Snow Mountain Passage (35 page)

T
HE SKIES ABOVE
the bay grow heavy, gray as lead. Hour by hour the moisture gathers, the impending rain. Another night passes. Another day.

In a silvery morning light two vessels sail out of Yerba Buena cove. Sutter’s launch, the
Sacramento,
is loaded with tenting and beans, thick blankets and guernsey shirts, woolen stockings, frying pans, camp kettles, coils of line. Crates of rations have been transferred from the fleet’s stores, enough to feed ten men for twenty days. Beside it a smaller schooner ferries Jim and a crew and three more volunteers who signed on once they knew the payroll was guaranteed. For a while they hold the same course, past White Island, sometimes called Alcatraz, for the pelicans that rest and hover, past Angel Island, on past the point called Tiburon, named for sharks seen cruising there.

They pass between jutting peninsulas and into the northern bulge of water called the Bay of San Pablo. The juttings seem to close behind them, as if they’re on a landlocked lake, and the hills above Yerba Buena are out of sight. Here the cargo vessel heads east, toward the delta, while Jim and his crew bear due north toward the mouth of Sonoma Creek. It’s drizzling now, a pelting drizzle that feels like sleet in the hard wind across the water.

An incoming tide helps them guide upstream, winding through marshland, miles of tule and grassy sloughs. At one edge of a puddle-dotted mudflat, gulls with folded wings hunker against the wind. On both sides of the creek, close-packed tule stalks lean like fields of wheat.

By the time they reach the little wharf,
el embarcadero,
they have left the wind behind. They hire two carts to haul their packs and weapons and foodstuffs, and in a spattering rain walk the last four miles to Sonoma, which sits at the base of a round and green-skinned mountain. Olive trees grow here. Grapevines hang from the balconies of well-kept adobes. There is another mission chapel, white and stark, though not as white as the heap of cattle bones and longhorn skulls in the plaza, made whiter by the downpour that now begins as the clouds release their burden, a straight-down rain that promises to fall for days.

Above the bones, the Stars and Stripes hangs damply from a high pole in the center of the plaza of the last town in Alta California. The adobe barracks were built to house the troops defending Mexico’s most northerly frontier. Now they house the U.S. garrison. A lieutenant in charge is pleased to see an order from the Commandant instructing him to turn over ten horses with their saddles and all necessary gear. He is happy to have something to do. He wants to help. He too has heard the latest news. The story of the Snowshoe Party’s fate has leapfrogged across the land, from rider to rider, from wagon to wagon, from ranch to ranch.

This lieutenant is friendly with Bill McCutcheon and believes he saw him an hour ago at a blacksmith’s shop right down the road. “He’s talked about you, Mr. Reed.”

Jim finds him shoeing a horse, his huge frame hunched above the upturned hoof. With precise taps, firm but gentle, he drives the nail. Jim waits until Mac looks up, until the face opens in a broad and eager grin.

“My goodness, Jim! Why didn’t you say something?”

“Always a pleasure to watch a talented man at work.”

“You’re about a month late, you know.”

“I got here about as quick as I could. There’s four men with me.”

“Well, I got five.”

His face has filled out. He has put on weight. His cheeks are pink, no longer from malaria but from a bursting health. Jim can see there is no fever in his body now, nor in his eyes, though the eyes are burdened in another way. No need to ask how much Mac knows, or if he knows his Amanda is among those who made it out. Nor is there any need to mention what they say she and others had to do to stay alive. All this is in his face. And yet whatever Mac knows has not defeated him. He has his health back now, his full strength. Jim can feel it in his arms when Mac takes him in a bear hug. Holding him like a long-lost brother, Jim remembers why he trusts this large and self-effacing man. Mac has a power of limb that takes on every task with relish and also with a sense of duty, a sense of honor. Since Jim left Valentine behind, honor has been on his mind, and what it means to ride with someone you can trust. The trouble with Valentine is not his posturing, it’s his lack of honor. What a relief to be in Mac’s company again. Jim realizes he would trust his life with this man.

When they set out the next morning, he feels on track at last, heading in the right direction. Jim is like the lonely sailor in a foreign port who runs into a fellow from his own hometown. With Mac at his side, some wide loop comes round upon itself. Though many show compassion for those caught in the mountains, no one truly knows what Jim left behind, no one but Mac, who also has a family waiting. It is odd. By the time they reached the Humboldt, Jim had come to loathe the wagon party and all its petty factions. Now, though he dreads what he may find, there is a sense of finally heading back to where he belongs.

MAC WAS THREE
weeks at Sutter’s, sweating through the fever one last time. Since crossing to Sonoma he has not rested, working for room and board with a local rancher and roaming all the valleys up this way, looking for recruits. Just a week ago a local citizens’ committee set aside some cash to go toward wages. As Jim and Mac push north and east, the knowledge of their coming flies in front of them, like an invisible messenger.

In Napa there is a miller from Missouri who says he has dreamed of people waiting by a frozen lake. In this dream a tall woman is surrounded by her hungry children, and over them looms a perpendicular wall of rock. He has also dreamed of a man riding up to his ranch house on a mission to rescue these same stranded ones. The miller welcomes Jim with wonder and humility and offers him provisions already set aside and waiting.

“I told my wife you’d be here,” says the miller, as if speaking to a saint. “And now you’ve come.”

They pick up four men and some spare horses and move farther east, climbing through wooded foothills into a tangle of gulches and arroyos jagged with upthrust granite slabs. The trail is slippery, as it drops into a creek canyon, with damp oak groves where moss hangs in clumps from barren limbs otherwise stripped for winter. Rocky walls hold back the rain. For a while the clouds above are white as cotton shirts, and the riders pass through a luminous, dripping fog laced with shrouds and tendrils of toplit moss.

Where the creek widens, the canyon opens out to a valley puddled everywhere, slick with grassy mudflats. They find the outpost of another rancher, who also says he has been expecting them, though he won’t say why. They spend the night and leave early with another mule, another horse. A day’s ride north, in the next valley, they find a family Jim knew on the trail last summer huddled inside a new log cabin, caulking holes where the rain trickles in, watching their newly claimed acreage turn to muck. They’ve had no company in months. Jim brings them their first news of the southern campaign. Here more horses join the party and a couple of men who would like somehow to celebrate the conquest and would rather ride for pay than sit here soaking.

A swollen creek flows past the cabin, spilling into the valley of the Sacramento, sometimes called the Great Valley, where Jim and his party again bear north and east, riding hard to make the rendezvous. Their foe now is water, falling from the sky, filling up every low spot and marshy field in the wide, wet expanse before them. No hills to climb, no rises or promontories. What had looked to him like a sculpted park when he descended out of the Sierras last October, has become an endless slough. While it drenches them from above, the water is sometimes halfway up the legs of their horses, sometimes to the bellies. They splash through bogs and mudholes, seventeen men and forty animals, and come at last to the banks of the surging confluence of all the creeks and rivers that channel water from the mountain ranges east and west to make the broad stream that divides the valley.

Jungles of bare-limbed trees line both banks. Where the river bends to make a natural cove in the high embankment, an American rancher has cleared the brush back and built a dock. The cargo vessel was to meet them here and ferry them across. But no vessel is waiting. The dock is almost submerged. The river seems to be two hundred yards across, a brown flood slick with patches of chocolate sheen.

The river is so long and full there’s no place to ford. Jim and Mac look out across the water. Half a day from Johnson’s now, and they can’t get to it.

“Lord have mercy,” says Mac.

“What a mess. Worst mess I’ve ever seen.”

“Now what?”

“I guess we wait.”

“For how long?”

“They were supposed to be by here yesterday.”

“You think they’ve come and gone?”

“They wouldn’t do that.”

“Damn, Jim, we have to get across.”

“We’ll send a couple of men down toward Sutter’s to see if they’ve been heard from.”

“We still have to get across.”

“Hell, Mac, we all know that. Can you walk on water? Just go on out there and show us how.”

“I can walk on water. If I take a mind to. It’s all the rest of you will need the boats.”

“That’s right. If those boys don’t show up, we might have to build ourselves some kind of boat.”

“We built rafts a time or two, coming across the plains. I guess I could build a boat.”

“There’s fellas with us that have built hide boats.”

“Damn that schooner for being late.”

“It’s no wonder,” Jim says. “Look how that current moves.”

He gazes downstream. In water like this the cargo vessel could still be fifty miles away. How long should they wait? Every day is crucial now. Every hour. Should they try to cross and keep on going? Suppose they made it to the other side? What then? Why press on without all that cargo so carefully assembled, the salt pork, the flour, the long underwear, the oilcloth …?

Well back from the rising flow they make camp, giving thanks that the rain has stopped. From the rancher’s shed they scavenge some dry wood to start a fire. In a marshy flat half a mile away a herd of elk stand grazing in the gray light of late afternoon. The hunters go out with rifles and bring back two, strip off the hides and butcher the carcasses. While they work, the sky begins to open for the first time in days, just a slit to let the sun through. Lifted entrails gleam in the unexpected light, and spirits rise at the prospect of fresh meat for dinner.

Watching their thick steaks turn and sizzle, they talk about building boats, how to take limbs off these trees along the bank and tie elk hides to the frame, whether or not you can pole across a river such as this, how to move the horses. They believe that they can do it, and their belief eases Jim’s burden of decision.

“By God, boys,” he says, “you are a breed apart. These deeds will not be forgotten.”

“We ain’t done ‘er yet, cap’n,” one fellow says. “Better wait to see who sinks and who swims out there.”

A few men laugh. Jim reaches into his saddlebag and withdraws two quarts of aguardiente.

“Don’t know about you, but I could use a snort. We been riding pretty hard.”

“Why, cap’n,” the fellow says, “you found those bottles just in time.”

There’s low laughter and muttered jokes as the bottles circulate. After a couple of sips Mac stands up, massive above the others, feeling the drink’s first rush.

“I got to tell you boys something while it’s on my mind. My woman is over there at Johnson’s, hardly any ways at all now. But our baby girl, far as I know she’s still up there at the lake. When we set out last spring she wasn’t much past one year old. I figured we’d be settled in somewhere long before this, ya see. I always figured she’d have her second birthday out here in California. Now it’s coming up again and I guess I want to make sure she gets this little geegaw I picked up at Sutter’s some time back. That’s why I got to get across this here river. And God’s gonna help us do it, too. You hear me now?”

He takes in the circle of faces gathered by the fire, then reaches inside his coat and from its pocket draws the tiny wooden whistle made smaller and more childlike in his calloused hand. It dangles from a rawhide thong. The men regard it with a kind of awe, as if Mac is an illusionist who produced this curiosity out of thin air. They watch him lift the whistle to his lips and blow, and they listen to the high, plaintive penetrating call that drifts out across the puddled marshlands.

No one can speak. The men are embarrassed by this naked show of sentiment and the place inside each of them awakened by the lonesome note. It is dusk. High clouds to the west are edged with purple-pink that tints the river, the myriad ponds and water holes. It tints the bearded faces, adding to the spell.

Mac too seems embarrassed by the mood he has created. He puts away the whistle and looks around again. As if to ward off the whistle’s call, he extends his hands, palms out, and tilts his head back, facing the sky.

In a loud and overly theatrical voice he intones, “I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. I am no orator, as Brutus is …”

“Aw shit, Mac,” one man calls out, “don’t start that tonight.”

The big voice rises. “But as you know me all, a plain, blunt man what loves my friend …”

“Plain and blunt,” says someone else. “You got that part right.”

He is bellowing now. “For I have neither wit nor words nor worth, action nor utterance, nor the power of speech …”

They are all grateful for this absurd display, for the chance to spend their feelings some other way. They throw their hats at him. They throw small sticks and tell him to sit down.

“Ol’ Mac, he missed his calling.”

“Yes, sir, he should’ve stayed in St. Louis, where they love his kind a talk.”

“If he was a horse I’d shoot him.”

“It’s this rotgut done it to him. He can’t have no more.”

“Fie on thee,” says Mac with a bashful grin, satisfied, reaching for the bottle. “Fie, fie, I say. A pox then on all your houses.”

THAT NIGHT COLD
stars are sprinkled across the heavens. Next morning the skies are blue again, and Mac’s prediction has come true. A schooner is moored to the rancher’s dock. To Jim, at first, it is an apparition, a dream boat, too good to be real. In brown eddies it sways, as if sent from heaven, or from wherever reside the powers watching over this journey. It is a cargo vessel, broad-decked, with a shallow draft, but not the one they expected. It belongs to a pilot who works the river between this ranch and the fort, or so he says.