Snow Mountain Passage (17 page)

From here on, they tell themselves, the wagon party could turn up anywhere, anytime. This hope gets them through a damp, bonechilling night, and through the next day, as they cross Bear Valley, now under two feet of snow, and climb the wall Jim and Walter slid down.

They climb its slippery zigzag trail, and Jim can tell the Indians don’t like the work at all, up this high, driving thirty horses through thickening snow. For two days he has not heard either of them speak. What are they thinking? Do they really know what this trip is for? Do they care? Are they doing it for wages? Sutter uses threats to keep his men in line. But does Sutter’s arm reach this far into the mountains?

Above Bear Valley the snow is waist-deep. The night is colder as they bed down, and utterly silent under the pines. A restless clatter from the horse herd rouses Jim and Mac. They call out to the Indians, who have camped apart, but get no answer. They hear hooves crunching through icy crust. They are up and running in the dark.

Jim stays with the herd while Mac resaddles, to give midnight chase down the long incline, plunging back the hard way they have come. But the Indians elude him, and once again he climbs the slope out of Bear Valley, returning before dawn to tell Jim their wranglers have disappeared, along with three horses.

When they have finished damning the runaways and damning Sutter and damning the snow and the cold and the endless night, after Mac has fallen exhausted into his bedroll, Jim lies in the darkness wondering how long Charlie’s Indians stayed loyal to the cause. They seemed to be trustworthy fellows. But so did these two, as they left the fort, giving their Indian promise to bring all Sutter’s horses back. So had the Paiutes Jim let hunker by his desert fire.

The next morning it begins to snow, a dry, windless, powdery fluff that gradually fills the trace of the trail. Jim rides in front of the pack train. Mac rides behind, as the snow deepens, hour by hour, soft and feathery, up to the bellies of the horses, up to their haunches. Under heavy loads of flour and beans the animals struggle. Some give out, stumble and fall, unable to rise. Their mouths and noses lift for air, as if coming up from underwater through foamy surf.

Jim has never been this high so late in the year. With the Indians gone and the horses floundering, it seems hopeless. Yet it is not hopeless. He won’t let it be. He does not know this Sierra weather. But he remembers the terrain. Didn’t he already cross it once? He thinks he knows where he is and where the summit is likely to be. He calls back that they will leave the herd and ride ahead on saddle mounts, just the two of them.

Mac shouts something in reply, but Jim doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He is thinking that Margaret and Virginia and Patty and Tommy and James Junior are now caught in something similar, somewhere not very far from here. Perhaps they struggle toward him as he pushes toward them. Perhaps ten miles away. Maybe less. They could be an hour away. Or half an hour! At any turn in the trail, at any clearing he could have a glimpse of the first mule or campfire flame.

In his mind’s eye he sees the whole route, the soothing trees along the Truckee, the wide bowl where the river spreads thick with tule, the eastern Sierra face. He sees the oval lake and the summit beyond the lake, the bleak grasslands higher up, the alpine valleys, then the crossing and recrossing of the Yuba, right on to this very spot where his horse heaves its chest against the mounds and heaps of white.

Nearly a month has passed since Jim and Charlie Stanton went their separate ways. By all calculations the party should have come this far by now. Where are they? Did Charlie make it through? Maybe his Indians did something worse than take off in the night with a few animals. Or maybe the snow stopped all of them somewhere before the summit. But no. That doesn’t figure. Something else went wrong. Could other fights have broken out? Lord knows, they were on a hair trigger, the whole company, day and night. Maybe Keseberg thought he’d try to hang somebody else, and this time succeeded. Right now Jim would like to have that moment back, facing Keseberg with the weapons loaded. He should have shot him while he had the chance. Yes. If he had that moment back he would shoot Lewis Keseberg in the heart and gladly watch him die. This spurs him on—the thought that one day he will have another chance.

He urges his panicky horse to drive forward, drive against the chest-high drifts. Each slow, bucking plunge moves the wheezing animal one yard closer to collapse.

At last they can go no farther. Jim dismounts, sinking in up to his belt. He throws a pack and bedroll over his shoulder and hurls himself at the white field, as if a refusal to stop will cause the snow to melt away in front of him.

Mac shouts, “Jim!”

He doesn’t turn.

“Jim, what the hell are you doing?”

“We have to keep going!”

“We can’t get anywhere in this stuff!”

“C’mon! C’mon!”

Jim is certain now that the party is within shouting distance. They could be holed up just past this ridge. They have to be. It stands to reason. He calls out, “Hallo! Hallo!”

They don’t have snowshoes. Neither of them thought of snowshoes. Where Jim comes from you don’t need snowshoes, and they weren’t mentioned in any of the guidebooks. They make another hundred yards, descending through powder up to their armpits. Downhill it is a slow floating fall through banks of cotton. They reach a ledge with a view along a white and empty slope toward the course of the Yuba. It has stopped snowing. Again Jim calls, “Hallo! Hallo!”

They listen.

They peer.

Not a sign. Not a sound. Not even an echo. The whole mountain range is empty. No one here but two snow-spattered men with heaving chests and steam puffing over the drifts, and silent flakes falling again, closing off the view ahead. All the streams are gone, buried. The Yuba’s gone. Perhaps he hears it hissing down below. Perhaps not.

At last Mac gets his breath. “This has got to be it.”

“This can’t be it.”

They look at each other, eyes red-rimmed under frosted brows. Mac stifles a wet, phlegmy cough, and Jim hates his cough, tells himself this is Mac’s fever talking, another body giving out the way the horses gave out.

Mac says, “We have to go back.”

“Goddam it, we can’t go back!”

“Even if we got through, what good is it without the pack herd? Wherever they are, they need food, not two more bellies to fill.”

Jim can’t bear this thought. Neither can he bear to speak his own heart. He knows Mac is right. He, too, is ready to collapse. He could bury himself right here in the powder and sleep for a year. He waits and lets Mac speak the terrible truth, the voice low and hoarse, words breaking in the breezeless cold.

“We’re stuck, Jim. They’re stuck too.”

“We’ll get back down to Sutter’s … get some more horses.”

“Horses can’t make it through this, don’t ya see?”

“He’ll stake us to whatever we need.”

“Fifty more horses. A hundred and fifty. Don’t make no difference. We’re all stuck, us and them, and right now there ain’t a goddam thing on earth you or me or anybody else can do about it.”

His words join the flakes that drop between the thick coats and their stoic faces, spoken, then gone, swallowed into the huge, white, all-surrounding silence. The men don’t move, as if still waiting for any distant flicker of a sign, a sound, perhaps a reaction from the place itself, some recognition that they have come this far to stand and listen. The indifferent snow falls lightly on their hats, their shoulder packs, their sleeves, the laden pines.

T
HEY TURN BACK.
But he hasn’t given up. They dig out the packhorses and at Bear Valley stash sacks of flour and jerked beef high up in the pines, still hoping that by God’s grace the company, or some part of it, might get this far. As they wind their way down toward the lowlands, he is already calculating what it will take to recross these mountains, spotting sites for backup camps.

They went about it all wrong, he sees that now. We’ll need a base camp below the snow line. We’ll need a forward camp higher up, and enough men to hold them while a lead team pushes for the summit. We’ll need tents, heavier blankets, and mules as well as horses, and a dozen men next time, or more, if we can find them. That means packing twice as much food for the trip in, and enough stored along the trail to get everyone out.

In the valley again, on the level plain, they follow the Feather. By midmorning it warms up. They’ve had some sleep. As Jim feels his strength again he scolds himself for listening to Mac. Another mile or two might well have brought them face-to-face with the families at last. He wants to get back up there. He wants to push on through. And soon. Soon! SOON! The sooner the better. In his mind the plan of rescue comes to life, the route, the catalog of details large and small—gloves, saddles, beans, flour, coils of rope …

Mac’s mind is filling too, though he has doubts. “I just don’t know,” he says repeatedly. “I just don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” says Jim.

“I’ll give ‘er anything I’ve got.”

“I know you will.”

“I sure don’t see how we’d make it past where we were.”

“We are going to!”

“Goddam it to hell, Jim …”

“That’s all there is to it.”

“I want to bring my family through same as you …”

“What are you saying, Mac?”

“When I think what it was like, with us not near the summit and …”

“And?”

“You have to wonder what it’ll be like once a full winter sets in.”

“So we leave them all in the mountains to freeze.”

“Did I say that?”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You think I’d say something like that? Hell, no. Any more than you would say something like that! But if a man can’t get through, he can’t get through. I just wish to hell I’d never left. I should’ve stayed with the company. I’d sooner be on that side now than this side, I can tell you that. But I ain’t. And you ain’t. And I sure can’t see how to get there!”

Jim doesn’t want this kind of talk. He wants to tame the snow, tame the high country, get back to Margaret and his children before the season’s full force overwhelms them. He wonders now if the malaria could still be working on Mac, even though the high color has subsided and the coughing only comes in early-morning darkness, when the air turns damp.

As they ford the American River again and see the fort, Jim is counting on Sutter to reassure them. It all depends on Sutter. His settlement is close enough to the mountains and big enough to outfit the kind of rescue team they’re going to need. As soon as the captain hears our story, Jim figures, he’ll understand what has to be done.

And Jim is right. Sutter understands it all too well. When they appear before him, shabby and weathered and worn down, he is moved by the plight of the two gallant fathers, the two husbands.

This time he invites them to eat and drink. They sit on wooden benches, at a plank table made of pine. Overhead, in elegant incongruity, hangs a candelabra of hammered iron, with twelve unlit white candles. The table is furnished with kerosene lamps and a brandy jug, three sterling silver spoons to catch the light, and three china bowls steaming with potato soup that smells of garlic and pepper.

Outside the walls, Indian guards pace back and forth in blue jackets of heavy cotton, their ancient muskets pointed toward the sky. Inside, the compound seems oddly altered. When Jim and Mac stepped through the gate, a few Indians could be seen, a scattering of half-breed children, half a dozen troops. But the place has the look of a town emptied by news of rising floodwaters. In Sutter’s rustic dining room a woodstove fire crackles, and he is eager for some company.

Jim is struck by how ordinary he looks for such a famous man. In the pages of the travel books he stands larger than life, a wilderness legend. Fremont is “the Pathfinder.” Sutter is “the Empire Builder,” self-appointed ambassador at the farthest edge of the civilized world. Upon close inspection, he is a short and balding fellow who has difficulty sitting still, as if pestered by a boil on his backside, or some affliction of his private parts. He wears his unbuttoned military jacket, blue with gold braid beginning to unravel. From a distance he still has a youthful look, his smile cordial, even jovial. From across the narrow table one sees the webbing around burdened eyes that seem to say he knows a truth too troubling to speak.

Sutter has been drinking for hours. His eyes are too steady now, his cheeks bright red, his voice animated yet maudlin. As he fills their cups a third time with his fort-made brandy, he apologizes for the runaway Indians.

“They would rather steal a horse, you know, than raise one from a colt and feed it and make it their own.”

Jim and Mac give their full attention to the soup. Bathed in aromatic steam, their eyes grow large and fill with the water of gratitude.

“They take pleasure in the stealing,” Sutter says.

Mac lifts his eyes but not his head. “I chased ‘em halfway down the mountain, captain. They got clean away.”