live? You don't have anything either.”
“We might not live,” Skye said. “Then again, we might.”
Mercer stared, annoyed, at such enigmatic conversation, and wheeled away.
Skye didn't feel like talking. He studied the mountains lying to the west perhaps thirty miles, a hard day's walk in the best of conditions, but two or three days in the shape they were in. Two or three days without food or water or grass for the animals, under a brutal sun.