Wolf Willow, Page 24

  Once, as they bounced across the flats, Slippers leaned out and shouted something down to Buck, leading the single-file walkers. An unintelligible word came down the line, the wheels beside them rolled faster, and they were forced into a trot to keep up. Rusty staggered sideways in the broken snow, kept himself from falling under the wheel by a wild shove against the wagon box, lurched and was yanked forward into step so roughly that it kinked his neck. The line of them jogged, grunting in cadence, trotting awkwardly armless, wrapped in their blankets, beside the ponderous wagon. Eventually Buck shouted up at the seat, and they slowed to a walk, but the run had done them good. The blood was out at their edges and extremities again. Rusty felt it sharp and stinging in his cheeks.

  Up ahead, revealed and half covered, and revealed and nearly obscured, moving steadily through the lateral whip and crawl of the storm, went the whitened horse, the humped white figure of Ray Henry. Once when Rusty looked he was down, walking and leading the pony. A few minutes later he was up again. The plain stretched on, interminable. Rusty dropped his head turtle-fashion, wiped an edge of the blanket across his leaking and freezing nose, concentrated on putting his feet precisely into the tracks of Ed Spurlock. Dreamlike and hypnotic, body moved, brain moved, but both sluggishly, barely awake. Life was no more than movement, than dull rhythm. Eyes were aware only of the drooping rope, the alternating feet ahead, and once in a while the glimpse of Ray Henry moving through the blizzard out at the edge of visibility. Walking or riding, he went with the inevitability of a cloud driving across the sky; to look up and find him not there would have been a shock and a dismay. And yet he went ambiguously too, something recognized or remembered from an old charade or pantomime or tableau, Leader or Betrayer, urgent, compulsive, vaguely ominous, so that one hurried to keep him in sight and cursed him for the way he led on, and on.

  In the thudding hollows of the skull, deep under the layered blanket, the breath-skimmed sheepskin, inside the stinging whiskered face and the bony globe that rode jolting on the end of the spine, deep in there as secret as the organs at the heart of a flower or a nut inside shell and husk, the brain plodded remotely at a heart’s pace or a walking pace, saying words that had been found salutary for men or cattle on a brittle and lonesome night, words that not so much expressed as engendered what the mind felt: sullenness, fear, doubt.

  Up ahead the foreman moved steadily, dusky stranger, silent companion, and if he did not “bend upon the snowshoe with a long and limber stride,” he had a look as tireless and unstoppable as if he had in fact been that Spirit Hunter, that Walker of the Snow, one of the shapes with which the country deluded frightened men.

  The wind had changed, and instead of driving at their legs under the box between the spokes was coming much more from behind them. Rusty felt Little Horn’s hand on his back, but when he turned to see what was wanted, Little Horn shook his head at him from under the blanket hood: only a stumble, or the wind hustling him along too fast. The pour of dry snow from the wheel blew on forward instead of sideward into their faces. Except for his hands and his impossible leaky nose, he was not cold. They must have come more than half of the three miles that would bring them to the river, where there would be protection among the willows and under the cutbanks, and where they might even choose to make some sort of shelter of the wagon and the tent—build a big wood fire and thaw out and wait for the storm to blow by. He hoped they would; he did not relish the thought of turning into the wind, even in the more sheltered river valley.

  He saw The Walker coming back, bent double, his face turned aside. When he reached them his pony turned tail to wind and Jesse cramped the Clydes around and they stood for a brief conference. It seemed that the wind had not changed. The horses simply wouldn’t head across it, and kept swinging. That meant they would hit the river lower down, and have a longer upwind pull to Bates.

  Only Ray’s eyes showed through the mask-like slot of a felt cap that came clear down around his throat. To Jesse and Slip he whisper-shouted something that Rusty could not hear, and mounted and rode off again. The wagon crunched after him, the segmented ten-footed worm beside it took up its lockstep. Deafened by fur and wool, anesthetized by cold and the monotony of walking, the next-to-last segment, joined to the segments before and behind by a waist of half-inch hard-twist rope, plodded on, thinking its own dim thoughts, which were concerned with cosmic injustice and the ways of God to man.

  Why couldn’t there be, just at this moment, the lucky loom of an unknown or unexpected cowcamp, the whiff of lignite smoke on the wind? Why, just once, could not rescue come from Heaven, instead of having to be earned foot by foot? He dreamed of how warmth would feel in the face, the lovely stink of four or five shut-in cowboys in a hot shack, and he sucked and sniffed at the drooling of his mouth and nose, a hateful, inescapable oozing that turned to ice in his beard and on his lips.

  Head down, he plodded on, one step and then another. Once as he put his foot in the print that Spurlock’s foot had just left, he caught the heel of Spurlock’s overshoe with his toe, and saw Spurlock fling an irritable snarl over the shoulder. Oh, the hell, he thought. Can’t you be decent even when we’re like this? The rope tugged tight around him, he hopped to get in step again, walking carefully, left, right, left, right, wiping his leaking nose against the blanket’s edge and feeling slick ice there.

  Sancta Maria, speed us!

  The sun is falling low;

  Before us lies the valley

  Of the Walker of the Snow!

  Later—hours or days, for time whipped and snaked past in unceasing movement like the wind and the trails of drift, and all its proportions were lost—Rusty bumped into Spurlock and an instant later felt Little Horn bump into him in turn. The wagon had stopped, and Ray was back, leading his pony by the bridle. His visor of felt was iron-stiff with ice, so that he pulled it down and craned his neck and lifted his chin to shout over it to Jesse, perched on the high seat beside Slip with the buffalo robe folded up around him under the armpits. Rusty, squinting to see what they were looking at, felt the sticky drag of ice on his lashes as if his eyes were fringed with crickets’ legs, and saw that ahead of them the land fell away beyond an edge where the grass was blown bare. Ahead or below, the ground-hugging trails of drift were gone, leaving only air murky as dusk, with fitful swirls and streaks of dark at its bottom which he realized were brush. He dragged at his wet nose. The river.

  But the brief, gratified expectation he had that this would be an easier stage lasted no more than two minutes. The hills dipping down to the floodplain were gullied and washed, and drifted deep. Even with Ray riding ahead to try the going, the wheels dropped into holes and hollows, rose over knobs; the wagon canted at perilous angles, groaning and jolting its way slanting, with the wind almost dead behind it. Pulling out wide from the rocking wagon, the men were caught in the open wind and blown along. Rusty saw the Clydes braced back in the breeching, their hairy fetlocks coming up out of the snow rattling with balls of ice, and their muscular haunches bunching under the blankets, and then here came Slip digging out from under the buffalo robe to throw his weight on the brake. Ice against ice, shoe slid on tire and held nothing; the wagon rolled heavily down upon the Clydes, who braced lower, slipping. The walkers jumped aside and then, as the wagon lumbered past them, jumped to the endgate to try to hold it back. Its ponderous weight yanked them along, their dug heels plowed up snow. They could feel it under their hands getting away, they knew it without Jesse’s yell that snapped off on the wind above their heads. Jesse rose half to his feet, braced between seat and box. The wagon jackknifed sharply as he swung the Clydes along the sidehill to slow them. The left side dropped down, the right heaved up, and with a neat final motion like the end of a crack-the-whip the wagon tipped over and cast off Slip in a spidery leap down the hillside. Jesse, hanging to the tilted seat to the end, slid off it to land on his feet with the reins in one hand and the lantern in the other. By the time Ray discovered what had happened and rode back, he had
unhooked the Clydes and got them quiet. The wagon lay with its load bulging out of the lashed cover, the busy wind already starting to cover it with snow.

  Rusty would not have believed that in that wind and cold it was possible to work up a sweat, but he did. It was a blind and furious attack they launched on the tipped wagon, unloading almost everything and carrying it down to more level ground where the abrupt hill aproned off, stacking it there while they floundered back to dig and pry at the jackknifed wheels. Ray hitched on with his saddle horse, they heaved while their held breath burst out of them in grunts and straining curses, until they righted it, and straightened the wheels, and a spoke at a time got them turning; three of them carrying the tongue and the others ready to push or hold back, they angled it down onto leveler and smoother ground.

  There they wasted not a second, but hitched up and loaded as if they raced against time. When the muffled-up figure of Spurlock started to heave a saddle up, and slipped and fell flat on its back with the saddle on its chest, Rusty coughed out one abrupt bark of laughter, but no one else laughed. Panguingue and Buck picked the saddle off Spurlock’s chest and tossed it aboard, and before Spurlock was back on his feet Little Horn and Buck were starting to tie together the worm of walkers. Up where Jesse and Slip were fussily folding the buffalo robe around and under them it looked bitterly cold, but down where Rusty stood it was better. He could feel his hands all the way, his feet all but the tips of the toes. Where the fur cap covered it, his forehead was damp, and under the ponderous layers of clothing and blanket his body itched a little with warmth. He was winded, and dead tired, and his shoulder ached as if the fierce haul and heave of the unloading and loading had pulled it from its socket, but the dismay of the accident was worked off. They were all right, they would make it yet.

  He twisted to help Little Horn tuck the blanket-ends under the rope, and at that moment Spurlock, moving awkwardly in front, put his foot down crooked, reeled against him, landed on his foot and anchored him there, and bore him helplessly over in the drift. If it had been anyone else, Rusty might have laughed, reassured and warmed by work as he was; but since it was Spurlock he rose to one knee anticipating trouble. He was not wrong; the hand he put on Spurlock’s arm was knocked off angrily, and through the layers of the muffler the words were savage: “... the Christ you’re doing!”

  The boy’s anger blew up instant and hot, and he bounded to his feet freeing his elbows from the blanket. They faced each other, tied together by four feet of rope like gladiators coupled to fight to the death, and then the shadow above them made itself felt and Rusty looked up to see Ray Henry sitting hands-on hom and looking down on them.

  “What’s trouble?” the foreman said.

  The unintelligible growl that came out of Spurlock’s muffled mouth could have told him nothing, but Rusty pulled the collar away from his chin and said passionately, “Look, put me somewhere else in this line! I’m not going to stand for ...”

  “What’s trouble?” Ray said again.

  “He keeps stumbling around and falling down and then blaming me ...”

  “If he falls down, help him up,” Ray croaked, and kneed his frosted pony around and rode off in front. The wheels jerked, the icy axles shrieked, their feet automatically hopped to get in step, and they were walking again. Rusty pulled his chin back inside the collar and went sullenly, furious at the injustice of the rebuke, and alert to make the most of any slightest slip or stumble ahead of him.

  Down in the bottoms among the willows the wind was less, and they could bring the horses to turn halfway into it, feeling for the river. But if the wind was less, the snow was deeper; the Clydes floundered belly deep and the wagon box scraped up a great drift that piled up over the doubletree and against the stallions’ rumps and finally stopped them dead. They shoveled it away and cleared the Clydes’ feet, never quite sure whether or not they would have their brains kicked out. Then they fell into two lines out in front and tramped a way for the horses and the wagon wheels down through smothered rosebushes and between clumps of willow whose bark gleamed red under the hood of snow. Ten feet of it was enough to wind a man; they panted their way ahead, turned to tramp backward and deepen the track, stopped every twenty yards to dig away the snow that the wagon box scooped up. They worked like people fighting a fire, exhausted themselves and stood panting a minute and fell to it again, frenzied for the easy going on the river ice.

  The wagon eased over the edge of a bushy bank, the Clydes plunged as Jesse took them over straight on. The front wheels went down, pushing the stallions out onto the ice. Just as Rusty saw them lunging to pull the wagon through, a jerk from behind dragged him over in the drift and the whole line of walkers came down. When they got to their feet there was the wagon on the river.

  Getting up watchfully, Rusty thought he felt Spurlock yanking at the rope, and he yanked back harshly. Sunk between the muskrat cap and the muffler, and blindered on both sides by the wings of the mackinaw collar, Spurlock’s eyes peered out like the eyes of a fierce animal peering from a crack in the rock, but he turned away without a word, giving Rusty at least the smoldering satisfaction of having yanked last, of having finished something that the other had started.

  The cutbank partially shielded them from the wind. Upriver was a straight reach with an irregular streak of clear, blown ice down its center, grading up to shelving drifts against both banks. Drift skated and blew down it like dust down an alley. The last lap of the road to shelter lay before them as smooth as a paved highway.

  Ray Henry, leading his pony down the broken bank, stopped by them a moment where they hung panting on the wagon. “Everybody all right?”

  They looked at him from among their wrappings.

  “Ed?” Ray said.

  It seemed to Rusty terribly unjust that particular attention should have been paid to Spurlock rather than to himself. It meant that the foreman still looked upon Spurlock as in the right, himself in the wrong. It meant that he had no concern for the one of his men who was hurt, and might be in trouble. He saw Ray’s eyes within the visor that was like the helmet of a hero, and his unhappiness that he had lost prestige and respect drove words to his lips, impulsive and too eager, anything to be recognized and accepted again. He did not care about Spurlock, actually; he was already ashamed of that quarrel. But he wanted Ray Henry to notice him, and so he said, “What do we do now, Ray? Camp here till it’s over?”

  “Not hardly,” Ray said. “The Clydes have had all the fresh air they need.”

  “How much farther?”

  “Three miles, maybe four.”

  “Do we ride from here?”

  The gray, thinking eye examined him from within the helmet of ice-hardened felt. The foreman said, “You reckon you’re any more petered than them studs?”

  He went stooping and slipping out in front to confer with Jesse and Slip, and Rusty, avoiding Little Horn’s eyes and with his back to Spurlock and the others, watched the smothered rosebushes on the bank quiver in a gust. The slow warmth under all his wrappings might have come from the heavy work of getting the wagon through the brush and the drifts, but it might just as well have been shame, and he hated them all for never giving a man a chance, for taking things wrong, for assuming what should not be assumed. He hadn’t been wanting to quit, he had asked only for information. Sullenly he waited, resolved to keep his mouth shut and plod it out. Once they got back to the ranch, he could simply leave the job; he was under no obligation to stay at it any longer than he pleased to. Neither Ray nor anyone else could compel a man to stick it through months of this kind of thing, no matter how short-handed the T-Down was. There was sure to be a great change as soon as he announced he was leaving. He could see Ray Henry’s face—all their faces. Every man who left, left more for the remaining ones to do. Too late, chaps. Sorry. Ta-ta, gentlemen. Enjoy the winter.

  In the river bottom the wind was louder, though he felt it less. The bare willows and the rosebushes, bent like croquet wickets into the drifts, whist
led with it, the cutbank boomed it back in hollow eddies, every comer and edge and groove of the valley gave it another tongue. More than out on the flats, even, it echoed with hallucinatory voices, shouts, screams, whistles, moans, jeers. Rusty concentrated on it. He had only been asking a perfectly reasonable question, considering that they were running for their lives and still had an unknown distance to go. Would it be so terrible to climb up and let those big strong horses pull them for a little while along the level ice? Would it, for that matter, be entirely unheard of to sacrifice the Clydes, if necessary, to save eight lives? He asked himself what about a leader who thought more of his horses than of his men.

  The blood in his veins was sluggish with cold, his mind was clogged with sullen hatred. Ray, shouting up to Jesse and Slip, and Spurlock, weaving bearlike from one foot to the other, were both part of a nightmare which he loathed and wanted to escape, but the numbness held him and he stood spraddling, squinting from behind the wagon box, hearing the shouts of those ahead torn from their lips and flung streaming down the ice to become part of the headlong illusory wailing that blew and moaned around the river’s bends. His mind, groping among images, was as clumsy as his mittened unfeeling hands would have been, trying to pick up a coin from the snow. He thought of old Jesse’s friend down by Sheridan, with his frozen conversation, and of how others had explained, not so humorously, the voices that haunted the wind in this country.