Still moving slowly, lest she become terrified and scream, he set his rifle by the wall and took the gun from her hands. "I guess you fired this since I left," he said, "because it isn’t loaded now." She had not yet looked up at him. Thought of her sitting with an empty gun before her enemies filled him with such pity and pain that he placed a hand lightly on her graying head and kissed her hair. "I’m your friend," he said, his voice low and gentle.
Then he took his rifle and went back down the hill. He couldn’t stand any more of it; he was afraid he was going to break down and cry like a child. To hide his emotion from Lotus he said they would go out and get a couple of deer, but even after they had come in with them and he was slicing liver for her he felt sick clear down to his guts. The trouble with deer and antelope, he said, to make talk, was that they didn’t have the full-bodied chewing of beef. He guessed it would be all right to make a fire here; the skulls were still on the stakes, the Blackfeet had scouted this area perhaps a dozen times. They had read the warning. They would never strike here, not now. The woman up there, she looked as if she hadn’t eaten a thing since he left her; she was scrawny and gray, and so full of sorrow that it made a man want to cry just to look at her.
His rifle within reach, he knelt to slice venison, and Lotus brought wood for the drying racks. The larger intestines he cut into lengths about eighteen inches long, and turning them inside out, took them to the river and thoroughly washed them. With a hatchet he laid open the spine and the shoulder and thigh bones to get at the marrow, for he intended to have boudins tonight. Lotus came over to see what he was doing. She hadn’t got used to the fact that he liked to cook and had a gourmet’s interest in food; she invariably looked astonished when he gave a cry of delight over some delicacy. She preferred a slice of raw liver to his warm golden biscuits, dunked in hot marrow fat; and the serviceberry to any other berry. But when he was feasting and exclaiming she had learned to smile and exclaim with him, and to say, "It’s all free," after hearing him say the words a hundred times. She hadn’t the slightest notion of what a whiteman meant by the word "free." Boudins she did like, and she watched with fascinated interest as he prepared them.
When he heard a meadow lark he stood straight and tall and listened. Its song was so much Hner than the meadow lark’s back east; this he took to be a sign that these mountains were a better home for a man than the hills of New England. The purple finch had a marvelous warbling song that was continuous; the orchard oriole’s welcome to springtime was almost as fine as the bluebird’s; the hermit thrush in the high cool canyons sang as he imagined the angels must sing; but this solitary vocalist of the prairies and fields, with its yellow vest and black cravat, was his favorite of all songbirds. He listened until it flew away.
"I wonder," he said, "if she ever hears it."
He now put the marrow and the tenderest part of the kidney fat in a frying pan and melted them. The choicest flesh of the tenderloins he minced, using his hatchet and knife, along with a portion of liver, two kidneys, a cupful of brains, and a pound or two of hindquarter taken close to the bone; and all this minced meat he mixed with the rich marrow and suet greases, sprinkled the compost with salt, squeezed over it the juice of a wild onion, and stuffed the whole of it into several lengths of the intestine, with one end tied off. When the boudins were ready for cooking each was about ten inches long and tied oil at both ends. It had taken him an hour to prepare them for slow broiling or roasting; he now turned to the biscuits and steaks, but paused every minute or two to glance round him and listen. Lotus meanwhile laid slices of flesh on the drying racks and kept up the fires.
A man and woman in love, preparing their supper, was the most beautiful thing in life. Didn’t she think so? No taxes, he told her for the twentieth time; no policemen, no laws; the odorous abundant earth turning over in its garden of good things, round and round, its face following the sun like a child its mother. He was mixing biscuit dough. Rib steaks and a large roast were laid out, ready for the fire. He hadn’t left her much flesh to dry, had he? he asked, looking at the slaughter he had made of two carcasses. Tomorrow they might find an elk, though this was a long way from elk country.
When the supper was almost ready, the roast and steaks brown and dripping, the boudins gently simmering in their hot juices inside the gut-sleeves, the biscuits ready to bake and the coffee to set on, he said he guessed they ought to go up the hill and ask the woman to eat with them. He supposed she wouldn’t but they ought to ask her anyway. The rifle over his left arm, his right arm gently across his wife’s shoulders, he went up the hill; and the moment Kate heard their footfalls she reached for her gun. With Lotus behind him now Sam went forward, knowing that her gun was not loaded; and Lotus followed, peering round him, for he had told her the story of the woman and she was curious. Sam called her attention to the graves and their flowers, and black eyes looked back and forth from the graves to the woman. She knew that the mother who stood there; looking so frail and alone and frightened, had three slain children buried under the withered flowers.
Taking his wife’s hand, Sam said to Kate, "We’re your friends." He watched her face, hoping to be able to tell if she understood him. "We have a fine hot supper down by the river. We wonder if you would come eat with us." Before he was done speaking he knew that she would not; the way she sat and everything in her face told him that she wanted them to go, that she wished to be alone. She looked terribly thin in her huddle of clothes, and very white and tired and old.
Kate’s next response amazed him. Apparently she had been only dimly aware of Lotus, if at all, and now she saw her as an Indian; for she screamed, and the cries of the loon, the bittem, the hawk, the grebe, all together, were not as blood-curdling as this woman’s cry. In the moment of the scream she ran frantically to her bed just inside the cabin and began to paw in it for the axe. Her cry had been so dreadful, so unhuman in its hate and fear and desperation, that Sam was unnerved, almost shattered; his bronzed face turning a shade paler, he seized his wife’s arm and moved swiftly back. The woman had found the axe but had got entangled in something and was struggling to get up; and because she was so weak, so desperate with fear, she screamed again, and in all his life Sam had never heard such a sound. He moved back again, back and back, until he and Lotus were almost a hundred yards distant; and there he stood, shaken and unbelieving, his eyes fixed on the creature (she could hardly in that moment have been called a woman) who crouched at her doorway and peered, the axe in her grasp.
"Almighty God!" he said. He felt nausea all through him. He felt that he was going to cry like a child. And he was trembling, clear down to his moccasins.
Sensing at last the pathos of it, the ghastly woe of it, the broken mother-heart of it, he took his wife’s arm and went down the hill. The supper had been spoiled for him. All the beauty and sweetness of the earth had been turned bitter for him in that moment when he grasped, in full measure, the loneliness and nightmares and stark insane wondering of a mother there with her dead children. He ate one of the rich boudins, a steak, a hunk of roast, and a half dozen biscuits; and he drank a quart of strong black coffee; but he was hardly aware that he was eating. He then folded one of the deerskins flesh side in, making a bowl of it; and in the bowl he put a skin of boudins, a piece of roast, a steak, and a few biscuits. He told Lotus to remain here, alert, hand on her gun, while he went back to the woman. If the woman were somehow to get away from him and rush at Lotus with the axe she was to shoot her, if she had to, or climb a tree, if she could. With his rifle he went up the hill with the hot food, and over to the woman, who now. sat between the graves; and he set the skin of food right before her, turning the folds back so that she could see what was there. He did not speak and he did not linger. He supposed that she would recognize the food and that she would ignore it or throw it away. What could he do or what could any man do that was any good for her? Was there in the whole world anything that could break through such grief as that? Perhaps the Almighty could do something for her; perhaps he was doing it in the only way that it could be done. Sam’s guess was that she would sink deep into sorrow, and from sorrow into death.