Snow Mountain Passage (37 page)

That showdown by the Humboldt, it is an ancient drama from another land, so close, yet so far away. As he plays those days against the dark news Bill Eddy brings, the squabbles that divided them seem lacking in all substance. Out in the desert, men and women faulted Jim for veering south of Salt Lake, as if they themselves were held at gunpoint and forced to follow him. And there’s another day he wishes he could live again, when they gathered at the Little Sandy to decide which route was best. He has met men with families who headed north that day, along the proven route, who made it through ahead of the snow, ahead of the rain. How he wishes he had joined them. He hears the voice of the Mountain Man from the Wyoming campfire last July.

I’d take the Fort Hall route and never leave it. That way you’re sure to get there. And isn’t getting there the main idea?

He’s learned something none of them could have known back then. Lansford Hastings is no prophet, no one to lead you anywhere, just another enterprising rascal who got here earlier than most. Old-timers laugh at the mention of his book, wag their heads and say he ought to be ashamed, feeding people such extravagance. Everyone seems to know he has land along the Sacramento, with a town laid out where towns have never been. The more folks he can persuade to travel, the faster those lots will sell. That’s why Hastings wrote his book, they say, and Jim berates himself for ever listening to such a charlatan, heading out across an untried route where wagons had never gone. He takes the blame for that day too and hears the truth of the accusing voices.

You’re the one got us into this mess.

You’ve cast a shadow over the wagon party, Reed.

You’re the one deserves a whipping …

What folly! He sees it now. And yet, why should he fault himself alone. Didn’t the company take a vote? All agreed to share the risk. The Donners. The Breens. The Murphy clan. Keseberg. Eddy too. And Mac. And Charlie Stanton from Chicago with his derby hat and his burgher’s paunch, now left in the snow to freeze and surely be devoured by wolves…. In times like these, who is to blame for what? Whose foolishness is more regrettable? Whose pride? Whose fear? Whose hunger? How do you weigh one grievous act against another and say this is worse than that, or more deserving of revenge?

AS THE SUN
nears the treetops, the air cools fast. Eddy reaches for his boots. It pains him to pull them up around his welts and scars. It takes a long time, and he refuses help. With a broken grin he says, “I need me some moccasins.”

His body has been shattered, but his spirit is intact. Jim wishes he had ten men like him for the trek back across the mountains, wishes Eddy could join them now, but knows he can’t, not yet.

J
OHNSON THE RANCHER
appears at dusk, riding with two Indian vaqueros. He is a bandy-legged horseman, uneasy in the saddle, glad to have a reason to dismount, to embrace these returning comrades. The ruined felt hat still looks as if his horse has been chewing on it. Tobacco has stained his red beard and moustache the color of mahogany. There is brandy on his breath and the aroma of a rotting tooth. But he is not the same. Something about these survivors who staggered out of the high country has shocked him and softened him.

“Toughest people I have ever personally known or heard of,” he tells them, his eyes warm with pity and admiration.

The welfare of the stranded ones obsesses Johnson now. He says he wouldn’t wait for whatever’s coming up from the fort. Time has run out. He has cattle here. “As many as you boys need. You tell me. Flour, too. You got the guts to head back in there one more time, I’ll give you anything you want.”

When the first rescue party started out two weeks ago, he tells them, there were fourteen men on horseback and a string of pack animals. Next thing he knew, Billy Eddy and another fellow came back with all the horses. Two others stayed at Mule Springs, thirty miles in, with a cache of food. At Bear Valley three more turned around, just gave it up, Johnson says, lost their will when they found themselves on foot with fifty pounds to pack and the worst country still ahead.

“I guess they got rained on and hailed on and snowed on. Climbing in new snow with all that weight, it just wore ‘em down. The leader upped their pay to five dollars a day, guaranteed by Captain Sutter and the good faith and credit of the United States Army, and that’s a pretty damn good wage, you ask me, and even that wasn’t enough to keep ‘em going. I can’t fault ‘em, Jim. They are better men than me, just making it as far as they did.”

The next morning his vaqueros bring in a small herd of longhorns. Jim and Mac shoot five of the fattest, which are skinned and gutted by the deft ranch hands, up to their elbows in the gore. The beef of five cattle is cut into strips and laid on racks to smoke above long beds of glowing coals. From his storeroom Johnson brings forth sacks of wheat to be ground into flour. His Indians pound it down with mortars. Ounce by ounce it is run through coffee grinders borrowed from the emigrant wagons. They all take turns cranking the little handles through the day and night, Jim and Mac and Johnson and Bill Eddy and the Indians wrapped in rabbitskin cloaks who do not yet know what happened in the mountains, who will not hear any version of Eddy’s story for many weeks to come, who feel emergency in the night air and work side by side with the whites, lit by an orange glow from beneath the racks of smoking meat.

Two days later the rest of Jim’s party rides up from the river, and still there has been no sign of the cargo team.

They move on, heading farther east along the Bear, seventeen men, their mules and horses laden now with bundles of jerked beef, hundreds of pounds of flour. By midmorning they’re unbuttoning coats, unwrapping scarves. An eerie perspiring warmth raises their hopes a notch. An early spring might somehow ease the plight of those beyond the summit. Maybe these past two weeks have melted a track so that animals can make it after all.

They push into the foothills, where snow has receded some. But not far enough. At Mule Springs it’s three feet deep, and worse from there on in, according to the young fellows watching the cache of flour and beef. No one else from the first rescue has yet come back, they say. “You’re the first ones we’ve seen hereabouts in twelve, fourteen days.”

Jim leaves half the horses behind, some packets of food, along with three men to tend to the horses and raise some shelters for the emigrants he now expects to see at every turn and rise.

Below Bear Valley they hit chest-high drifts. The animals snort and strain in protest. Knowing it can only get worse, Jim sends all the horses back, with two more men. Later that day another man turns around when his eyes go bad. They are running with pus, and he can barely see. When yet another gives it up, from exhaustion and discouragement, two men sit down to rest, saying they ought to all head back to Mule Springs and wait there until the first rescue team comes out. But Jim and Mac can tolerate no more waiting. They have snowshoes this time. They can’t let themselves be stopped by heavy drifts, or second thoughts.

“There’s only seven of them ahead of us,” Jim says, as he takes in each man with unblinking, urgent eyes, “and seven can’t do it all. There could be sixty still waiting at the camps. That’s a lot of people. No telling what shape they’re in, since the strongest have already come ahead. It’s mostly youngsters now, you see. And they’ll need every hand. We have to stick it out. God will bless each man who sticks it out.”

He lets this hang in the air. The two who sat down are standing again, hoisting their enormous loads.

“We’re with you, Jim.”

“Ain’t no time to sit around the fire.”

The party forms up again. After so much planning and purchasing and gathering of goods, they are eleven men without horses, a web-footed caravan, each packing as much food as he can bear. They have a base camp behind them and a hope that the
Sacramento’s
cargo of tenting and trousers and medicines and beans will find its way from the fort to the ranch and up to Mule Springs and be there waiting.

Through silent pines they plod along the same route Jim and Mac followed in November, and Jim listens as he did the first time for any sound ahead, for a hiss of creek water below the snowpack. It is like a dream of that other trip, same trail, same sloping stands of timber, same yearning to see a figure move against the white, though the snow is deeper. Charlie and his Indians came this way with their loaded mules, and it occurs to him that those three are riding again, right now. His neck hairs prickle at the thought that they are somewhere close by, watching his every move. He shakes his head and tells himself he has to get more sleep.

L
YING IN THE
snow Salvador did not feel the snow. It could have been day. It could have been night. Lying on his back, he had no power in his arms or legs or hands.

He opened his eyes and saw the one called Foster, standing above them with the rifle and staring at Luis. His eyes were crazy. Foster’s face looked like he was shouting, but his voice was small and cracked and faraway.

“Don’t move!” he said, waving the barrel. “Don’t try nothing! You’re damn near dead anyhow, so what difference does it make? You two hear me now? You hear me?”

Salvador closed his eyes and waited and listened, and after a while he was a young man again, and he saw the face of his father on the day he told Salvador not to go back to the mission called St. Joseph. His father knew that place. He had worked for the padres. Then he had run away with his wife and sons, run back to the village by the river. Do not listen to them, his father had said. Do not listen to the padres.

Salvador had wanted the clothes. He wanted a buckle made of silver. He had seen the buckles on the belts of the vaqueros. He wanted jingling spurs to wear and a hat with a wide brim and a leather band.

“These things are very costly,” his father had said. “You cannot trade for necklaces and robes of rabbit skin. The whites want more than that.”

Salvador had waited, wondering what this meant.

“Much more,” his father had said.

It was a grave warning, but Salvador did not hear the meaning of the words. Not then. His eagerness was too great. Now he heard, lying in the snow. Now he knew. “They want your life,” his father was saying. “For all these things, they want your life.”

He saw Jesus again on the cross above the altar in the mission church, in flickering candlelight, the pale skin, the pale and bleeding hands out wide. He saw shining robes and wings floating all around the hands, feathered wings. He saw the padre’s fingers push a white wafer toward his mouth, said to be the flesh of the one who hung upon the cross. But how? Salvador did not have words to ask the padre how one man can eat the flesh of another man, even if he is a god in the shape of a man. Bread is bread. Flesh is flesh.

In the chapel of the Mission of St. Joseph he could not ask. Now he did not have to ask. Here in the mountains he had seen men eat flesh. White men ate white flesh. Into their bodies they took meat of another’s body. And with the meat, the spirit. In his hunger Salvador ate flesh too. The hunger made him crazy, as crazy as the whites. Today they wanted his flesh. They wanted his spirit. Foster wanted it.

This is what the padre said. This is what his father tried to tell him. They wanted his life. You eat the bear, you eat the bear’s life. You eat the elk, you eat the elk’s life. And the bear is you. The elk is you …

He heard the first shot. He did not move. He could not move. He had no strength. His arms and legs lay still, and the snow was warm. As warm as a blanket. He listened for some sound from Luis. Nothing. Luis was gone. He heard only Foster, breathing. He felt the barrel upon his forehead. He felt its icy touch. At the far end of the rifle he saw the eyes small as a raccoon’s eyes in firelight. He did not hear the second shot.

S
OME
people say the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. Old sayings like that are easy to quote years later when you’ve had some time to think back over your life. You don’t quote them when you’re in the middle of that darkest hour and cannot see a flicker of dawn peeping through in any direction. Nobody was quoting it at the lake camp around about the middle of February, when every one of us was wasting away, some seeing things, others going blind. Keseberg’s baby boy had died, and William Eddy’s wife, Eleanor. In our family all that stood between us and starvation was three hides mama had conserved, and one morning Mrs. Graves showed up saying those hides belonged to her.

She was claiming them, she said, until mama could settle her debt. She had worked herself into a fit. This time mama was not to be outshouted. They stood in the snow screaming at each other, pulling those smelly cattle hides this way and that. mama finally tore two of them loose. Elizabeth still held on to one. She had brought along her seventeen-year-old son, who was as skinny as a stick, like the rest of us, but mama didn’t have enough strength left to go after Elizabeth and her son too. They dragged that one hide back to their cabin, and mama set to work scraping at the two we had left.

After that I remember sitting still a lot. My mind would simply go away. I don’t know how many days went by. It was about the time our last square of hide was boiled up that we heard a voice from somewhere far off, a voice we didn’t recognize. We were down inside the Breens’ cabin, with just the fireplace light. A little streak of late afternoon was leaking down the stairwell. I didn’t say anything. I had been seeing angels in the darkness and hearing them sing beautiful songs. Sometimes they would call to me, and in my mind I would answer. I listened for this voice to come again. And it did.