Butcher's Crossing (30 page)

“Ain’t you even going to look?” Schneider wailed.

“No need to,” said Miller. “Like I said, if it’s anywhere near as deep as you say, we still got a few days. We’ll just wait for a while.”

So they waited. Charley Hoge, coming slowly out of his long dream during the winter, worked the oxen with the wagon for an hour or so every day, until they pulled, without a load at least, as easily as they had the previous fall. Under Charley Hoge’s direction, Andrews smoked quantities of foot-long trout and great strips of venison to sustain them on their journey down the mountain and across the plain. Miller took to wandering again upon the mountainside, which was still drifted heavily in softening snow, with two rifles—his own Sharps and Andrews’s varmint rifle—cradled in the crook of his arm. Frequently the men who remained at camp heard the booming of the Sharps or the smart crack of the small rifle; sometimes Miller brought his kill back to camp with him; more often he let it lie where it had dropped. At camp, his eyes constantly roved over the long valley and about the rising contours of surrounding mountainside; when he had to look away for one reason or another, he seemed to do so with reluctance.

Schneider’s sullenness, which followed upon Miller’s first refusal to leave the valley, turned into a kind of silent ferocity, of which Miller was the apparently unaware object. Schneider spoke to Miller only to insist that he accompany him to the pass, virtually every day, to inspect the snow pack that remained. When Schneider asked, Miller complied, neither good-naturedly nor bad-naturedly. He rode impassively away with Schneider, and returned impassively, his face set in calm untroubled lines beside Schneider’s anger-reddened features. And to Schneider’s half-articulate insistence, he replied only:

“Not yet.”

To Andrews, though he said nothing, the last few days were the most difficult to endure. Again and again, at the imminent prospect of leaving, he found his hands clenched into fists, his palms sweaty; yet he could not have said where his eagerness to be gone came from. He could understand Schneider’s impatience—he knew of Schneider’s simple desire to fill his belly with civilized food, to surround his body with the softness of a clean bed, and to empty his gathered lust into the body of any waiting woman. But his own desire, though it may have included in some way all of those, was at once more intense and more vague. To what did he wish to return? From where did he wish to go? And yet the desire remained, for all its vagueness, sharp and painful within him. Several times he followed the trampled path in the snow that Miller and Schneider took to the pass, and stood where the snow lay thickly drifted in the narrow cut between the twin peaks that marked the entrance to the valley. Above the drifts, the raw brown-red rock of the peaks cut into the blue sky. He peered down the narrow open trench that Schneider had worn in the snow, but it twisted so that he could not see through it to the open country beyond.

Helpless before Miller’s calm, they waited. They waited even when the snow, gathered in the solid shadow of the forest, began to melt and run in narrow rivulets past their campsite. They waited until late in April. Then one night before the campfire, suddenly Miller spoke:

“Get a good night’s sleep. We load up and pull out tomorrow.”

After he spoke, there was a long silence. Then Schneider rose to his feet, jumped in the air, and let out a loud whoop. He slapped Miller on the back. He turned around two or three times, laughing wordlessly. He slapped Miller on the back again.

“By God, it’s about time! By God, Miller! You really ain’t a bad feller, are you?” He walked in a tight circle for several minutes, laughing to himself, and speaking senselessly to the other men.

After an instant of elation at Miller’s announcement, Andrews felt a curious sadness like a presentiment of nostalgia come over him. He looked at the small campfire burning cheerily against the darkness, and looked beyond the campfire into the darkness. There was the valley that he had come to know as well as the palm of his own hand; he could not see it, but he knew it was there; and there were the wasting corpses of the buffalo for whose hides they had traded their sweat and their time and a part of their strength. The ricks of those hides lay also in the darkness, hidden from his sight; in the morning they would load them on the wagon and leave this place, and he felt that he would never return, though he knew he would have to come back with the others for the hides they could not carry with them. He felt vaguely that he would be leaving something behind, something that might have been precious to him, had he been able to know what it was. That night, after the fire died, he lay in darkness, alone, outside the shelter, and let the spring chill creep through his clothing into his flesh; he slept at last, but in the night he awoke several times, and blinked into the starless dark.

In the first clear light of morning, Schneider roused them from their sleep. As celebration of their last day, they decided to drink what remained of the coffee, which they had been hoarding for several weeks. Charley Hoge made the coffee strong and black; after the weak brew made from reused grounds, the fresh bitter fragrance went to their heads and gave a new strength to their bodies. They yoked the oxen to the wagon, and drew the wagon up to the open area where the hides lay in their tall bales.

While Andrews, Schneider, and Miller boosted the great bales onto the wagon bed, Charley Hoge cleaned their camp area and packed the smoked fish and meat with the other trail goods into the large crate that had stood covered in canvas beside their campsite all winter. Weakened by their long diet of game meat and fish, the three men struggled against the weight of the bales. Six of the huge bales, laid in pairs, covered the bed of the wagon; upon these, the men managed to boost six more, so that the bound hides rose to the height of a man above the sideboards of the wagon. And though they were gasping and half faint from their labor, Miller urged them to pile six more bales upon the twelve, so that at last the hides balanced precariously ten or twelve feet above the spring clip seat which Charley Hoge was to occupy.

“Too many,” Schneider gasped, after the last bale had been shoved in place. Breathing hoarsely, his face beneath its grime and smoke paler than his light hair and beard, he moved away from the wagon and looked at its towering load. “It’ll never make it down the mountain. It’ll tip over the first time it gets off level.”

From the pile of goods that Charley Hoge had been sorting beside the wagon, Miller gathered what pieces of rope he could find. He did not answer Schneider. He knotted odd pieces of rope together, and began securing rope to the gussets and eyes along the top of the sideboard. Schneider said:

“Trying them down will just make it worse. And this wagon wasn’t meant to carry this heavy a load. Break an axle, and then where’ll you be?”

Miller threw a rope over the top of the bales. “We’ll steady her as we go down,” he said. “And if we take it careful, the axles will hold up.” He paused for a moment. “I want us to go back into Butcher’s Crossing with a real load. And watch their eyes bug out.”

They lashed the hides to the wagon as tightly as they could, straining against the ropes, pulling them so heavily that the hides, flattened, pushed against the sideboards of the wagon and made them bulge outward. When the load was secure they stood away and looked at it, and then looked at the baled hides that remained. Andrews estimated that there were nearly forty of them on the ground.

“Two more wagon loads,” Miller said. “We can come back for these later this spring. We’re carrying around fifteen hundred hides—and there’s better than three thousand here. Say forty-six, forty-seven hundred hides in all. If the price holds up, that’s better than eighteen thousand dollars.” He grinned flatly at Andrews. “Your share will come to better than seven thousand dollars. That ain’t bad for a winter of doing nothing, is it?”

“Come on,” Schneider said. “You can count your money when you get it in your hand. Let’s finish loading and get out of here.”

“You ought to of held out for shares, Fred,” Miller said. “You’d of made a lot more money. Let’s see—”

“All right,” Schneider said. “I ain’t complained. I took my chance. And you ain’t got your load back to town yet, either.”

“Let’s see,” Miller said. “If you’d held out for a sixth, you’d—”

“All right,” Andrews said; his own voice surprised him. He felt a faint anger at Miller rise in him. “I said I’d take care of Schneider. And I’ll give him a share above and beyond his salary.”

Miller looked at Andrews slowly. He nodded very slightly, as if he recognized something. “Sure, Will. It’s yours to do with.”

Schneider, his face reddening, looked angrily at Andrews. “No, I thank you. I asked for sixty a month, and I been getting it. Fred Schneider takes care of his self; he don’t ask nothing of nobody.”

“All right,” Andrews said; he grinned a little foolishly. “I’ll buy you one big drunk back in Butcher’s Crossing.”

“I thank you,” Schneider said gravely. “I’ll be obliged to you for that.”

They stowed their camp goods and their smoked food under the high wagon seat, and looked around them to see if anything had been left. Through the trees, the shelter in which they had spent their winter looked small and insufficient for the task it had performed. It would be here, Andrews knew, when they returned later in the spring or summer for the other hides; but in the following seasons, dried by the heat of the sun and cracked in the bitter cold of snow and ice, it would begin to disintegrate, crumble into patches and shreds; until at last it would be no more, and only the stumps of the logs they had set in the ground would remain to show their long winter. He wondered if another man would see it before it rotted in the weather and trickled down into the deep bed of pine needles upon which it stood.

They left the other bales of hides where they were, not bothering to push them back out of sight among the trees. Using the last of his strychnine, Charley Hoge sprinkled the hides to discourage vermin from nesting in the bales. Miller, Andrews, and Schneider saddled their horses, wrapped their blankets and small goods in softened buffalo hides, and strapped these behind their saddles. Charley Hoge clambered atop the high clip seat; at a signal from Miller, he leaned far to one side of the piled bales of hides, unfurled his long bull-whip behind him, and brought it smartly alongside the team of oxen. The splayed leather at the tip cracked loudly, and the crack was followed immediately by Charley Hoge’s thin howling shout: “Harrup!” The startled oxen strained against the weight of the wagon, and dug their cloven hooves deep into the earth. The wooden yokes cut into their shoulder flesh, and the wood, strained in the pulling, gave sounds like deep groans. The freshly greased wheels turned on their axles and the wagon inched forward, gaining speed as the oxen found their balance against the weight they pulled. Under the weight of the hides, the wheels sank past their rims in the softened earth and left deep parallel ruts that were dark and heavy in the light yellow-green. Behind them, the men could see the ruts as far as they extended.

At the pass the snow was still fetlock deep; but it was soft, and the oxen made their way through it with comparative ease, though the wagon wheels sank in the wet earth halfway up to their hubs. At the highest point of the pass, precisely between the two peaks that were like the gigantic posts of a ruined gate that let them in and out of the valley, they paused. Schneider and Miller inspected the wagon brake that would keep the wagon from spilling too rapidly down as they descended the mountainside. As they did so, Andrews looked back upon the valley which in a few moments would be gone from his sight. At this distance, the new growth of grass was like a faint green mist that clung to the surface of the earth and glistened in the early morning sun. Andrews could not believe that this same valley had been the one he had seen pounding and furious with the threshings of a thousand dying buffalo; he could not believe that the grass had once been stained and matted with blood; he could not believe that this was the same stretch of land that had been torn by the fury of winter blizzards; he could not believe that a few weeks ago it had been stark and featureless under a blinding cover of white. He looked up and down its length, as far as he could see. Even from this distance, if he strained his eyes, he could see the expanse dotted with the dark carcasses of the buffalo. He turned away from it and pushed his horse over the pass, away from the other men and the wagon which remained immobile at the summit. After a few moments he heard behind him the slow thud of the horses’ hooves and the slow creak of the wagon. The party began its long descent.

A few yards beyond the pass, the three men on horseback dismounted and tied their horses loosely together, letting them trail behind them as they made their way down the mountain. The buffalo path, which they had followed up the mountain in the fall, was soft, though not so muddy as the earth had been back in the valley. Because of the softness, the wheels of the wagon had a tendency to slip sideways off the trail whenever it pitched from a level and followed the slope of the mountain; Miller found three lengths of rope in Charley Hoge’s goods crate, and secured these lengths high upon the load. As the wagon descended, the three men walked beside it and above it, level with the top of the load, and pulled steadily against the ropes, so that the wagon did not topple over as it angled broadly away from the mountain. Sometimes, when the trail turned sharply, the tottering weight of the high-piled wagon nearly pulled them off their feet; they slid downward on the slick grass, their heels digging for a hold in the earth, their hands burning on the ropes they pulled.

They went down the mountain more slowly than they had come up. Charley Hoge, dwarfed by the hides piled behind him, sat erect upon his wagon seat, angling as the wagon angled, regulating its speed by a judicious mixture of cracking whip and applied hand brake. They stopped frequently; animal and man, weakened by the long winter, were unable to go for long without rest.

Before midday they found a level plateau that extended a short way out from the mountain. They took the bits from their horses’ mouths and unyoked the oxen and let them graze on the thick grass that grew among the small rocks that littered the plateau. On a broad flat rock, Charley Hoge cut into equal portions a long strip of smoked venison, and passed the portions among the men. Andrews’s hand received the meat limply, and put it to his mouth; but for several minutes he did not eat. Exhaustion pulled at his stomach muscles, sickening him; tiny points darkened and brightened before his eyes, and he lay back on the cool grass. After a while he was able to tear at the tough leatherlike meat. His gums, inflamed by the long diet of game, throbbed at the toughness; he let the meat soften on his tongue before he chewed it. After he had forced most of it down his throat, he stood, despite the tiredness that still pulsed in his legs, and looked about him. The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue. The dark green of the pine boughs was lightened to a greenish yellow at the tips, where new growth was starting; scarlet and white buds were beginning to open on the wild-berry bushes; and the pale green of new growth on slender aspens shimmered above the silver-white bark of their trunks. All about the ground the pale new grass reflected the light of the sun into the shadowed recesses beneath the great pines, and the dark trunks glowed in that light, faintly, as if the light came from the hidden centers of the trees themselves. He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth. A light breeze rustled among the boughs, and the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together; from the grass came a mumble of sound as innumerable insects rustled secretly and performed their invisible tasks; deep in the forest a twig snapped beneath the pad of an unseen animal. Andrews breathed deeply of the fragrant air, spiced with the odor of crushed pine needles and musky from the slow decay that worked upward from the earth in the shadows of the great trees.