Snow Mountain Passage (23 page)

Home from the beach today I opened up my keepsake box and poked through the ancient souvenirs, my grandmother’s pincushion, and a lock of her hair I kept after she was buried on the trail, and a miniature doll I’d carried with me all the way across, and this curved bit of abalone shell I hold here in my lap, about the size of an eyeglass, silver-pink. High in the Sierra Nevada Range, when I was eight, it held me mesmerized. It still does, and sends me back. It sends me thinking back. I move it this way and that, and the light moves around its pearly surface. Sometimes I see a river there. Sometimes I see a swarm of silver clouds …

AS MANY HAVE
observed in the decades since that winter long ago, our party reached the summit trail twenty-four hours too late. Who can say which of our delays was the culprit? Who can say which of our numerous setbacks stole away the one last day that might have made the difference? Who could have known that the snow would come so much earlier than anyone expected?

On Captain Sutter’s mule, Salvador and I had climbed halfway to the summit. When the mule gave out we tried to push ahead on foot. I tried to step where he stepped, but my legs were too short, so he lifted me up in his arms. I was carrying Cash, and Salvador was carrying both of us. His arms were strong, and he held me tight and close, but his chest was heaving. The climb right along there was so steep he couldn’t make it and carry me and Cash too. All signs of the trail were gone. The summit was lost in gloomy overhang. Charlie Stanton still thought we could get across. He and Luis had been right behind us on the other mules. He told mama to stay put with us kids while he pushed on with the Indians.

After a while he came tumbling back down the slope yelling for everyone to get on their feet. If we kept climbing, he yelled, we could still make it before dark. A crowd of us had fallen down in the snow in a sprawl of bodies and bundles and baskets, exhausted from the altitude and the cold and what seemed like the longest day of the whole endless journey. Charlie ran around tugging and pulling at people, but no one had the will to move on.

Someone had set a pine tree on fire. A raggedy circle took shape around its crackling flame. Under another tree mama spread a blanket. The four of us children fell onto the blanket. She laid one on top of us and sat there hunched over, brushing back the flakes. She said, “Hush,” and I dozed off.

It seemed like only a moment later something woke me, though several hours must have passed because the sky was light. From up the mountain I heard a distant howling that I thought at first was a wolf. I listened. It wasn’t a wolf. It was too forlorn and human. Later on I would find out it was Salvador. His howling, groaning call became a chant, an incantation, the same lonesome words called out over and over again.

Mama’s eyes were open too, and we looked at each other, listening to this long lament for what the night had given us. She had stayed awake brushing the flakes away, but she hadn’t been able to hold back the snow. Her shoulders were white. All the blankets under all the trees were white. There was nothing to do but to retrace our steps back down to the shore of Truckee Lake, where we made camp as best we could.

In the years since then I have often thought about Charlie and Salvador and Luis standing at the summit on that stormy afternoon. They knew it was only twenty miles more to reach Bear Valley. If they’d kept going, the three of them could probably have made it through. They were all strong enough then. They knew the route. I still have to wonder what called them back to our bedraggled crowd of wanderers scattered across that slope like old limbs fallen from the juniper and sugar pine.

That lake—the one they renamed Donner—is about three miles long, set in a valley among the higher peaks. Toward the eastern end, in the trees, it was nice and level. The snow was sparse enough, men could get right to work putting up cabins. Charlie and the Indians and Milt Elliott worked on ours, felled the trees, fit the logs, laid limbs across the top and covered those with the hides of cattle people had already started to slaughter for meat. We had one half of a double cabin, with a wall between us and the other side, which was occupied by the Graves clan. It was a test, I have to say, being thrown in so close with people who’d been resenting us for so long. Mary Graves still mourned the loss of her beloved. Elizabeth, Uncle Billy’s wife, behaved as if mama herself was the one who sent the snow that blocked our path to the summit.

The fastest way to get shelter up, of course, was to make one wall serve two cabins. You had to share it with somebody or another, though in all other ways people seemed reluctant to share much else. When I think back, if we’d wanted to make the best of a bad situation, we could have tried to make a kind of village there in the mountains, a little community. But at the time nobody wanted it that way—as if the various families were so fed up with one another and the fix we were in, they’d rather live in solitude, like hermits.

At the lake camp there were three cabins, set so far apart whole days could go by when you didn’t see anyone but whoever lived right next to you. From our place to where the Breens and Kesebergs camped it was almost half a mile through the trees. It was another two hundred yards past the Breens’ place to where the Eddys were and the widow Murphy and her clan.

If mama had had her secret wish we would have shared a cabin with one of the Donner families. But they had fallen so far behind, their camp was five miles back. The front axle had broken on George Donner’s family wagon, which some folks saw as just one more sign of the curse that had fallen on our party. He and Jacob had to make a new one on the spot. They got out their tools and cut fresh timber and were shaping it to size, when George drove a chisel into his hand, tearing back a chunk of flesh. It shows you what a hurry they must have been in. Papa always said George was one of the handiest carpenters he’d ever known. It cost them another day, and there were no days to spare. When the next snow started, they set up some tents and lean-tos. And that was where they stayed, with their teamsters and some of the other single men, clear through to the end—a day’s hike farther back, on the banks of another creek that fed into the Truckee River. They were mama’s closest allies, the ones she and papa planned the trip with from the start, and we didn’t see any of the Donners for another month at least.

The first concern, for all of us, was food. By that time our family was worse off than just about anyone else. Back in April we’d been the most prosperous-looking family on the western trail. Now we were down to nothing. The Graveses, right next door, they still had a wagon and a dozen cattle or more, raggedy and bewildered, but still a supply of food that could get them quite a ways. By November every one of our cattle had wandered out into the Salt Desert or been picked off by Paiutes or starved to death somewhere. We had our clothes and some bedding and the final hoarded scraps of the provisions mama and papa had hoped would last six months and had just about lasted seven.

On the morning after we moved into the cabin, mama and I were walking back from the creek when she ran into Elizabeth Graves, who had just come around from behind their ramshackle wagon with her one-year-old daughter on her hip. They hadn’t said a word to each other in at least two weeks. mama steeled herself and spoke first.

“Good day, Elizabeth.”

She just nodded.

“Looks like we’ll be neighbors for a while,” mama said.

“Looks like it.”

“We finally got ourselves moved in.”

She nodded again and turned away.

Mama stepped around so she could see her face. “I’d be grateful if you would talk to me, Elizabeth.”

Mrs. Graves looked right at her with that blaming look. I could tell it took all mama’s will not to walk away.

“We don’t have much left,” mama said.

“Nobody does.”

“I’d like to buy some beef.”

“Not from us. There’s none to sell.”

“Our supplies are just about used up.”

“Whose fault is that?” asked Mrs. Graves.

“Whose fault?”

“Some of us have took care of what we brought and some of us have not.”

“My God, Elizabeth! I have four children here, four hungry children …”

“Mine are hungry too. And I’ve got twice as many mouths to feed. I got this baby here, helpless in the world without me to feed her …”

“What are we to do, then, if we run out?”

“Should have thought about that a whole lot sooner.”

Mrs. Graves was a big woman, bigger than mama, and a good deal older, by fifteen or twenty years, almost old enough to be her mother. Her tight face had that kind of look, a mother scolding a daughter. mama wasn’t used to being talked at like that. Usually she was the one did the scolding. It took her by surprise. A frightened, girlish look crossed her face, and Mrs. Graves went after her.

“You should have thought about that when you were building a wagon so big it wore out all your oxen hauling it through the mountains! You could use them oxen right about now, couldn’t you? If it wasn’t for you people slowing down the whole party, by this time we’d all be in California! Johnny would still be alive, too! Now we’re just plain stuck! Lord knows how long till we get outta here, and we can’t be feeding anybody but our own!”

The skin around her eyes had turned pink. Her mouth was twitching. I knew mama wanted to shout back at her, but she held her tongue and took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry for what your family has been through, I truly am. Someday I hope we can make it up to you …”

“Can you bring a dead man back to life?”

This time mama couldn’t hold it back. Her eyes started flashing. “You think James
meant
to kill Johnny?”

The mouth of Mrs. Graves twitched into a crooked smile. “Didn’t he pull a knife? It was him pulled the knife …”

“He loved John Snyder!” mama cried.

Her smile got bigger, a crazy and triumphant smile. “Why’d he stab him, then? If he loved Johnny so much, how could he stab him in the heart in cold blood and stand there and watch him die?”

“Don’t you think he took his punishment for that? Don’t you think we all have—with him gone off now … who knows where? You have any idea what that is like?”

Mama’s voice broke. Mrs. Graves looked away, blinking, maybe blinking back tears of her own, though I couldn’t quite tell, nor could I tell if these blinks were for John Snyder or for her daughter Mary Ann or for herself and for mama and all the other wives and mothers marooned up there.

When she spoke again her voice sounded different, gentler. “We ought not to be parting with any beef.”

Mama closed her eyes and gathered herself together. “I’m not asking for your best animals. Whatever you can spare. One or two. Just to get us through.”

Mrs. Graves looked out among the pines where the cattle stood, mournful and shivering, as if they had lost their way, with no idea where to turn or which way to move. Getting across the desert and up into these mountains had been harder on them than it had been on the human travelers. The pathetic creatures that had survived were all that stood between us and starvation. Mrs. Graves pointed toward the two worst-looking of the lot.

“We might could get along without them two.”

Mama looked at the cattle.

“Back in Independence,” said Mrs. Graves, “they’d draw twenty dollars each.”

“My Lord, Elizabeth, they can hardly stand up.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Mama pointed toward another clump of trees. “I’ll tell you what. Give me those two over there, and when we get to California I’ll pay you back with two fat healthy cattle, the best ones we can find.”

Mrs. Graves stood with her hands on her hips. Whatever softness she might have been feeling had hardened again.

“Up here,” she said, “the price is double.”

“Double what?”

“Seeing as how we have to wait a while to get paid back, it’ll be two cattle for each one of these.”

Mama felt betrayed. I wanted to kill Mrs. Graves just then. I think mama did too and might have tried it if she’d had a club or an axe close at hand. But she stood her ground, knowing there’d have to be something to eat if we were going to get through the next few days and weeks. She held back her tears and kept her shoulders straight.

“Thank you, Elizabeth. We do appreciate your generosity.”

Her voice was full of sarcasm and contempt, but Mrs. Graves didn’t seem to hear it. She had that crazy grin again, lopsided and victorious, as if she believed she had not only avenged John Snyder’s death but somehow righted all the wrongs of history. Then she went and got a little scrap of paper and called Mary and told her to write out a bill with a promise to pay back the Graves family four cattle for two.

At the time this seemed to be one more way to humiliate mama, as if her word wasn’t good enough and only a signed receipt would do. And maybe that’s what Mrs. Graves had in mind. But as I look back now, my heart fills, thinking how that little piece of paper was also an odd and twisted form of hope. All that winter, even through the darkest times, as those who had more kept trading and selling things to those who had less, they would write out receipts and IOUs, as if there were no doubt at all that on some future day beyond the snow, beyond the mountains, all such obligations would be settled and all accounts put right.

AROUND THIS SAME
time William Eddy borrowed a rifle and started hunting. If there was anything out there, he would find it. He hated to come home with nothing. One day he brought back a coyote, another day an owl. Then we got word he had taken a grizzly bear. He had shot it twice and clubbed it to death. The men who went and helped him haul it out of the woods said it weighed eight hundred pounds or more. Eddy was a hero, and our hopes soared. A kill like this from time to time would solve half our problems! Part of the meat came to our family, thanks to him, and we lived off it for many days.

That’s how it was for the first month at the lake camp. We were wilderness gypsies, making our way from week to week.

Charlie Stanton and the Indians stayed in our cabin then. mama didn’t have to feed them—they foraged on their own—but at night they were inside, along with Milt and our whole family, in a room no bigger than our woodshed back home. I’d never been that close to snoring men, nor had I known nights as dark as some of our nights there at the lake. We had no windows, just one low door, and a chimney to let the smoke out. At that altitude the stars are so bright and numerous they can make a silver blanket across the sky, but in our cabin you could never glimpse the stars. No moonlight leaked in. Sometimes the wind would come up strong and whistle through the cracks and chinks and blow out the coals, and then it was as dark as the whale’s insides must have been for Jonah.