Above all, he would ask them to imagine the kind of winter he was spending, with its pure mountain streams, its deep white snows, its millions of acres of forest that an axe had never touched; its abundance of food, its cathedral quiet when the birds were hushed, its hot baths and chambers—all as free as a mother’s love for her child.
After writing the letter he wrapped it in buckskin to keep it dry and safe from mice.
He lingered a few days at the delightful hot springs by the lake and then crossed a low mountain range to the geyser basins. He was now in dense forest that lay before him in all directions for a hundred miles. Under a huge pine just south of the geyser that would someday be known as Old Faithful he made his camp. When it became cold enough to keep meat withoutjerking it he brought in both elk and deer, and the choicest portions he hung from branches of trees, loosely shrouded in buckskin sheaths. He had plenty of salt, sugar, coffee, tobacco, a fifty-pound bag of flour, a thousand rounds of ammunition, seeds and nuts and dried fruit, perfect health, and a mountain appetite. What more, he would have asked the philosophers, did any man want? And all of it was free.
It was in his thankful moods, induced by thunder’s magnificent orchestrations or the witchery of high-mountain snowstorms, that he would climb to the spine of a range and stride along it, flinging his arms toward heaven and pouring song from his throat. The wonder of being alive and healthy and free was for him such a miracle that only in song could he express his gratitude. "Thank you, thank you!" he would cry, his red face and golden beard turned up to the storm. Then he would go on long strides, singing into, the thunder or the snow, or with his feeble music try to be an instrument in the cosmic harmonies. An empyrean glissando in the rolling chords of thunder might abash him for a few moments; but soon he would be exploding his loud cries in his eifort to develop his theme of joy-in-life over the theme of death-levels-all; and he would try to build his own crescendo, as though he were a bassoon or a French horn, all the while waving his arms to bring in other instruments, the whole ten thousand of them, for the celestial finale.
Once by a slim chance Bill had seen this red-bearded giant striding against the skyline down a mountain’s back, and had said later to Hank Cady that he figgered Sam had been teched by the death of his wife. For there he was up yonder like a buffler bull full of mush and molasses, bellering his head off. Had Hank ever seen the likes of him? Hank said in his slow, over-deliberate way that he expected Sam was just happy. He hadn’t ever knowed a man loved life like Sam.
Sam was writing a lyric in the only way he knew, or a paean of thanksgiving, for he thought that life was indeed a "wilderness of sweets" and his transports carried him now and then to bel cantos so wild that most men would have thought them pure lunacy. Sam was enraptured, enchanted, fascinated by the simple fact of being alive and healthy, with no clock to watch, no boss over him, no taxes to pay, no papers to sign, nobody to give an accounting to, except the Creator, whom he was glad to thank morning, noon, and night. He would have said that in an ideal world every man should have at least ten thousand acres on which to stride and explode and feel free. That was a puny spot, that many acres, but a man could turn around on it. He had heard McNees say that at the rate babies were being born all over the earth the time would come when no man could find room to stand on and blow his nose.
It was Bill who told Kate about Sam Minard. He told her that Sam strode up and down all the mountain spines in the west, singing into the heavens and praising God. Thereafter Kate always saw him when she looked for him. She would look off in the direction of the Big Belt or Bear Paw Mountains, though from where she stood she could see none of them; and there in the sky was a stupendous range, and Sam striding along the crests, looking as tall as pine trees, a gigantic figure with flaming hair and beard, and a voice that could be heard halfway around the world. It got to be a habit with her to stare at him in the far blue mists and to listen to his singing.
One of the best cooks among mountain men, Sam’s specialty was steaks. He had learned that steaks broiled over embers absorbed the flavor of the wood; and so he had used all the kinds of wood he would find: pine, fir, spruce, and cedar he did not like, for they were too strong; aspen and willow were better, alder was fair. The flavors of woods also appeared in tanning. Those squaws did the best tanning, in both odors and textures, who had the best wood for it. Sam could smell a piece of leather and usually tell what wood had been used. He wouldn’t wear leather for which the wood had been the poplar, willow, aspen, birch or plum.
It took him five or six hours to broil ten pounds of elk steaks and to make two pans of biscuits. It was the steaks that took so much time, and digging the fat out of marrowbones. The embers had to be just right, and he had to hover over the meat, lest it absorb too much of the wood odor. Here in the geyser basin he had some pepper beans, which he powdered in a mortar. For butter on his biscuits he used marrow. He had wild honey, which he had robbed bees of; when his meal was ready he feasted on juicy dripping steaks, biscuits sopped with marrow fat and honey, and coffee. While eating he would look out to watch the geyser blow. He could have felt no safer from the redmen if he had been encamped at the entrance to hell. His chief problem was his appetite; he had to have three big meals every day, and if they were all hot meals, most of his time was spent cooking. The livers he ate raw, or warmed through and seasoned; and every day he ate a handful of rose hips, for the reason that Bill Williams said every mountain man should. He also ate uncooked the livers from trout and grouse; they were extremely tender and savory.
One of his chief joys in wintertime was to walk in deep snowstorm when there was no wind but only the loveliness of movement and design, light and shadow, as the countless flakes like tumbling moths came down in such density and in such dodging, weaving, swirling grace that he found it amazing that no two flakes ever seemed to collide. They reminded him of the fantastically intricate dance of gnats when thousands of them in a tight swarm moved for hours in a pattern so complex and yet so perfect that no one man could believe it possible who had not seen it. He marveled at the flight of birds. He had watched red-winged lackbirds passing over him in early morning, on their way to feeding grounds, and he had guessed their number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly in millions, for they had been flying at a speed of twenty or thirty miles an hour, yet had darkened the sky above him for thirty minutes. All of them darted and bobbed and dipped and capered like birds out of their minds with joy, yet he had never seen two of them touch one another. He would lie on his back in soft new snow a foot deep and gaze at the myriad flakes until his senses swam, and never once had he seen a flaw in the constantly changing and infinitely complex pattern. It was as if every flake had eyes. He could never foresee where one would come to rest, for until the very instant of touching snow, earth, or water it was weaving and dancing and changing its course, yet it came to rest as if it had found the inevitable and perfect spot for its soft little cargo of frozen water. He would rise and walk again, and in the gentle wonderful world of white storm and dusk he would see wild things—his neighbors, the rabbits, birds, deer, weasels, bobcats—all acting as if they were as glad and thankful as he. A deer, ears pointed toward him, would stand and gaze at him, its coloring blending so perfectly with the storm’s gray dusk that it hardly looked alive; and then it would move soundlessly away and vanish, like a patch of slightly darker dusk dissolving into the storm. The rabbits were gentler, the birds tamer, in a deep storm; all wild things seemed to feel the grace of benediction. The melting flakes reached down over his face like tiny cold fingers; the snow on his golden hair sopped it and turned it curly. He felt the damp against his moccasined feet, the chill down his spine.