There now rose before him, as he shivered, a vivid picture of the Indians. A brave had come with a second drink for the guard and had seen him lying there, dead, with eyes and tongue choked half out of him. Shrieking, he had run to the chief; and half drunk and stuffed with half-cooked elk meat, the redmen had rushed to the tent to stare with amazement at one of their most valiant. Then all hell had broken loose. The Indian camp must have been like an anthill after squaws built a fire around it. What odors!—of stinking war paint, fire smoke, rum, howling dogs, and rage; and what yells of fury and frustration! What wild barking from the dogs, what terrified snortings and whinnying from the horses; and then what a bedlam as fifty-seven men, clutching their guns and tomahawks, ran back and forth, east, west, north, their senses fogged with rum and their black eyes turning yellow!
Sam’s idea of the scene warmed him a little. "When this ole woman she torst him come he went jumpin." Sam could imagine the chief’s eyes almost down on his cheeks when, bending over in the dim light of the tepee, he could no longer doubt that The Terror had killed a mighty warrior with his bare hands. Sam snorted and chuckled and shivered. He was warming his body and warming his soul. "Me and the chief," he said, wiping a tear away, "will have a huggin match, come next summer."
He stood up and for a third or fourth time wrapped the robe around him, tugging at it as if by tugging he could stretch it, but it would reach only from his chin to his knees. Doing the best he could vith it, he lay again in the coffin hole, knife and hatchet within reach, both hands clutching the edges of the robe to hold them together. It was his lower legs and feet that felt coldest. Trying again, he lay on bare earth on his left side, brought his knees up, and spread the robe over him, with the back edge tucked under his back and rump, and the front edge under his knees and hands. And though the temperature was fifteen below Sam fell asleep, with five wolves crawling close to smell him.
The wolves were bivouacked and waiting when Sam awakened four hours later, chilled through and so stiff that the only thing he could move was his head. There was no sensation in his hands or legs. and it was only with a supreme effort that he was able at last to sit up. The hunger pangs in him were as sharp as knife points when he crawled out of the shelter and rose like a huge animated corpse to his feet. As he hailed himself to drive blood through him he sensed that during sleep he had come close to freezing to death. Looking east into the gray morning. he wondered how it was with Kate.
For a few minutes he tried to quiet his violent shivering and think of things that would give him strength. There were mountain flowers—the Mariposa, caltha, and alpine lilies, the windflowers and violets and poppies, columbines and paint-brushes and whole mountainsides of syringa. It had seemed to him in times past that the loveliest flowers and the sweetest musical themes were but two aspects of the same grace; but the relationship seemed a bit strained. He tried to hum a Schubert song while telling himself that when spring came he would climb to the snowbanks and gather an armful of lilies to lay over the bones of his wife and son. His muscular spasms were so strong that he began to pinch and smite himself, and fling his arms wildly and jump up and down; and two hundred feet away live wolves sat on their haunches and looked at him.
26
AN HOUR LATER he looked down the Judith River, which was north, and wondered if it would be safe to ride a raft down it to the Missouri, and then down the Missouri to the Musselshell. He knew it was a stupid thought and he took it to mean that his mind was failing. After his dreadful ordeal and escape, Tom Fitzpatrick, whose hair had turned white in a few days, had said, "After a certain time the biggest danger is a man’s ideas, for his mind fails and he thinks every idea is brilliant; but nearly every idea would lead him to certain death if he followed it." Yes, it was what looked like easy ways that fooled a man. So Sam looked straight east and told himself to get along, that it was less than a hundred miles to Kate’s door. There was a stiff wind from the north this morning. The lands between him and Kate’s shack were the winter hunting-grounds of the blizzards down from Canada. Though feeling terribly weak, Sam thought he could cover the distance in two days and two nights, if the winds did not put him down. It was the kind of land the Creator used to test His boldest children. Job he had tested one way, Sam Minard he was testing in another. The greenhorns and other weaklings, with soft useless hands, flabby bellies, and timid fawning ways, He tested by allowing them to walk two blocks to a trolley, or to fish in a hole on a pleasant stream. Sam accepted the test and resolved to survive it, but he knew that it was a test more severe than he had ever faced, with its cold and hunger, and the blizzards in which any mountain man on earth could lose his way. Somewhere yonder in the frosty early-morning haze was Judith Mountain, and somewhere beyond it was Wild Horse Lake. Not far from the lake was a sizable creek that flowed into the Musselshell. If he could see these landmarks he could find his way, even though the sun was hidden day and night.
The river before him was frozen about a fourth of the way across on either side. Sam had to find and drag across the ice pieces of log for a raft. It was when he moved to pick up the end of a log that he knew, with a pang of dismay, not only that a good deal of his strength had left him but that merely to lift sixty or eighty pounds drove sharp pains all through him. He hadn’t realized that he was so weak. He spent two hours getting enough timber to the edge to carry him, and it was almost noon when he reached the farther side. It was so cold this morning that the steel of hatchet and knife burned his flesh. Deciding that he wouldn’t need the hatchet, he buried it at the root of a tree; but after he had gone a little distance he turned to look back, and began to tremble, as though he were taking farewell of a living thing. He became conscious of a wish to return to it, and to take his mind off it he stared at the five wolves across the river. Then he faced the east and began to walk.
For the first ten miles it was easy walking. As he trudged along, trying to ignore the pains in nerves, muscles, and bones, there was around him only the white blinding waste, for it was blinding, even though the sun was hazed over. There was a sharp burning wind on his left, and after a while his face was so numbed by cold that there was little feeling in it. Having no mittens, he had to keep rubbing his hands or striking them against him. But it was his feet that gave him the most trouble. He now had only two pairs of moccasins and they were thin. He wondered if he ought to wrap a piece of the robe around each foot; what he did from time to time was to fold the robe and sit on it and take the moccasins off. He then rubbed his feet to bring the blood through them, and studied the sun, the sky, and the world around him. Since leaving the Judith he had seen no wolf, no rabbit, no bird. Winter cold was supreme here. He thought the temperature was about fifteen below zero, and failing. If it reached forty below could he keep going? Of course he would keep going.
When he walked again he hung the robe over his head and down on the left side, but the wind made such frenzied efforts to tear it away that he again carried it in his arms, with his numbed hands inside it. Would Kate have a fire? Or would he find her dead? When darkness fell what a glory it would be if far away through the cold he were to see the pale wintry yellow of a lighted window! But there was no window, and unless she had a fire there would be no light. He supposed that she was sitting with her knees drawn up to her belly, with all her bedding piled under, around, and over her. It made a man mad to think of a woman living that way, winter after winter; but her devotion to her children was one of the great and noble things, like Beethoven’s Ninth, or a sunset, or a wild storm on the ocean. He looked up at the frozen sky and wondered what the Almighty thought of Kate. She was all grit and a yard wide. What a mountain man she would have made!