Wolf Willow, Page 25

  For I saw by the sickly moonlight

  As I followed, bending low,

  That the walking of the stranger

  Left no footmarks on the snow.

  The voices of all the lost, all the Indians, métis, hunters, Mounted Police, wolfers, cowboys, all the bundled bodies that the spring uncovered and the warming sun released into the stink of final decay; all the starving, freezing, gaunt, and haunted men who had challenged this country and failed; all the ghosts from smallpox-stilled Indian camps, the wandering spirits of warriors killed in their sleep on the borders of the deadly hills, all the skeleton women and children of the starving winters, all the cackling, maddened cannibals, every terrified, lonely, crazed, and pitiful outcry that these plains had ever wrung from human lips, went wailing and moaning over him, mingled with the living shouts of the foreman and the old-timer, and he said, perhaps aloud, remembering the legend of the Crying River, and the voices that rode the wind there as here, Qu‘appelle? Qu’appelle?

  Heartless and inhuman, older than earth and totally alien, as savage and outcast as the windigo, the cannibal spirit, the wind dipped and swept upon them down the river channel, tightening the lightly sweating inner skin with cold and the heart with fear. Rusty watched Ray hump his back and shake off the worst of the blast, saw the arm wave. The wagon rolled again. Ed Spurlock, unready, was pulled sideways a stumbling step or two by the tightening of the rope, and Rusty got one clear look into the brown, puckered eyes. Out of his fear and misery and anger he sneered, “Learn to walk!” But if Spurlock heard he made no sign. In a moment he was only the hooded, blanketed, moving stoop, not human, not anything, that Rusty imitated movement for movement, step for step, plodding up the river after the wagon.

  Exhaustion and cold are a kind of idiocy, the mind moves as numbly as the body, the momentary alertness that a breathing spell brings is like the sweat that can be raised under many clothes even in the bitterest weather; when the breathing spell is over and the hard work past, mind and body are all the worse for the brief awakening. The sweaty skin chills, the images that temporary alertness has caught scrape and rasp in the mind like edged ice and cannot be dislodged or thought away or emptied out, but slowly coagulate there.

  For Rusty they were the images of fear. No matter how much he tried to tie his mind to the plod-plod-plod of foot after foot, he heard the spirit of that bitter country crying for cold and pain. Under his moving feet the ice passed, now clear, with coin-like bubbles in it, now coated with a pelt of dry smooth snow, now thinly drifted. The world swung slowly, the dry snow under their feet blew straight sideward, then quartered backward; his quickly lifted eyes saw that the right bank had dropped to a bar and the left curved up in a cutbank. The wind lashed his face so that he hunched and huddled the blanket closer, leaving only the slightest hole, and still the wind got in, filled the blanket, threatened to blow it off his back. His eyes were full of water and he wiped them free, terrified that they would freeze shut. With his head bowed clear over, almost to the rope, he stumbled on. Through the slits of sight remaining to him he saw that the drift now was blowing straight backward from Spurlock’s feet. The river had swung them directly into the wind. The line of walkers huddled to the left until they were walking bunched behind the feeble protection of the wagon.

  The wagon stopped, the line of walkers bumped raggedly to a halt. Rusty had forgotten them: he was surprised to find them there, glaring from the frozen crevices of their clothes. From out in front Ray Henry came looming, a huge indomitable bulk, leading the pony whose bony face was covered with a shell of ice, the hairy ears pounded full of snow, the breast of the blanket sheathed. He unlooped the halter rope and tied it to the endgate, pulled the bridle and hung it on the saddle horn. For a minute he rubbed and worked at the pony’s face, turned grunting, and said from inside his visor, “They just can’t buck it. We’re gonna have to lead ‘em.” He helped Little Horn pull open the loose, frozen knot in the rope and free himself from the others. “Rusty,” he said, “see if you can find a blanket up in the load somewhere.”

  Rusty found the blanket, the foreman and Little Horn flapped off with it, the walkers huddled back to the wagon, eying the miserable pony which now took half their shelter. After a minute or two the yell came back, they turned, they stirred their stiffened legs and moved their wooden feet. The wind shrieked around the wagon, between the spokes, along the axles and the snow-clogged reach, and Rusty, colder now than at any time since he had awakened half frozen in his blankets, heard the blizzardy bottoms wild with voices. Qu‘appelle? ... Qu’ap- pelle? ... Qu‘appelle?

  In an hour, or four hours, or ten minutes, the river blessedly bent rightward, and the wind went screaming and flying above them but touched them only in swoops and gusts. There was a stretch where the inshore drifts let them go close up under the bank, and for a brief time the air was almost still, the snow settling almost gently as on any winter’s day, a day to put roses in the cheeks.

  Sancta Maria, speed us!

  During that brief, numbed lull Spurlock tangled his feet and fell again, pulling over Panguingue ahead of him. Rusty, hopping awkwardly to keep from getting entangled with the sliding, swiveling figures, saw Buck squat and grab the rope to maintain his balance against the drag of the fallen ones. There went the three of them, helplessly dragged along on back or feet, and here came Rusty, a lead-footed dancer, prancing and shouting in their wake until those up ahead heard and they stopped.

  Ray was back again. Panguingue and Buck stood up and cleared the rope, but Spurlock sat on the ice with his head down, pawing at his face and heaving his shoulders under the blanket. Rusty stayed back in scorn and contempt, sure that the blame would somehow be pinned on him. He was the proper scapegoat; everything that happened was caused by his awkwardness.

  Ray was stooping, shaking Spurlock’s shoulder. His hand worked at the muffler around Spurlock’s face. Then he straightened up fierce and ready and with so much power left that Rusty moved a step back, astonished. “The lantern!” Ray shouted, and lunged around the line of walkers to reach and take the lantern from Jesse’s hand. Back at Spurlock, stooping to hold the lantern directly against the muffler, he said over his shoulder, “Rusty, unhitch yourself and rustle some wood. We’re gonna have to stop and thaw out.”

  The knot was stiff with ice, his fingers like sticks, but he got loose and stumped around in the deep snow breaking dead stalks out of willow clumps. Slip appeared to help him, and Rusty said, pausing a second in his fumbling, “What’s the matter with Spurlock?”

  “Smotherin‘,” Slip said. “God damn muffler froze to his whiskers.”

  “Are we going to camp here?”

  “Why?” said Slip in surprise. “Do you want to?”

  Rusty floundered down the bank with his handful of twigs, watched Panguingue cone them on the ice and souse them with kerosene. The smell cut his nostrils, and he sniffed back the wetness and spat in the snow. It was that drooling that had got Spurlock in trouble. Drool and freeze fast. Dully curious, he watched Ray moving the lantern glass around on the frozen wool, while Buck pulled on the unfrozen ends. Spurlock’s head was pulled out of his collar; he looked like a fish on a hook. Then Panguingue found a match and reached across Buck to scratch it on the dry bottom of the lantern. The little cone of sticks exploded in bright flame.

  “More,” Panguingue said thickly.

  Little Horn, who had led the Clydes around in a half circle, was already up over the endgate, unlashing the wagon cover. Stupidly Rusty watched as he loosened it all across the windward side and dropped it in the lee, and then, comprehending, he helped tie it to the spokes to make a windbreak. The fire had burned out its splash of kerosene, and was smoldering in the snow until Panguingue swished it again and it blazed up. “Morel” he said. “We need wood.”

  “In the wagon,” Jesse said. “What do you think I chopped all that wood for yesterday?”

  He climbed the wheel to burrow into the uncovered load, and his face with it
s bowed mustaches emerged from under the tangled tent like a walrus at a waterhole and he winked in Rusty’s face, handing him out wood two and three sticks at a time. His manner was incredible to the boy. He acted as if they were out on a picnic or a berry-picking and were stopping for lunch. Buck and Ray were holding Spurlock’s face close to the little fire and working away at the muffler. The wind, here, was only a noise: they squatted in their bivouac with the fire growing and sputtering in the water of its melting, and they gathered close around it, venturing their faces a little out of their coverings.

  Spurlock cursed clearly for the first time, the muffler came loose in Buck’s hands. Ray set the lantern aside while Spurlock breathed deeply and passed his hands around on his face.

  “Stick her right in,” Jesse said. “That’s the quickest way to thaw her. Set those weeds on fire.”

  They sat knee to knee, they put their mittens on sticks of wood in the snow and held stiff red hands in the very flames, they opened collars and exposed smarting faces. Life returned as pain: far down his legs Rusty felt a deep, passionate ache beginning in his feet. He knew from the burn of his cheeks and the chilblain feel of his fingers that he would have some frostbite to doctor. But he loved the snug out-of-the-wind shelter, the fire, even the pain that was beginning now and would get worse. For no matter how they came out, or whether they camped here to wait out the storm or went on after a rest to Bates, which couldn’t be more than another mile or two, he would go with a knowledge that warmed him like Jesse’s lantern under the robe: it hadn’t been he that cracked. And what a beautiful and righteous and just thing it was that the one who did crack should be Spurlock! In triumph and justification he looked across the fire at the sagging figure, but he couldn’t make the restless reddened eyes hold still. Spurlock hadn’t said a word since they released him from the smothering scarf.

  A half hour later, when Ray said they must go on, Rusty received the words like a knife in his guts. He had been sitting and secretly willing that they should stay. But he glanced again across the fire and this time caught Ed Spurlock’s moving eyes, and the eyes ducked like mice. He told himself that if he was unwilling, Spurlock was scared to death. When they lashed the wagon cover back on and tied themselves together again and hooded the Clydes in the red Hudson’s Bay blanket and Little Horn and Ray swung them by the bits and the forlorn night pony stretched his neck and came unwillingly, Rusty had a feeling that the moving line literally tore Spurlock from the side of the fire, now sunk into the crust and sizzling out blackly at the edges in steam and smoke.

  The river swung, and the wind got at them. It swung wider, and they were plucked and shoved and blinded so that they walked sideward with their backs to the bar and their faces turned to the fantastic pagoda-roof of snow along the cutbank. In fury and anguish they felt how the river turned them. Like things with an identical electrical charge, their faces bent and flinched away, but in the end there was no evading it. The wagon stopped and started, stopped and started. The feet that by the fire had felt renewed life began to go dead again, the hands were going back to wood, the faces, chafed and chapped and sore, were pulled deep into the wool and fur. Gasping, smelling wet sheepskin and the tallowy smell of muskrat fur, feeling the ice at their very beards and the wind hunting for their throats, they hunched and struggled on.

  Rusty, bent like a bow, with every muscle strained to the mindless plod, plod, plod of one foot after the other, and his eyes focused through the blanket’s crack on Spurlock’s heels, saw the feet turn sideward, the legs go out of sight. Apparently Spurlock had simply sat down, but the rope, tightening on him, pulled him over. Sliding on the ice, hauled after the backward-walking, braced, and shouting Panguingue, he was trying to untie the rope around his waist with his mittened hands.

  Again their yells were torn away downwind, voices to blend with the blizzard’s crying, or thaw out to haunt hunters or cowboys in some soft spring. They dragged Spurlock a hundred feet before those up in front heard. Then Rusty stood furiously over him and cursed him for his clumsiness and cried for him to get up, but Spurlock, straightening to sit with his arms hung over his knees, neither looked up nor stood up. He mumbled something with his head down.

  “Lone,” he mumbled, “rest minute.”

  Rusty’s leg twitched: he all but kicked the miserable bundle. Slip and Jesse or both were shouting from the wagon seat, Ray Henry was coming back—for the how many‘th time? They were utterly exposed, the wind whistled and the drift blinded them. He dropped his mouth again to Spurlock’s ear, shouted again. Panguingue was hauling at Spurlock’s armpits. “Can’t sit down,” he said. “Got to keep him movin’.”

  Not until then did the understanding grow into Rusty’s mind, a slow ache of meaning like the remote feeling in his feet. Spurlock was done. It wasn’t just awkwardness, he wasn’t just quitting, he was exhausted. The danger they had been running from, a possibility in which Rusty had never thoroughly believed, was right among them. This was how a man died.

  His hands found an arm under blanket and coat, and he and Panguingue helped Spurlock’s feeble scrambling until they had him on his feet. They held him there, dragged down by his reluctant weight, while Ray peered grimly into his face. “He’s played out,” Panguingue said, and Rusty said, “Couldn’t we put him in the wagon? He can’t walk any farther.”

  Ray said, “Put him in the wagon he’d be froze stiff in twenty minutes.” His hands went out to Spurlock’s shoulders and he shook him roughly. “Ed! You hear? You got to keep movin‘. It’s only another mile. Just keep comin’.”

  “‘mall right,” Spurlock said. “Just rest minute.”

  “Not a damn minute,” Ray said. “You rest a minute and you’re dead.”

  Spurlock hung between Rusty and Panguingue until they were holding almost his whole weight. “You hear, Ed?” Ray said, glaring from his visor like a hairy animal. “You stop to rest, you’re dead. Come on now, stand up and walk.”

  Somehow he bullied strength into the legs and a glitter of life into the eyes. Then he drove back against the wind to take the bridle of the off horse, and the halting, laborious crawl moved on. But now Rusty and Panguingue had hitched their ropes around and walked one on each side of Ed Spurlock, each with a hand under the rope around his waist to haul him along, and to support him if he started to go down. He came wobbling, and he murmured through the blanket they had wrapped over his whole head, but he came.

  Rusty’s shoulder ached—he ached all over, in fact, whenever he had any feeling at all—and the strain of half supporting Spurlock twisted his body until he had a stabbing stitch in his side. The hand he kept in Spurlock’s waist rope was as unfeeling as an iron hook.

  A mile more, Ray said. But the river led them a long time around an exposed loop. He had all he could do to force himself into the blast of snow and wind that faded and luffed only to howl in their faces again more bitterly than ever. When Spurlock, stumbling like a sleepwalker, hung back or sagged, trying to sit down, Rusty felt Panguingue’s strength and heard Panguingue’s stout cursing. His own face was so stiff that he felt he could not have spoken, even to curse, if he tried; he had lost all feeling in his lips and chin. His inhuman hook dragged at Spurlock’s waist rope, he threw his shoulder across to meet Panguingue’s when the weight surged too far forward, and he put foot after foot, not merely imbecilic now with cold and exhaustion, but nearly mindless, watching not the feet ahead, for there were none now, with three of them abreast and Buck trailing them behind, but the roll of the broad iron tire with the snow spume hissing from it.

  He watched it hypnotically, revolving slowly like the white waste of his mind where a spark of awareness as dim as the consciousness of an angleworm glimmered. His body lived only in its pain and weariness. The white waste on which the wheel moved broke into dark angles, was overspread by blackness that somehow rose and grew, strangely fluid and engulfing, and the air was full of voices wild and desolate and terrible as the sound of hunting wolves. The led pony reared a
nd broke its halter rope and vanished somewhere. Then Rusty felt himself yanked sideward, falling into Spurlock and Panguingue in an encumbered tangle, seeing even as he fell, shocked from his stupor, that the endgate was clear down, the hub drowned in black water that spread across the snow. Kicking crabwise, he fled it on his back, helped by someone hauling on the rope behind, until they stood at the edge of the little shallow rapid and saw Jesse and Slip in the tilted wagon ready to jump, and the round wet heads of stones among the broken ice, and the Clydes struggling, one half down and then up again, Little Horn hanging from the bits, hauled clear of the ice as they plunged. There was a crack like a tree coming down, the stallions plunged and steadied, and then Ray was working back along the broken tongue to get at the singletrees and unhook the tugs and free them.

  Ray was standing on the broken tongue and calming the stallions with a hand on each back while he yelled downwind. Rusty pulled at his cap, exposed one brittle ear, and heard the foreman shouting, “Get him on up to the cabin ... two or three hundred yards ... right after you.”

  So with hardly a pause longer than the pause of their falling sideward away from the crunch of ice and the upwelling of water from the broken shell of the rapid, he and Panguingue were walking again, cast free from the rope and supporting Spurlock each with one arm around his shoulders, the other hands locked in front of him. He drooped and wobbled, mumbling and murmuring about rest. He tricked them with sudden lurches to left or right; when he staggered against them his weight was as hard to hold as a falling wall. Twice he toppled them to the ice. Compelled to watch where he walked, Rusty had to let the blanket blow from head and face, and without its protection he flinched and gasped, blinded, and felt the ice forming stickily along his eyelashes, and peered and squinted for the sight of the dugway that would lead them out of the channel and up the cutbank and across a little flat to the final security, so close now and so much more desperately hard to reach with every step.