Butcher's Crossing (28 page)

“Till spring?” Andrews said.

“Six months at the least, eight months at the most. So we might as well dig in good, and get ourselves set for a long wait.”

Andrews tried to realize how long six months would be, but his mind refused to move upon the figure. How long had they been here now? A month? a month and a half? Whatever it was, it had been so filled with newness and work and exhaustion, that it seemed like no period that could be measured, thought about, or put up against anything else. Six months. He spoke the words, as if they would mean more coming aloud from his lips. “Six months.”

“Or seven, or eight,” Miller said. “It won’t do no good thinking about them. Let’s get to work before this coffee wears off.”

The rest of the day Andrews, Miller, and Schneider spent in constructing the lean-to. They stripped the smaller branches from the slender pine logs and piled them in a neat bundle near the fire. As Miller and Andrews worked on the logs, Schneider hacked from a stiff hide, the smallest and youngest he could find, a number of uneven but relatively slender thongs. His knives blunted quickly on the stonelike hides, and he had to sharpen a knife several times before it would peel off a single thong. After he had hacked a large number of thongs, he bent them so that they would fit into a huge kettle that he found among Charley Hoge’s things buried in the snow. From around the fire he raked what dead ashes he could and put them in the kettle with the thongs. Then he called Miller and Andrews over to where he stood and told them to urinate in the kettle.

“What?” Andrews said.

“Piss in it,” Schneider said, grinning. “You know how to piss, don’t you?”

Andrews looked at Miller. Miller said: “He’s right. That’s the way the Indians do it. It helps draw the stiffness out of the hide.”

“Woman piss is best,” Schneider said. “But we’ll have to make do with what we got.”

Solemnly the three men made water into the iron kettle. Schneider inspected the level to which the ashes had risen; shaking his head regretfully, he threw several handfuls of snow into the kettle to bring the sooty mixture up to a level that would cover the thongs. He set the kettle on the fire, and joined Andrews and Miller in their work.

They cut the stripped logs to lengths, and set four of them—two short and two long—in a rectangle before the fire. To secure the logs, they dug into the soggy ground, cutting through the spreading roots of the trees and breaking through scattered subterranean rock, to a depth of nearly two feet. Into these holes they set the logs, so that the taller ones were facing the fire. The more slender and longer boughs they notched so that they would fit firmly, and lashed them to the thick uprights set into the ground, thus forming a sturdy boxlike frame that slanted from the foot-high stubs at the rear to the height of a man’s shoulders at the front. They lashed the branches with the urine-and-ash-soaked thongs that were still so stiff they were barely workable. By that time it was midafternoon, and they paused, nearly exhausted, to eat the hard beans that had been boiling in the iron kettle. The four men ate out of a common pot, using whatever utensils they could salvage out of the snow, beneath which they lay scattered. The beans, without salt, were tasteless and lay heavy on their stomachs; but they worked them down and cleaned the heavy pot of its last morsel. When Miller, Schneider, and Andrews returned to their frame, the buffalo-hide thongs had hardened and contracted, and held the logs together like bands of iron. They spent the rest of the afternoon stringing buffalo hides to the frame, using the thongs which had softened in their bath of urine and wood ash. All around the frame they dug a shallow trench, into which they stuffed the ends of the hides, and covered them over with moist earth and peat, so that no air or moisture could run inside the shelter.

Before darkness came, the shelter was finished. It was a sturdy structure, walled and floored with buffalo skins, which were thonged and overlaid so that from the back and sides, at least, it was virtually water- and wind-proof. From the broad front, several hides were suspended loosely and arranged so that in a wind they could be secured by long pegs thrust into the ground. The men dug what remained of their bedrolls out of the snow, divided the remaining blankets equally, and spread them before the fire to dry. In the last light of the sun, which threw the snow-wrapped land into a glittering cold blue and a brilliant orange, Andrews looked at the shelter of log and buffalo hide that they had spent the day constructing. He thought: this will be my home for the next six or eight months. He wondered what it would be like, living there. He dreaded boredom; but that expectation was not fulfilled.

Their days were occupied with work. They cut narrow strips of softened hide in two-foot lengths, scraped the fur from them, made four-inch slits in the center of each, and wore these like masks over their eyes to cut down the blinding glare of the snow. From the pile of small branches of pine they selected lengths which they soaked and bent in oval shapes, and tied upon them a latticework of hide strips, using them as crude snowshoes to walk upon the thin hard crust of the snow without sinking down into it. From the softened hide they fashioned clumsy stockinglike boots, which they secured to the calves of their legs with thongs, and which kept their feet from freezing. They cured several hides to supplement the blankets that had blown away during the blizzard, and they even made for themselves loosely fitting robes which served in lieu of greatcoats. They cut wood for the fire, dragging the huge logs through the snow until the area around the camp was packed and hard, and they could slide them along the iced surface with little effort. They kept the fire going night and day, taking turns during the night getting up and walking into the sharp cold to thrust logs beneath the banked ashes. Once, during a heavy wind that lasted half the night, Andrews watched the campfire consume a dozen thick logs without once breaking into flame, the embers kept at a glowing intense heat by the wind.

On the fourth day after the blizzard, as Schneider and Andrews took axes and started into the woods to increase the stockpile of logs that grew beside the chimney rock, Miller announced that he would ride into the valley and shoot a buffalo; their meat was low, and the day promised to be fair. Miller mounted the lone horse in the corral—the other two had been turned loose to live with the oxen as best they could on what grass might be found in the valley—and rode slowly away from the campsite. He returned nearly six hours later, and slid wearily off his horse. He tramped through the snow to the three men who waited for him around the campfire.

“No buffalo,” he said. “They must have got out during the blow, before the pass was snowed in.”

“We ain’t got much meat left,” Schneider said. “The flour’s ruined, and we only got one more sack of beans.”

“This ain’t so high that game will be hard to find,” Miller said. “I’ll go out again tomorrow and maybe get us a deer. If the worst comes, we can live on fish; the lake’s froze over, but not so thick a body can’t chop through.”

“Did you see the stock?” Schneider asked.

Miller nodded. “The oxen came through. The snow’s blowed away enough in spots so they’ll manage. The horses are looking poorly, but with luck they’ll get through.”

“With luck,” Schneider said.

Miller leaned back from the fire, stretched, and grinned at him.

“Fred, I swear you ain’t got a cheerful bone in your body. Why, this ain’t bad; we’re set now. I recollect one winter I got snowed in up in Wyoming, all by myself. Clean above timber line, and no way to get down. So high they was no game; I lived all winter off my horse and one mountain goat, and the only shelter I had was what I made out of that horseskin. This is good living. You got no call to complain.”

“I got call,” Schneider said, “and you know it.”

But as the days passed, Schneider’s complaining became more and more perfunctory, and at last ceased altogether. Though he slept at night in the hide shelter with the other men, he spent more and more time alone, speaking to the others only when he was directly addressed, and then as briefly and noncommittally as he could. Often when Miller was off hunting for meat, Schneider would leave the campsite and remain away until late in the afternoon, returning with nothing to show for his absence. Through his apparent resolve to have little to do with the others of the party, he got into the habit of talking to himself; once Andrews came upon him and heard him speaking softly, crooningly, as if to a woman. Embarrassed and half-afraid, Andrews backed away from him; but Schneider heard him, and turned to face him. For a moment, the two men looked at each other; but it was as if Schneider saw nothing. His eyes were glazed and empty, and after a moment they turned dully away. Puzzled and concerned, Andrews mentioned Schneider’s new habit to Miller.

“Nothing to worry about,” Miller said. “A man by his self gets to doing that. I’ve done it myself. You got to talk, and for four men cooped together like we are, it ain’t good to talk too much among their selves.”

Thus, much of the time, Andrews and Charley Hoge were left to themselves at the camp while Miller hunted and Schneider wandered alone, speaking to whatever image floated before his mind.

Charley Hoge, after the first numb shock that came with his emergence from the snow, began slowly to recognize his surroundings and even to accept them. Among the debris of the camp that remained after the fury of the blizzard had spent itself, Miller had managed to find two gallon crocks of whisky that were unbroken; day by day he doled this out to Charley Hoge, who drank it with the weak thin bitter coffee made by boiling over and over the grounds used the previous day. Warmed and loosened by repeated doses of the coffee and whisky, Charley Hoge began to stir a little about the campsite—though at first he would not go beyond the wide circle between their shelter and the campfire which had been melted of the snow by the heat and their tramping upon it. One day, however, he stood bolt upright before the campfire, so suddenly that he sloshed and spilled a bit of his coffee-and-whisky. He looked around him wildly; dropping his cup to the ground, he slapped his hand about his chest, and thrust it into his jacket. Then he ran into the snow. Falling to his knees near the large tree where he had kept his goods, he began scrabbling in the snow, poking his hand downward and throwing the snow aside in small furious flurries. When Andrews went up to him and asked him what the matter was, Charley Hoge croaked only, over and over: “The book! The book!”, and dug more furiously into the snow.

For nearly an hour he dug, every few minutes running back to the campfire to warm his hand and the blue puckered stump at his wrist, whimpering like a frightened animal. Realizing what he was after, Andrews joined him in his search, though he had no way of knowing where he ought to look. Finally, Andrews’s numbed fingers, pushing aside a cake of snow, encountered a soft mass. It was Charley Hoge’s Bible, opened and soaked, in a bed of snow and ice. He called to Charley Hoge and lifted the Bible, holding it like a delicate plate in his hands, so that the soaked pages would not tear. Charley Hoge took it from him, his hand trembling; the rest of the afternoon and part of the next morning he spent drying the book page by page, before the campfire. In the days thereafter, he filled his idleness by sipping a weak mixture of coffee and whisky and leafing through the blurred, soiled pages. Once Andrews, tense and near anger because of his inactivity and the silence that came upon the camp in Miller’s absence, asked Charley Hoge to read him something. Charley Hoge looked at him angrily and did not answer; he returned to his Bible and thumbed through it dully, his forefinger laboriously tracing the lines and his brows drawn together in concentration.

Miller was most at ease in his isolation. Away from the camp in search of food during the day, he always returned shortly before twilight, appearing sometimes behind the men who waited for him, sometimes in front of them—but always appearing suddenly, as if he had thrust himself up out of the landscape. He would walk toward them silently, his dark bearded face often shagged and glittering with snow and ice, and drop whatever he had killed upon the snow near the campfire. Once he killed a bear and butchered it where it fell. When he appeared with the huge hindquarters of the bear balanced on each shoulder, staggering beneath their weight, it seemed to Andrews for an instant that Miller himself was some great animal, grotesquely shaped, its small head hunched between tremendous shoulders, bearing down upon them.

As the others weakened on their steady diet of wild meat, Miller’s strength and endurance increased. After a full day of hunting, he still dressed his own kill and prepared the evening meal, taking over most of the duties that Charley Hoge seemed no longer capable of performing. And sometimes, late, on clear nights, he went into the woods with an ax, and the men who stayed by the warmth of the campfire could hear the sharp hard ring of cold metal biting into cold pine.

He spoke infrequently to the others; but his silence was not of that intentness and desperation that Andrews had seen during the hunt and slaughter of the buffalo. In the evenings, hunched before the fire that reflected upon the shelter behind them and returned the warmth to their backs, Miller stared into the yellow flames whose light flickered over his dark, composed features; upon his flat lips there was habitually a smile that might have been of contentment. But the pleasure he took was not in the company, even silent, of the other men; he looked at the fire and beyond it into the darkness that was here and there lightened by the pale glow of moon or stars upon the drifted snow. And in the mornings before he set out for his hunting, as he fixed breakfast for the men and himself, he performed his tasks with neither pleasure nor annoyance but as if they were only a necessary prelude for his leaving. When he left the camp his movements seemed to flow into the landscape; and on his snowshoes of young pine and buffalo thongs, he glided without effort and merged into the dark forest upon the snow.

Andrews watched the men around him, and waited. Sometimes at night, crowded with the others in the close warm shelter of buffalo hide, he heard the wind, that often suddenly sprang up, whistle and moan around the corners of the shelter; at such moments the heavy breathing and snoring of his companions, the touch of their bodies against his own, and their body stench gathered in the closeness of the shelter seemed almost unreal. At such times he felt a part of himself go outward into the dark, among the wind and the snow and the featureless sky where he was whirled blindly through the world. Sometimes when he was near sleep he thought of Francine, as he had thought of her when he had been alone beneath the great storm; but he thought of her more precisely now; he could almost bring her image before his closed eyes. Gradually he let the remembrance of that last night with her come to him; and at last he came to think of it without shame or embarrassment. He saw himself pushing away from him her warm white flesh, and he wondered at what he had done, as if wondering at the actions of a stranger.