Sam was turning these things over as he puffed his pipe and thought of her problems. He wished he could stop thinking about her; after all, the vast wonderful earth the Almighty had made was filled with the dying and the about-to-die. He tried to force his thoughts to his plan to take a wife, to trap in the Uintahs this coming winter, to send for a trumpet—to these, or to speculation on what other mountain men were doing at this moment—in what deep impenetrable thicket tall skinny Bill Williams had hidden from the red warriors, his high squeaky voice silenced for the night; by what fire with its cedar and coffee aroma Wind River Bill was spinning his yarns and saying, "I love the wimmins, I shorely do"; in what Spanish village short blond Kit Carson was dancing the soup dance with black-eyed senoritas; what tall tales Jim Bridger was telling to bug-eyed greenhorns from a wagon train that had stopped this day at his post to get horses shod and tires set—Jim, spitting tobacco juice and saying, "Waugh! This here critter is wore plum down to his quick—I reckon I’ll hafta put moccasins on him"; and in what quiet shelter Lost—Skelp Dan was moving a calloused palm over the hideless bone of his skull, as if hoping to find hair growing there. Then Sam’s mind turned to Dick Wooton, who in mountain-man talk was some for his inches: six feet six and as straight as the long barrel of his rifle, he had once stood shoulder to shoulder with Rube Herring, and "Thar warn’t a hair’s-breadth differns in tall or wide betwixt them." Even Marcelline, though a Mexican, could easily look down on the top hair of a man standing six feet—Marcelline, with a temper ranging from red-hot to white-hot, who despised his people and abjured his blood, and cast his lot with the white mountain men. Marcelline was a picture all right, with his mass of hair half as long as his arm and as black as wet coal, spilling out from his slouched beaver, to cover the shoulders of his buckskin hunting jacket like a wide mane ....

But again and again Sam’s thoughts returned to the woman on the hill. He then laid his pipe aside, took a fat dripping roast off the green tripod above the glowing embers, thrust a green stick through it, picked up his rifle and a small robe, and took the path. Slippered with moccasins and as soundless as the wolf or the mouse, he approached the woman until he stood only a few feet from her, and looked down at her bowed head. For two hours or more she had been silent. In her own way she had wept until she could weep no more. She still sat where she had sat when he left her, chin sunk to her breast. One hand touched the daughter’s grave, the other that of the sons. The thing that fixed his attention was the heartsick quavering moan she made, when the long deep shudder of grief and horror ran through her. He was not a man in whom pity had a large home but compassion ran deep in him now. For perhaps ten minutes he looked down at her and listened, until the utter bitterness of it, the quivering of her flesh and soul in the loss, was more than he chose to endure. Laying his rifle down and holding the roast with his left hand, with his right he draped the robe across her shoulders and over her lap. He then set the green stick in the earth at her side, with the spitted roast on it. She gave no sign that she was aware of him. After looking at her a full minute he was convinced that she was not. Our Father in heaven, could grief be deeper than that!

Shaken, he turned away and went down the hill. At the fire he put a robe over him like a collapsed tent and took a mouth organ from his medicine bag. His father played the clavichord with dash and clarity, though his hands, almost as large as his son’s, easily spanned an octave and a half and sometimes hit the wrong key. Sam had learned to play several instruments, including the horn and flute. When he headed west he had taken only two mouth organs, and he had played them through seven long lonely winters. Tonight, with the robe over him, he played softly, so that he would not start up the night birds, the tree toads and the wolves. Beethoven had imitated the nightingale’s song with the flute, the quail’s with the oboe, and the cuckoo’s with a clarinet. Sam had tried to imitate bird songs—the phoebe’s plaintive little voice of a tiny bird-child lost in a thicket, telling its name over and over; the chickadee’s and bunting’s and horned lark’s. Tonight he softly played a few sad old things and a hymn or two, for he was filled with homesickness; or with the yearning that Schubert had felt, who had never found the love he hungered for.

It was the woman on the hill. He flung the robe back, for he didn’t want to play down in the depths of fur. He wanted to stand up and shake a clenched fist at that malevolent fate that knocked on the door in the opening bars of Beethoven’s C-minor symphony and proclaimed to the world its power over Beethoven’s hearing. It was the same unpitying ruthless fate, knocking there in the grand arrogant manner, that had brought savages to this spot, to hack three children to death and take a father away to torture. What was it there, he wondered, looking up at the home of the stars, a divine benevolence or a mindless malevolence? He rolled into a robe but was not able to sleep; he looked up through treetops at the constellations and thought  the time was about midnight. Sniffing the odors in the night breeze, he listened; tried to sleep and again listened; and rose at last to sit by the dead fire and smoke his pipe and think. There was something he ought to do. Maybe the woman up there would like a drink of water. Among her things he found a coffee pot and this he rinsed at the river and filled. When a few yards from her he paused to look round him, for the moon was still up. The four skulls looked quite comfortable on their stakes. Out in the moon dusk in the northeast a beast was slinking, perhaps a wolf. She was still there, between the graves, the robe around her, the roast on the green stick at her side. For a moment he thought she might be dead, simply, eternally, of grief. It might be best so. Going softly over to her, he saw that rats or mice had been feeding at the roast. No, she was not dead; the same long shudders were running through her, on every third or fourth breath, and the same unearthly sound of loss and woe followed each shudder.

He sank quietly to the earth and sat by her. Softly he said, "I thought you might want a drink." He had expected no response. All his life he had heard of the riddle called woman, but if she was a riddle it was in man-woman love, not in grief. In grief she was as stark and plain as the face of death itself. Windy Bill might have said that she made a man feel like gone beaver; like what he had once called a stillborn child in a putrefied forest. She made Sam feel homesick for sight of his mother and father, and Christmas around the fireplace.

Bending low and moving forward, he looked around to see if her eyes were closed. They were wide open. Once more, somewhere in the years ahead, he would see eyes like hers, and they would alter the course of his life. Now he could only feel a stupid and exasperating helplessness. Would she go with him, and take a boat or a wagon train back to her people? He knew that she never would, unless he bound her. She would fight like the bitch wolf when the grizzly approached her lair. If he were to take her a thousand miles away, like the cat she would find her way back—she would return, slinking through the forests and over the mountains, even if it took her ten years. His deepest insights told him that. They told him that all that this woman had in the world was here, under her left hand and under her right.

"You know," he said gently, "I think you’re going to need a little house here and went back to his camp.

3

AT THE BOLE of a cottonwood he untied the end of a long leather rope, and down the tree from twenty feet up came the remainder of the deer. He would eat a big breakfast, for he knew that he would work hard all day. In loin and kidney fat he fried the entire tenderloin, as well as two thick steaks from a ham; and he ate nearly all of it and drank a quart of coffee. Then, while indulging himself with a pipeful, he looked round him at the trees. Either aspen or cottonwood would do. The wood of both was soft and rotted easily but a cabin built of them would stand as long as the woman stood. If he made it about ten by ten it ought to house her all right. He was not a mason, and so would not undertake a chimney, but he would gather stones and lay a foundation, so that the logs would not rot right away; and he would leave a hole at the apex of the roof, as Indians did, to let the smoke out. He had no glass or oiled paper for a window, no planks for a door, unless he were to tear the wagon bed apart. He supposed she would freeze to death when the wild winds of Canada came baying down the skies and the river froze white and solid from bank to bank. But maybe not, for he and other mountain men would bring her blankets and robes. They would take care of her, in their way.