Sam was not a man who usually felt gooseflesh in moments of danger but he had been enfeebled by hunger and want of sleep. Gooseflesh spread over him in the moment when he smelled the danger; turning swiftly to a sitting position, tomahawk in one hand and knife in the other, he saw ambling toward him not more than fifty feet away a grizzly so large that it seemed almost to fill the cavern. In a flash Sam knew that the reverberating echoes had disturbed the monster’s slumber, somewhere back in the gloom, and it had come to give battle to its enemy. That it intended to give battle Sam knew the instant he saw it. The next moment he was on his feet, advancing, the hatchet ready to strike and the knife to plunge. He marched right up to the beast and smote the prow of the nose a crushing blow with the head of the axe. In an instant his arm came back and he struck again, and this time the blow fell across the sensitive nostrils. The big furry fellow said woof-woof and began to back off, with Sam after him, hoping for grizzly steaks; but almost at once the beast vanished, and there was only the whimpering plaintive sound of a frightened child, as the shuffling fur ball hastened back to its winter bed.
Pale from fright and weakness and breathing hard, Sam watched it disappear. He felt for a moment that he was being tested with more than he could bear. Hungry, weary to the depths of his marrow, and numbed through with cold, he would now have to leave the cavern and go. There might be a whole pack of grizzlies back in the dark; and even if there were not, the whimpering one would nurse his injuries and come forth again. Over by the entrance Sam stood a few moments, looking out. He knew by the nimbus around the winter sun that the weather was going to change. After seven days of deep storm the temperature would fall; sometimes in this area it went to thirty, forty, even to fifty below. Sometimes there were blizzards that not even the wolves and hawks could endure. There was cold that split trees open with the sound of gunfire; that froze broad rivers from bank to bank and almost to their bottoms; and the snow so hard that even the giant moose with its sharp hoofs could walk on it. It was cold that welded a man’s hand to the steel of gun or knife, if he was fool enough to touch it.
After searching the valley for sign of Indians and seeing none Sam looked up the river gorge to the continental backbone. After he had crossed the Divide the rivers would be flowing east instead of west, and he would be going down instead of climbing. With the robe flung across his left shoulder the food enfolded by a piece of it and tucked up under an armpit, the hatchet in his left hand and the knife in his right, he scrambled down to the water’s edge; sat and took off moccasins and leggins and trousers; and thrust wounded feet into the icy waters. Then he waded upstream. He guessed he might as well eat the remainder of the elk and the three small fish, and keep going and keep going. After he had gone a mile or two he peeled the outer bark off a spruce and licked the juice of the cambium. It was resinous and bitter. Hank Cady had said that lessen a man has something better he kin live on it if he hafta. The cambium itself Sam found unchewable, and so peeled off strips of it and licked the juice, as he had licked fruit juices off his hands as a child. While licking the juice he looked round him, wondering if there was anything else on this mountain that a man could eat. During the long miles up this river he had seen no birds, except a hawk or two and one duck; no sign of grouse or sage hen, no sign of deer or elk trail. On the mountain slopes above him he could see no snowpaths. The untramped, unmarked snow on either side of the river was about three feet deep. He wondered if it would be less exhausting to plow through it than to fight his way up over slippery boulders, in water from a foot to three feet deep. Wading in river waters up a mountain canyon was the most fatiguing toil he had ever known; he was sure he was not covering more than two miles an hour but he kept at it, doggedly, all day long, pausing only when night closed round him.
He then searched both banks, hoping to find a shelter in which he could sleep. But he found only an arbor, under a dense tangle of berry vines and mountain laurel, over which the snow had formed a roof; he crawled back under it, out of sight. After putting on his clothes he wrapped the robe around him, and lying on his left side facing the river, he put two fish on leaves a few inches from his face, hatchet and knife within reach, and in a few minutes was sound asleep. His first dream was of his wife; they were somewhere in buffalo land, and while she gathered berries and mushrooms he cooked steaks and made hot biscuits. It was a cold night and he slept cold, but for eight hours he did not awaken. It was the first solid rest he had had in a week.
When at daylight he stirred it took him a few moments to understand where he was. Then, like Jedediah Smith, he gave thanks to God; dwelt for a few minutes on the bones of his wife and child, yonder in the winter, and on a mother sitting in a pile of bedding looking out at an empty white world; and then ate the two fish. Yes, it had turned colder. On the eastern side of the Divide would be the wild storm winds down from Canada; there he would need more than a mouthful of frozen fish to keep him going. But he felt cheerful this morning and he told himself that he was as strong as a bull moose. He thought he was safe from the Blackfeet now. Ahead of him lay an ordeal that might be the most difficult he would ever endure, but he would struggle through it, day after day, all the way across the white winter loneliness, until he came at last to Kate’s door.
"Keep a fare for me, and a light," he said, and faced into the sharp winds from the north.
25
HE HAD NO food, not even a seed pod or a root, when he reached the continent’s spine and looked across a frozen white world to the thin faint tree line of a river, fifteen or twenty miles distant. Beyond the river was the wintry desolation that lay all the way to Kate’s shack. The Missouri came down from the Three Forks area, and passing through the Gates of the Mountains, swung to the northeast. That was buffalo land, yonder. It was also Blackfeet land. It would be Blackfeet land all the way to the Musselshell. He could think of nothing to eat down there that a man could get hold of—even the rancid marrow in the bones of dead things would be lost under the snows. Breaking off evergreen boughs, he laid a pile on the frozen snow and sat on the pile. Taking the left moccasin off, he drew the foot up across his thigh. The trouble with foot wounds was that they never got a chance to heal; in this foot he had a dozen wounds; during his hours of rest or sleep they tried to scab over but when he walked again the scabs softened and came off. Both feet had wounds but it would do no good to worry about them. A mountain man did not worry about small wounds, nor much about big ones. He could keep going for years with arrowheads in his flesh, or for months with open thigh or belly wounds.
Sam’s problem was food. It would be a bitter irony to escape from torture and death only to fall exhausted on the prairie and be eaten by wolves. A lot of wolves and coyotes were down there and they were all hungry. They were all over that vast frozen whiteness as far as a man could see and a thousand miles beyond that; they would follow him, hoping to chew the buckskin off him, and to eat him alive when at last he fell to rise no more. The greenhorns back east told tales of ferocious man-eating wolves that in lonely winter wastes of northern nights trailed helpless voyagers and pulled them down; but Sam knew of no attack of man by wolves, and the mountain men knew of none. The wolves would follow him and trot around him all night and all day; and when he slept they would steal up close to see if he had anything a wolf could eat. Hunger, if strong enough, might force them to attack a man. Hunger had made more heroes than courage.