Sam was thinking these thoughts as he rode down the Musselshell and came close to Kate’s shack. He was in a more sentimental mood than was usual for him—deep gone in mush and molasses, Bill might have said if he could have looked into Sam’s soul; for Sam was thinking of the bones in the cairn and his arms were filled with flowers. His first sight of the woman was halfway up the hill with a pail of water; he sat and watched her around her plants and flowers, and his thoughts went out to all the wild mothers he knew.
"Hello, Kate," he said after riding up to her yard. He had hoped that her name would make her look at him but she gave no heed at all. She looked thinner, she looked older. There was a lot of white in her hair now and deep seams all over her face. He thought she was not yet forty but she looked eighty. Instead of moccasins—he and other men had brought her a dozen pairs—she still wore her tattered old shoes, bound to her feet with leather strings. Her garments were cotton rags covered with patches. But her sage looked nice and her flowers looked eager and strong.
He wondered if she would ride his packhorse and go with him down the river to meet a steamboat, but he knew she would not. When her pail was empty she went back down the hill and the moment she was out of sight Sam looked into the cabin. Nothing had changed. The bed was still just inside the door, and over by the north wall were a few things including a pile of skins. He saw no rifle or axe or knife. She seemed not to know that there were enemies in the world, perhaps because she had sunk so deep into loneliness and sorrow, or had entered so fully into heaven. The time would come, he supposed, when she would forget to eat, or to wrap herself against the cold.
By the river he ate a dry lunch and washed it down with river water. On his way in he had seen a few buffalo and now kallated that he ought to get one and jerk a pile of beef. He guessed he ought to gather a bushel of berries and dry them for her, for the time was again late August and the serviceberries were ripe. Before coming here he had picked up his pelts at Bill’s spot and had gone to Bridger’s to buy some things, chiefly on credit. It took a lot of pelts, with sugar a dollar a pound, coffee a dollar and a quarter, blue cloth four dollars a yard, and rum twelve dollars a gallon. He had found a five-gallon keg of rum by the Trail, cached by Mormons or other immigrants; he hoped that Mormons had left it, for they were not supposed to drink rum, or coffee, or tea. Though washing soap was a dollar and a half a pound he had brought a pound to Kate. For his father-in-law he had a copper kettle, and for his sister-in-law he had blue cloth and vermilion and assorted beads.
The next day he gathered berries and spread them on a robe in the sun to dry. He shot a young buffalo and brought it to the river bottom. He then went up the hill and over to the cairn; he had removed a stone and thrust his armful of flowers back over the bones, and now, reaching in, he clasped the skull of his wife and looked at Kate. She was watering her tlowers. "My mother raises flowers," he said, wishing he could make her talk. "Yours are just as nice." He meant the Indian paintbrush, pentstemon, and aster. Patting the skull and pushing flowers down on it, he drew his arm out and walked over to Kate. Would she come down to the river and have supper with him'? Did she want to learn how to jerk flesh? Had she written a letter to her people that he could send out for her?
She took her pail and turned down the path and Sam followed her. He watched her at the river dip the pail full and turn back, and he followed her halfway up the hill. Then he turned to the task of drying the meat. From the loin he put aside steaks for his supper and breakfast, and sliced the flesh of hams and shoulders. The slices he laid in piles and cut down through the piles; jerky should be not more than two or three inches wide, and from four to six inches long. Green saplings above a fire he covered with slices of flesh, and set up a second rack, and a third. In a smaller fire he laid a part of his steaks and basted them with hot fat. Pore ole critter, she was nothing much but hide and bones, Could he get her to eat a steak and a hot biscuit? He would have given a year of his life to bring a smile to her face; he would have trembled with joy if he could have made her talk. His mouth watered, his eyes smarted in the smoke of four fires, his body clothed in leather itched in the heat. But there was a feast to look forward to, and lo, what heaven it would be if Lotus were here!
The afternoon waned, the sun sank, and it was dusk, and down the hill came a dreadful sound. Sam thought at first that he heard a wolf scream; then, that it was the cry of a buffalo or elk calf under wolf teeth. But no, God no, it was the woman!
He couldn’t see her but he could hear her unearthly blood-chilling lament, and he had a picture of her, there by the graves, bowed, snarls of gray hair falling over her face. Knocking the fires down so that the meat would not burn, Sam took his rifle and ran up the hill. Yes, there she was, as he had imagined her, bowing low and rising—sinking in what seemed to be a long shudder, and rising with gasping sobs. In all his life he had never heard sounds of such utter sadness and loss. They made him feel weak and furious and helpless. After running back down the hill to take care of the meat he stood among the fires and looked back and forth at drying racks and listened. He could not put away the thought that it was his presence that had touched her off to this bitter lament out of grief and fear. My God, did she think he was an Indian? He thought of that quiet and delightful evening when he had played for her and they had sung together, but now her voice was wild and piercing and full of such horrors as only a heart-stricken mother could feel. He looked west, where the Blackfeet lurked, and south, where the Crows waited for him.
Removing the layers of meat and covering the racks with raw flesh, he laid a choice steak on a large cottonwood chip and went up the hill. The woman was still bowing and rising. Kneeling before her, Sam said he had brought her a fine hot steak, knowing that it would do no good to say anything; he held the hot meat so that its aroma would rise to her nostrils. Would she look at it, please? Would she take at least one bite? He felt an impulse to shake the hell out of her but it passed in an instant. He stood up, looking round him and trying to think of something to do. There seemed to be only the presence of death here; the silent cairn was full of it, the shack, and this woman. He bent over and said in her ear, quietly, "I also have sorrow, Mrs. Bowden. My wife and child, the Indians killed them too; and they are there, their bones, in that pile of rocks. But no matter what our grief we have to go on living." He straightened and looked at the sky, wondering what the Father thought of a woman like Kate. Sam then faced her, laid the chip and steak down, took her arms away from her face, set the steak on her lap, and returned her arms. It was like moving the arms of a dead person who had not yet turned rigid.
He went back to the fires and tried to eat but his appetite was no good. Up the hill he could hear the woman crying. The odor of hot steak was rising to her nostrils and she was crying, for she did not know what hot steak was and she was afraid of what she did not know. A man had to listen to a lament like that, as he had to listen if his mother spoke, or the Almighty. It was one of the deep and eternal things. Sam filled his pipe and sat, rifle across his lap, listening and thinking. He had aroused some terrible fear in her; she knew he was with her, yet did not know, and her lament was a prayer to God to send him away. The poor lonely thing! he thought, puhing and thinking.