For a while he had felt warmer but actually it was below zero where he sat and slowly he was filled with chills. He had dreadful cramps in his belly; when with massaging he tried to ease them they became so severe that he almost cried out. He ate a handful of snow and it filled him with nausea. Reaching back under snow, he tried to find grass, dead bugs, or anything he could chew and swallow; but there was only the soil. He cut off a buckskin fringe and began to chew it and at once doubled over, trying to vomit. He told himself he should think of the men of whom it had been said that they lived for weeks on the stiff old hides of dead wolves, or who lived for days on nothing but grass.

He guessed he would just have to massage the numbed parts of him, think of Job, stay awake, and wait for daylight. He would also think of Kate; she was not far from him now, no more than thirty miles, or twenty. Staying awake was the hardest thing he had ever tried to do; what a tyrant it was when the body wanted rest! When twice he almost reached the point of no return he knew that he would have to set up a better watchdog. While he sat, swaying a little, his head had imperceptibly sunk, and his eyes in the same slow treacherous way had almost closed, until it had been only with a feeble glimmer of awareness that he caught himself. He tried to devise a plan whereby if he fell asleep he would sink on the point of the knife. Turning to hands and knees, he told himself that no man could sleep in that position, that if he were to fall to his belly he would awaken. But that proved to be no good either. The only way he could think of in which he had any confidence was to count to twenty, over and over, and record each twenty. For awhile he plopped a piece of snow into his mouth after uttering the word "twenty," and he thought he was doing all right until, with a start, he came awake and realized that the last word he had spoken was seventeen. Convinced that he was pampering himself, he resolved on sterner measures, he began to smite and pinch himself and to yank at his nose and ears. All this he had to abandon; the massaging and pinching filled him with a warmth that was almost the same as sleep.

"Doggone it, Sam," he said aloud, "if ye can’t stay awake, then git up and go!"

He thrust up through the snow that had been blown into the hole and stood up, head and shoulders in the wind. He could see no sign of daylight. The winds seemed to be rushing by in even greater haste and he doubted that he could stand in them. To punish himself for being such a sleepy lubber he turned his head from side to side, so that the air filled with frozen crystals could smite and sting all over his face. Then he sank back under the shelter.

He was never to know how he survived this night and the next forenoon. His mind was no longer clear when at last he tested the winds and decided to go. With the robe around his back and the edges tucked in around his hands he pointed his haggard face into the east, bent forward, and walked again. He now moved more like a robot than a man. The winds had abated a little, a pale nimbus of light was halfway up the southern sky, and he could see sometimes for a hundred yards, sometimes for half a mile. For seven hours he walked, pausing only four times to massage his feet. And at last he stood, swaying in almost utter exhaustion, and looked at a snow-laden riverline and knew that it was the Musselshell.

He had barely enough awareness left to know that his journey was not over. He would have to cross the river. Somehow he would have to determine if he was north or south of Kate’s shack. And he knew he would have to keep in the forefront of his mind the hard and merciless fact that when a person found his dreadful ordeal almost over his tendency was to relax his efforts, to let go of what remained of his strength. He tried to hum the Ave Maria while searching round him for pieces of wood for a raft; he tried to think of a story to lift his spirit and recalled one that Bill had told about wolves. A big pack of wolves was running around campfires after dark, snapping their teeth and moving in a foot or two every time they circled the camp. At last, exploding at them in profane rage, Lost-Skelp Dan had rushed at them with long knives, only to see the wolf nearest him leap to his hind legs, shed his wolf clothing, and vanish into the darkness. Before Dan could recover from amazement all the wolves had jumped up and fled. Sam tried to laugh at the old Indian trick but it did not seem to be funny now, nor could he think of anything funny as he set his teeth on the weariness and pain and dragged chunks of wood to the edge of the river ice. The Ave Maria didn’t sound like a prayer any more. He found berry vines to bind the logs and he got across the river but he would never know how he did it; and he crossed the bottomlands and looked north and if south for a landmark. Seeing nothing familiar, he climbed a hill and looked over the country up and down the river, and to the west where he had plodded through the wild winds. He felt pretty sure that Kate was north of him, and after he had walked a mile he knew that she was. After two more miles and two hours and the coming of night he looked up the hill at her cold snow-covered shack.

In this moment, when convinced that he was looking at it, that it was no mirage or apparition, he was overwhelmed by sudden and awful weakness. In spite of all he could do he sank to the earth and began to weep. The mightiest of all the mountain men had reached the end of his strength but not of his grit. He began to crawl on hands and knees toward her door. His escape from the Blackfeet and his long journey without food through deep cold and blizzards was to become one of the legends of the mountain men, along with Tom Fitzpatrick’s, Colter’s, and Glass’s. "He done it, he shorely did,” Windy Bill would say a hundred times around the campfires. "He jist headed torst the crazy woman and clum the mountains and there he wuz .... "

By the time Sam reached Kate’s door his hands were so nearly frozen that he spent a few minutes blowing on them, sucking the fingers, washing them in snow, massaging them, and putting them inside his clothing against his ribs. He was so weak that he was sitting, and when he saw the snowpath to the graves, and then the cairn that looked like a mound of snow, he began to cry like a tortured child. He pounded on the door planks, for the door was closed, and he said, "It’s me! It’s Sam!" Grasping the door with both hands, he pulled it open and back. He was straining forward to peer into the gloom when with a low cry he saw that the woman was almost in his hands. She was right by the doorway and she seemed to be sitting in her pile of bedding, but only her gray hair and a part of her face were visible. Sam put a finger up and touched her face to see if it was alive.

"It’s me!" he whispered. "It’s your friend Sam." He crawled over the pile of bedding and turned and pulled the plank door shut. Then like an animal he wormed himself into the pile of bedding and put an arm up and around the woman and wept quietly till he fell asleep.

PART THREE

SAM

27

SAM SLEPT THROUGH the night and into the next afternoon and when he awoke he was alone. After realizing where he was he wondered if he had hogged the bedding, and then like a beast crawled over to the north wall to paw among the cold things there. One parcel, as hard as stone, he thought was jerked venison; with his knife he peeled back a part of the skin pouch, and chipping off a small piece, thrust it into his mouth. A moment after swallowing it he turned sick and was convulsed but like a famished wolf in midwinter at a carcass he chewed and swallowed other morsels. Then, suddenly, he was seized by shudderings so strong and uncontrollable that he shook all over and moaned. He crawled over to the bedding, dragging the sack of meat after him, and with some blankets around him he sat, shuddering and wondering what was wrong with him. He drew the sack of meat into the bedding and his shaking hands tried to whittle off another piece; but he was so utterly and infinitely tired that his deepest wish was to surrender to the warmth and sleep again. And so he sank back and piled bedding around and over him, and with his arms around the pouch of venison he slept again.