Leading two packhorses, he crossed the trail and rode south, but turned time and again to stare curiously at the creeping wagons, tongue to tailgate and looking like hideous monster-bugs. In fancy he imagined their sucking mouths, like a locust’s; their legs like cactus spines for seizing and holding; their round unblinking opaque-looking eyes that sought in life only what the mouth could devour; and their long sandpaper feelers that nervously twitched and flicked and shook with eagerness when the creature sensed that it had touched an object that could be eaten. During the past hour he had built such a loathsome image of the immigrants and all that they seemed to hunger for that he felt a twinge of shame and was glad when the day lowered and opened its belly to spill out the big white flakes. He began to hum a Haydn theme.
A hundred and thirty miles and three days later snow was still falling when Sam sat in its lovely gloom and looked at the cabin. It seemed to him that many years had passed since he had slipped up to it to find what was left of his wife and child. His were not the kind of wounds that time could heal.
Dismounting, he went over and stood by the door; and when he looked at the spot where she had been murdered he felt, with almost no loss of intensity, the deep hurt, the anger, the injustice, the idiocy in the divine arrangement and the loneliness of bereavement that he had felt when he set her skull on his palm. He had looked at the stark white of the teeth, remembering the soft ripe lips that had covered them; at the empty caves, thinking of the marvelous eyes that had had their home there. He recalled now all the lights and living things that had been in those eyes; the gorgeous mane of her hair; the whole face and the whole delightful body; and all the living wonder of her that somehow, by a will stronger than his own, had become no more than a few bones and his memory of her. It was this kind of thing that wrenched a man’s heart loose and blotted the soul out of him: if only something could survive that was more than the least of what a thing had been! If, of a flower, there could be more than the dry dead petals; of man, more than bones bleaching after the wolves were done with them; of his child, some part somewhere of the brave mountain man that he would have been. Far north (it was eight hundred miles or more) he had three times removed stones so that he could reach in and thrust in an armful of flowers. Three times his hand had softly moved over the pitiable and absurd remains; and crushed petals and rubbed their essence over the two skulls. How utterly death separated the lover from the things he loved! Here by the cabin door he kicked the snow away, and sitting where she had fallen, he played a few of the melodies he had played during those few immortal weeks when they were man and wife.
33
ALL THE MOUNTAIN MEN men had known what kind of winter it would be; it was the second most paralyzing in the memory of the oldest Indians of the north country. It set in early and deepened fast. By mid-December the Missouri was frozen across at the Big Bend, and the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Bighorn. August was feeling the chills of September when Kate saw the first blight on her flowers. She did not know that it was frost; she thought her plants needed water, and daylong for a week she trudged up the hill. By October even the late bloomers were stricken, the primroses, asters, and gold stars. The nights were cold and clear, and when the moon was up Kate sat with her children until it went down.
During her years on the Musselshell she had not been conscious of a lost husband. She no longer saw Sam striding along the spine of high mountains, or heard him filling the heavens with deep organ tones. Her life had steadily drawn in to the heart of it, until it encompassed only her children and their flowers. Except in moments of fitful sleep or when chewing at food that was old and stale and tough she gave all her time to her children and their garden, watering and weeding all day, even when there were no weeds, and reading noble verses or singing old hymns half the night. She had been thirty-five when her family was massacred: she was not an old woman now but she looked as old as the hills around her. Bill had come by after the killing of the Indians and had been startled on finding her hair completely white. It was not gray but white, with the look of cotton. Her face was deeply seamed and the skin over it looked like leather. Her body had shrunk until she was barely five feet tall; and it was bent and misshapen, like aspens on northern hillsides after the deep snows of winter. It was not labor that had prematurely aged her but want of food and sleep: she had been so completely devoted to her children that for days on end she had not eaten, and she had slept only when too exhausted to read or sing. During these years she had not once lain down to sleep but had sat by the door. She had so little grasp of the realities and was so far gone to heaven that she did not understand that the moon was not capricious in its appearances but came at certain hours. She got the habit of sitting by the door because she thought the moon might appear at any moment, day or night. One dream she had dreamed so many times that she had only to doze and it came again. She was in heaven with her children and everything there was inexpressibly tender and beautiful. The river of life lay clean and holy and nourishing, and away from it in all directions were gentle hillsides, abloom with flowers and redolent of orchards; and over all of it was a blue sky as impeccable as God. All the people around her were mothers with their laughing and loving children, gathering flowers, eating berries, drinking from the river, and singing glad little songs of love and thanksgiving. Kate was so happy that she gave off little laughs and cries in her sleep; and on awaking she was so filled with the glory of it that it seemed to her that all her life she had fed on the light and love of the other world. Her world, the lonely hills around her, empty but for her garden, she was only dimly aware of, if at all; for she had been approaching heaven dream by prayer and was at last on its threshold, even when awake, and was ready to enter and be with her angels.
Because she was so other-worldly in her moods eating had become wholly perfunctory; she would go to the pile of stuff by the wall and without looking at it would feel into it and around her; and if she felt something that she thought she could eat she would begin to gnaw at it, if it was old meat or hard old biscuit, or she would push it into her mouth, if it was dried fruit. The mice had worked all through her food and had spilled and eaten most of her sugar and flour. If her searching hand came to spilled sugar she would eat a little of it, or of the raw flour; or she would chew a coffee bean if she found one. Her hunger for food was on the level of her need to void and for her had no more significance. In the dead of winter when the cold was deepest and all her food was frozen and she was unable to gnaw at it, because her teeth were bad, she would suck at it. Sitting by the door with all the bedding around her and over her, she would put to her mouth a piece of old hard deer or elk flesh, and suck at it and watch for the moon.
In this terrible winter she went in December to the river for a pail of water. The river was frozen over from bank to bank. A week ago she had chopped a hole in the ice but had forgotten it; she now climbed the hill over her snowpath, to fetch the axe. She chopped until she was exhausted and found no water. This deeply troubled her, for she felt that her children’s plants needed watering. The next morning she went down and chopped again. She had at last a hole eighteen inches deep, but peering down, she saw that there was no water in it. Trembling with weakness and anxiety, she enlarged it. Because most of the ice chips fell into it as she chopped she now and then had to lie on her belly and reach down for them. Then, on her knees, she would chop again. With the kind of dauntless perseverance that had put Sam across the cold white prairies she kept at the task until she could see black water, two feet down. Her hole across the top was two and a half feet wide; around it all the way down it was jutting and jagged, like a talus slope, and lying face down, she tried to smooth the wall by chipping at it. Reaching down too far, she slipped and went headfirst into the hole. At the bottom it was too small to allow her to go through, and so she stood head downward, like a cotton-wrapped stopper in a huge ice jug. But at once she began to struggle and with almost the last of her strength pushed herself up and out.