Snow Mountain Passage (20 page)

Jim looks back the way he has come. The mist has spread. Below him it’s a lake of mist. He can imagine that the endless valley may once have been another kind of lake. If water somehow had risen to the level of this slope, some poor creature who had swum too far became marooned when the waters receded. The sight fills him with reverence and a rush of dread at the strangeness of this huge skeleton spread across otherwise empty terrain, as if waiting for the water to return.

He rides on, and the low-lying vapor follows him. It rises, gathering, a wet, enshrouding fog so dense he cannot see the trail. He lets the horse pick its way. When they finally climb through it, the fog breaks into shreds, revealing a corridor of green-skinned slopes.

After the Sierras, this crossing seems to him no more than a bulge of foothills. The trail climbs smoothly toward a notch, an easy pass between two steep slopes, emerald under gauzy cloud cover that obscures the topmost ridges. Too easy, it seems to Jim. Beyond this range, he has been told, the Californians have built their towns and laid out their largest ranchos. This narrow passage, it’s one of the gateways to the Californian enclaves—in times like these, the kind of place you would expect troops to lurk.

He stops to listen, tries to peer into the cloud barrier, then heads toward it, and through it, as the trail descends to another valley. Isolated oaks emerge from dense mist, backlit silhouettes. Late sun pushes underneath the mist to make luminous curtains around the trees.

It is a well-watered valley where longhorn cattle roam at large, like Johnson’s herds, without fences, but somehow more sinister. They seem to regard him with suspicion. Is this the untamed herd of a Californian’s rancho? They seem wilder than the elk or antelope.

Another pass leads into another valley, which slopes toward yet another notch, another wooded ridge where riflemen might wait. But where are they? Why don’t they show themselves? Do they watch from a distance, like the desert Indians watched? He feels exposed. Again he is a sitting duck, and what in hell is he really doing here? What is the point of this tedious excursion? He should have waited for the schooner. The trail is too long, too chancy, and it takes him in the wrong direction—west—when he should be heading east with food and horses. Each day has taken him farther from where he ought to be, farther south, now west again, and how many more days before this southern loop bends north at last?

Jim feels that he has lost his way. The land is lovely, bowls of pasture, stands of oak, the succulent country he has yearned to possess. But after all these months of dreaming, after all these years of knowing where he was headed next, and why, today he is like the great fish once marooned back there, in the wrong place at the wrong time, with fins and undulating rudder tail suddenly useless. In this alien place where the maps and guidebooks cannot be trusted, he is adrift, a householder with no house, a father with no children, a wagon master with no more wagons to lead.

ON THE AFTERNOON
of his second day past the river he is climbing toward a ridge that seems burnished. From somewhere beyond it, an aura probes the sky. A final corridor opens out, and he sees another plain spread before him to the west, blazing silver. He dismounts and gulps from his canteen. The late sun appears to bounce off a sheet of water, light shimmering so brightly he has to squint to see through it, to make out the low range of indigo mountains bordering the farther side. This is like the beguiling mirages that followed him so many times across the Salt Desert, that delicious dazzle off the still water. He half expects it to lift or wobble, yet the water does not move. No pieces break and float away, nor do those distant mountains waver in the heat. They can’t. There is no heat. It occurs to him that today is the last day of November. The air is crisp and clean. But cool.

A briny scent is rising. He remembers that he smelled it long before he passed through that corridor. Your eyes can fool you. But the smells are real, the smell of marshy wetlands where salt collects. Surely this is the southern arm of that large bay pictured on maps, named by the Spanish for Saint Francis. The water extends as far north as he can see, bordered by those low dark ridges. Yerba Buena must lie that way.

He studies the curving edge of water. Out in front of him, where the long bay ends, a basin continues farther south, wide and flat, and seemingly empty, but for its glinting rivulets and scattering of trees.

Jim gazes until his eyes burn. He dips his hat to shield his eyes against the blazing light. From somewhere behind him he hears a voice.

“Don’t turn around.”

As he reaches for the rifle in its scabbard by his saddle, he hears the click of a hammer cocked.

“Don’t do that either.”

Jim waits. How did someone get this close?

The voice says, “Where do you come from?”

“John Sutter’s fort.”

“You’re American.”

“That’s right. I have a letter of safe passage.”

“From Sutter?”

“From the lieutenant in charge of the garrison there.”

He hears the man spit.

“An idiot.”

“That may be so,” Jim says, “but he commands the valley of the Sacramento now.”

He hears a low, sardonic chuckle.

“I’m going to turn around. I mean no harm here.”

“Hands away from the body, please.”

The fellow sits on a fallen tree trunk as if posing for a portrait, one boot propped on a rock, a dark hat tipped to shade his eyes. His jacket has a vaguely military cut, though it isn’t military, the collar high and circular, a tapered waist. A rifle in the crook of his arm points toward the ground.

“I’ll look at that letter now.”

He has a black tuft of chin beard and across his cheeks unshaven stubble. A thin mocking smile tells Jim he is being toyed with, in some little game this fellow seems to enjoy. He holds a hand out, palm up, not like a highwayman, but like a creditor collecting on a debt.

From the leather pouch slung inside his coat Jim withdraws a smudged and flimsy folded page. He has noticed movement beyond some trees. Now three more men ride toward them, leading half a dozen horses. They all carry rifles, wear wide-brimmed hats and heavy coats similar enough to seem like uniforms, though they are not. Dust and grime are embedded in these coats and in the bulging beards. They look as if they have been traveling on horseback for months, or years.

They watch but do not speak, as the one on foot returns Jim’s letter. The hat brim has been pushed back, revealing fixed blue eyes, implacable eyes that hold him with a haughty gaze. Do they taunt him?

“Meet Mr. Reed. He’ll ride with us a while.”

Is this an order or an offer? The fellow mounts one of the horses and waits for Jim to mount. The riders bunch around him as they set out together on the downslope trail.

For a couple of miles they ride without speaking. Has Jim been captured or befriended? He can’t quite tell. There is something menacing about the leader’s face under the shadow of his tilted brim. In profile the tufted chin protrudes too far. Jim considers making a run for it, but knows he won’t. Not yet, at any rate. Where would he run to? He studies the three in overcoats. He is sure he recognizes one of them, a tall and lanky fellow.

After a while Jim mentions Fort Laramie. The fellow nods. He was there in July. And yes, he thinks the name Reed might ring a bell. A younger man, riding next to him, nods and grunts. “Ain’t you the ones fell so far behind?”

They all know something of the story, the last party on the trail in this year that a thousand wagons made the crossing. Scraps and bits of lore and gossip have traveled through the passes like burs and seedpods in the furry coats of animals, to spread out into the valleys where the emigrants have gathered.

These men too are land-seeking settlers, now plunged into a struggle with the scoundrel Californians who cannot seem to get it through their heads that the newcomers are here to stay and not about to be pushed aside or trifled with.

The lanky fellow has a wife and three children parked down below. “Most everybody rode south with Colonel Fremont,” he says, “but some of us had to stay behind to protect the families.”

Two weeks ago he joined the volunteer militia out of San Jose. This patrol of four is about to give up the search for a band of troops rumored to be forming in these mountains. Stock has been stolen, so they’ve heard, though whether by Californians or by Indians, it’s hard to say.

Jim looks at the string of unsaddled horses.

“So you found the animals but not the troops.”

The man grins and looks away. “Let’s say these critters been repossessed.”

“They’re wily, them greasers,” the younger fellow says.

“Chickenshit’s what they mostly are,” says the third.

“They could be clear to Mexico City by now.”

Jim hears these things from the men in overcoats, not from their jacketed leader, whose name is Valentine. He keeps a brooding silence on the trail. The way he rides reminds Jim of someone. Though aloof, he sits in the saddle like a performer who insists that you notice him.

Later on, the lanky fellow tells Jim he was among those who made it to Fort Bridger in time to join the party led by Lansford Hastings. “I guess we come through just ahead of your bunch,” he says, with a grim, commiserating nod. “And I don’t have to tell you it was a tough old road. We lost some wagons. Just barely made it, if you want to know the truth. Then come to find out this fancy new republic he claimed he would lead weren’t nothing but hot air, since the United States Navy had got here first. But we did make it through, I’ll give him that.”

“And where is he now?” Jim asks.

“Long gone.”

“Gone where?”

“On south with the rest of ‘em. Some kind of officer, is what I heard. That Hastings, he don’t miss a step. I’d wager he’s halfway to Los Angeles.”

Jim feels the stab of envy. It irks him that Hastings is there while he is not, riding with Fremont’s battalion. It irks him more that the man has escaped interrogation. Jim has imagined him in some California town filling other heads with far-fetched promises. Jim has imagined finding him and throwing a rope around his neck and walking him up to that ridge above Bear Valley where they listened to the empty snowfields, so that Hastings might contemplate the miseries he led them to.

Part of him would head south right now in pursuit of the battalion, while part of him listens to the fellow pilgrim who followed the prophet from Fort Bridger and made it all the way across with his family intact. Could it be that Jim has misjudged Hastings and his cutoff? He wonders, as they ride, and he resigns himself to waiting. The war can’t last forever. In this uncertain land, in such uncertain times, he’ll have to wait a while longer to learn who to hold accountable for the suffering and the setbacks on the journey he thought he’d planned so well.

T
HE SUN IS
about to touch the farther rim of mountains when another rider overtakes them. He comes up from behind at a gallop, wearing high boots and the tight-waisted jacket of a Californian, although he is not a Californian. His face is brown, his cheekbones high, an Indian face, and on his head a wide blue cap, flat-topped and circular with a short bill. Sitting tall and straight, he rides next to Valentine, says a few words in Spanish, then drops back.

They have crossed a table of land between the tawny foothills and the bay’s dark curve, and now they come upon a low compound of tattered buildings. San Jose Pueblo still lies half a day’s ride south, beyond the bay. This is the Mission of St. Joseph, or what remains of it. Valentine decides they’ll spend the night here.

Along one side of the road, a lopsided row of adobe huts, half brick, half mud, are melting back into the soil from which they rose. They face a chapel, a long, squared-off barn of adobe brickwork, covered with flaking whitewash. The peaked roof is made of earth-red tiles, though many have slipped loose and lie broken. There is no bell tower, no steeple, no cross rising—only a door in the windowless facade, held loosely shut by a padlock on a rusty chain.

With a cryptic nod Valentine says, “There is the true enemy.”

Jim looks at him. “The Church?”

“Neglect. Indifference.”

Though the mission looks abandoned, in one of the shacks they find a woman who is willing to prepare some food, a very short woman, well under five feet, dark and round and hunched, with a braid of silver hair down her back. When Valentine speaks to her in Spanish about the food, her eyes grow bright. To the men he says, with a leer, “Her bed is too small for all of us together. But she will take us one at a time and guarantee our satisfaction.”

The men chuckle. The woman and a granddaughter of ten or so scurry around a cooking fire. The floor is dirt, swept and hard-packed. There is one small window. On the low benchlike table they set out platters of tortillas, beans cooked with beef chunks, and chili colorado. The men eat with their fingers. They eat as if they haven’t seen food in weeks, hot juice running across their hands, dripping onto the platters. They joke about the lack of forks and spoons.

“My daddy never even saw a fork till he was nine,” the lanky fellow says, “then it was just for pitching little bitty bales of hay in this field that was owned by a midget.”

It is near dusk when they lead their horses past the outbuildings that surround the chapel and through an unlocked gate in the low adobe wall. They pass long porticos outside the empty dormitories, collapsing sheds where thatched roofing has been torn by wind, and warehouses where olive oil and dried fruit and grains and wines were once stored. Staves lie scattered where the barrels fell apart among the shards of broken jugs. Rickety looms stand idle, gray with cobwebs and rotting yarn. Farther in, there is a courtyard covered with debris, twigs and limbs and birds’ nests blown from trees, strewn around a gurgling fountain, and beyond that the long-neglected vineyards and olive groves and orchards.

At night the place is ghostly. The fountain splash is like a light burning, as if someone just stepped away and might return at any moment. Jim peers into the falling darkness.