Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

  After a time, the stiff hide shelter pressed upon him with an increasing weight. The wind seemed to have lessened, for no longer did he hear the angry snarl and moan about his ears. He raised the flap of his shelter, and felt the weight of the snow above him; in the darkness he saw only the faintest suggestion of light. He moved his hand toward it; it met the dry, crumbling cold of solidly banked snow.

  Under the snow, between the skins that had only a few days before held together the flesh of the buffalo, his body rested. Slowly its sluggish blood generated warmth, and sent the warmth to his body’s skin, and out to the close hide of the buffalo; thence his body gathered its own small warmth, and loosened within it. The shrill drone of the wind above him lulled his hearing, and he slept.

  For two days and three nights the storm roared about the high valley where the men were trapped; they lay hidden under drifts of snow and did not move beneath them, except to emerge to relieve themselves, or to poke holes in the drifted banks to allow fresh air into their close dark caves of skin. Once Andrews had to come out into the weather to release water that he had held inside him until his groin and upper thighs throbbed with pain. Weakly he pushed the snow aside from his head-flap, and crawled into the bitter cold, blinking his eyes; he emerged into a darkness that was absolute. He felt the snow sting against his cheeks and forehead; he winced at the cold air that cut into his lungs; but he could see nothing. Afraid to move, he crouched where he had merged and made water into the night. Then he fumbled back through the snow and squirmed into his close shelter, which still held a bit of the body warmth that he had left.

  Much of the time he slept; when he did not sleep, he lay motionless on his side, knees drawn up on his chest, so that his body would give warmth to itself. Awake, his mind was torpid and unsure, and it moved as sluggishly as his blood. Thoughts, unoccasioned and faint, drifted vaguely into his mind and out. He half remembered the comforts of his home in Boston; but that seemed unreal and far away, and of those thoughts there remained in his mind only thin ghosts of remembered sensation—the feel of a feather bed at night, the dim comfortable closeness of a front parlor, the sleepy hum of unhurried conversation below him after he had gone to bed.

  He thought of Francine. He could not bring her image to his mind, and he did not try; he thought of her as flesh, as softness, as warmth. Though he did not know why (and though it did not occur to him to wonder why), he thought of her as a part of himself that could not quite make another part of himself warm. Somehow he had pushed that part away from him once. He felt himself sinking toward that warmth; and cold, before he met it, he slept again.

  VII

  On the morning of the third day, Andrews turned weakly under the weight of the snow and burrowed through the long drift that had gathered at his head. Though he had grown somewhat used to the cold, which even in sleep enveloped the thin edge of warmth his body managed to maintain, he flinched and closed his eyes, hunching his neck into his shoulders as his flesh came against the packed coldness of the snow.

  When he came from under the snow, his eyes were still closed; he opened them upon a brilliance that seared them over for an instant with a white hotness. Though melting snow clung in patches to his hands, he clapped them over his eyes and rubbed them until the pain subsided. Gradually, by squinting his eyelids open a little at a time, he accustomed his eyes to daylight. When at last he was able to look around him, he viewed a world that he had not seen before.

  Under a cloudless sky, and glittering coldly beneath a high sun, whiteness spread as far as he could see. It lay thickly drifted about the site of their camp and lay like movement frozen, in waves and hillocks over the broad sweep of the valley. The mountainside, which had defined the valley’s winding course, now was softened and changed; in a gentle curve the snow lay in drifts about the dark pines that straggled from the mountain into the flat valley, so that only the tips of the trees showed dark against the whiteness of the snow. The snow was gathered high upon the mountainside, so that no longer did his eyes meet a solid sheet of green; now he saw each tree sharply defined against the snow which surrounded it. For a long time he stood where he had come out of his shelter and looked about him wonderingly, and did not move, reluctant to push through the snow which bore no mark of anything save itself. Then he stooped and poked one finger through the thin crust in front of him. He made his hand into a fist and enlarged the hole his finger had made. He scooped a handful of the snow, and let it trickle through his fingers in a small white pile beside the hole from which he had scooped it. Then, weak from lack of food and dizzy from his days and nights of lying in darkness, he stumbled forward a few steps through the waist-high drift; he turned around and around, looking at the land which had become so familiar to him that he had got out of the habit of noticing it, and which now was suddenly strange to him, so strange that he could hardly believe that he had looked upon it before. A clear and profound silence rose from the valley, above the mountains, and into the sky; the sound of his breathing came loudly to him; he held his breath to gather the quality of the silence. He heard the slither and drop of the snow as it fell from his trouser legs into the harder snow packed around his feet; in the distance there came the soft echoing snap of a branch that gave beneath its weight of snow; across the camp, from the drifted corral, came the sharp snort of a horse, so loud that Andrews imagined for a moment that it was only a few feet away. He turned toward the corral, expelling his clouded breath; beyond the drifted snow he saw the horses move.

  Gathering air into his lungs, he shouted as loudly as he could; and after he had shouted, he remained with his mouth open, listening to the sound of his own voice that boomed as it grew fainter, and after what seemed to him a long time, trailed into the silence, dispersed by distances and absorbed by the snow. He turned to the mounds of snow, under one of which he had lain for two days; under the other Miller and Charley Hoge still lay. He saw no movement; a sudden fear caught him, and he took a few steps through the snow. Then he saw a tremor, saw the snow break from above the mound, and saw the break lengthen toward him. Miller’s head—black and rough against the smooth whiteness from which it emerged—came into sight; the heavy arms, like those of a swimmer, flailed the snow aside and Miller stood upright, blinking furiously. After a moment he squinted at Andrews and said hoarsely, his voice wavering and unsure: “You all right, boy?”

  “Yes,” Andrews said. “You and Charley?”

  Miller nodded. He looked across the expanse of their campsite. “I wonder how Fred made out. Likely as not he froze to death.”

  “The last I saw, before we settled in, he was over there,” Andrews said, and pointed toward the chimney rock around which they had earlier arranged their camp. They walked toward it, their going uncertain; they sometimes plowed through drifted snow that came above their waists, and sometimes easily in snow that barely reached the middle of their calves. They went around the high rock, poking cautiously into the snow with their boots.

  “No telling where he is now,” Miller said. “We might not find him till the spring thaw.”

  But as he spoke, Andrews saw the snow move and break very close to him, beside the chimney rock.

  “Here he is!” he shouted.

  Between Miller and Andrews a rough shape came up through the snow. Great chunks of white ice clung to the matted hair of the buffalo hide and fell away, revealing the flat umber color; for an instant, Andrews drew back in fear, thinking irrationally that somehow a buffalo was rearing itself upward to confront them. But in the next instant, Schneider had thrown aside the skins in which he had wrapped himself like a mummy, and was standing blindly between them, his eyes screwed shut, an expression of pain furrowing the flesh between his eyebrows and pulling his mouth to one side.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s bright,” Schneider said, his voice an unclear croak. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Are you all right?” Andrews asked.

  Schneider opened his eyes to a slit, recognized Andrews, and nodded. “
I think my fingers got a little frostbit, and my feet are damn near froze off; but I managed all right. If I ever get thawed out, I’ll know for sure.”

  As well as they could—with their hands, their feet, and the folded buffalo hides that Schneider had discarded—the three men scraped away a large area of snow from around the chimney rock; upon the frozen ground, and over the charred, ice-coated remains of an old campfire, they piled what dry twigs they could strip from the snow-weighted lower branches of the pine trees. Miller dug into their cache of goods and found an old tinderbox, some crumpled paper that had not been wetted by the snow, and several unused cartridges. He laid the paper under the dry branches, worked the lead bullets loose from the cartridges, and poured the gunpowder upon the paper, crumpling more paper on the powder. He struck the tinderbox and ignited the powder, which flared powerfully, igniting the paper. Soon a small fire blazed, melting the snow that clung to the inward side of the rock.

  “We’ll have to keep this going,” Miller said. “It’s mighty hard to start a fire in a blowing wind with wet wood.”

  As the fire grew stronger, the men dug into the snow for logs and piled them, wet, upon the fire. They huddled about the warmth, so close that steam rose from their damp clothing; Schneider sat on his buffalo skins and thrust his boots close to the fire, almost into it. The smell of scorching leather mixed with the heavier smell of the burning logs.

  After he had warmed himself, Miller walked across the campsite, following the irregular path that he and Andrews had made earlier, toward the place between the bales where Charley Hoge still lay. Andrews watched him go, following his progress with eyes that moved in a head that did not turn. The heat from the fire bit into his skin and pained him, and still he had the urge to get closer, to hover over the fire, to take the fire inside himself. He bit his lips with the pain of the heat, but he did not move away. He remained before the fire until his hands were a bright red, and until his face burned and throbbed. Then he backed away and instantly he was cold again.

  Miller led Charley Hoge back across the snow toward the fire. Charley Hoge went before Miller, shambling loosely in the broken path, his head down, stumbling to his knees now and then. Once, when the path turned, he plowed into the unbroken snow, and halted and turned only when Miller caught at him and turned him gently back. When the two men came up before the fire, Charley Hoge stood inertly before it, his head still down, his face hidden from the others.

  “He don’t quite know where he is yet,” Miller said. “He’ll be all right in a little while.”

  As the fire warmed him, Charley Hoge began to stir. He looked dully at Andrews, at Schneider, and back at Miller; then he returned his gaze to the flames, and moved closer to them; he thrust the stump of his wrist close to the heat, and held it there for a long time. Finally he sat before the fire and rested his chin on his knees, which he cradled close to his chest with arms folded tightly around them; he gazed steadily into the flames, and blinked slowly, unseeingly, every now and then.

  Miller went to the corral and inspected the horses; he returned leading his own horse, and reported to the men around the fire that the others seemed to be in good shape, considering the weather they had gone through. Digging again into the cache of their goods, he found the half-filled sack of grain that they had brought along to supplement the grass diet of the horses; he measured out a small quantity and fed it slowly to his horse. He told Schneider to feed the others after a while. He let his own horse wander about the area for a few moments until its muscles were loosened and it had gained strength from its food. Then, scraping the ice and snow off the saddle and tightening the cinch around its belly, he mounted.

  “I’m going to ride up toward the pass and see how bad it is,” he said. He rode slowly away from them. His horse walked with head down, delicately lifting its forehooves out of the neat holes they made, and more delicately placing them on the thin crust and letting them sink, as if only by their own weight, through the snow.

  After several minutes, when Miller was out of hearing, Schneider said to the fire: “It ain’t no use for him to go look. He knows how bad it is.”

  Andrews swallowed. “How bad is it?”

  “We’ll be here for a while,” Schneider said, and chuckled without humor; “we’ll be here for a spell.”

  Charley Hoge raised his head and shook it, as if to clear his mind. He looked at Schneider, and blinked. “No,” he said loudly, hoarsely. “No.”

  Schneider looked at Charley Hoge and grinned. “You come alive, old man? How did you like your little rest?”

  “No,” Charley Hoge said. “Where’s the wagon? We got to get hitched up. We got to get out of here.”

  Charley Hoge got to his feet and swayed, looking wildly about him. “Where is it?” He took a step away from the fire. “We can’t lose too much time. We can’t—”

  Schneider rose and put a hand on Charley Hoge’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said, gruffly and soothingly. “It’s all right. Miller’ll be back in a minute. He’ll take care of everything.”

  As suddenly as he had arisen, Charley Hoge sat back on the ground. He nodded at the fire and mumbled: “Miller. He’ll get us out of here. You wait. He’ll get us out.”

  A heavy log, thawed to wetness by the heat, fell into the bed of coals; it hissed and cracked, sending up heavy plumes of blue-gray smoke. The three men squatted in the little circle of bare ground, which was soggy from the snow that had turned to water and seeped from the closely surrounding drifts. Waiting for Miller to return, they did not speak; torpid from the heat of the fire and weak from the two-day lack of food, they did not think of moving or feeding themselves. Every now and then Andrews reached over to the thinning bank beside him and lethargically took a handful of snow, stuffed it into his mouth, and let it melt on his tongue and trickle down his throat. Though he did not look beyond the campfire, the whiteness of the snow over the valley, caught and intensified by the brilliant sun, burned into his averted face, causing his eyes to smart and his head to throb.

  Miller was gone from the camp nearly two hours. When he returned, he rode past the campsite without looking at anyone. He left his trembling and winded horse in the snow-banked corral and slogged wearily through the snow up to where they waited around the fire. He warmed his hands—blue-black from the cold and ingrained powder smoke that remained on them—and turned around several times to warm himself thoroughly before he spoke.

  After a minute of silence, Schneider said harshly: “Well? How does it look?”

  “We’re snowed in good,” Miller said. “I couldn’t get within half a mile of the pass. Where I turned back, the snow was maybe twelve foot deep in places; and it looked like it was worse farther on.”

  Schneider, squatting, slapped his knees, and rose upright. He kicked at a charred log that had fallen from the fire and was sizzling on the wet ground.

  “I knowed it,” Schneider said dully. “By God, I knowed it before you told me.” He looked from Miller to Andrews and back again. “I told you sons-of-bitches we ought to get out of here, and you wouldn’t listen to me. Now look what you got yourselves into. What are you going to do now?”

  “Wait,” Miller said. “We get ourselves fixed up against another blow, and we wait.”

  “Not this feller,” Schneider said. “This feller’s going to get his self out of here.”

  Miller nodded. “If you can figure any way, Fred, you go to it.”

  Andrews rose, and said to Miller: “Is the pass we came over the only way out?”

  “Unless you want to walk up over the mountain,” Miller said, “and take your chances that way.”

  Schneider spread his arms out. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” Miller said, “if you’re fool enough to try it. Even if you rigged up some snowshoes, you couldn’t carry anything with you. You’d sink down in the first soft snow you came to. And you can’t live off the land in the high country in the winter.”

  “A man with bel
ly could do it,” Schneider said.

  “And even if you was fool enough to try that, you take a chance on another blow. Did you ever try to wait out a blizzard on the side of a mountain? You wouldn’t last an hour.”

  “It’s a chance,” Schneider said, “that could be took.”

  “And even if you was fool enough to take that chance, without knowing the country you came out in, you might walk around for a week or two before you saw somebody to set you straight. There ain’t nothing between here and Denver, to speak of; and Denver’s a long way off.”

  “You know the country,” Schneider said. “You could point us the way to go.”

  “And besides,” Miller said. “We’d have to leave the goods here.”

  For a moment Schneider was silent. Then he nodded, and kicked at the wet log again. “That’s it,” he said in a tight voice. “I might of knowed. It’s the goddamned hides you won’t let go of.”

  “It’s more than the hides,” Miller said. “We couldn’t take anything with us. The horses would run wild, and the cattle would go off with the buffalo that’s still here. We’d have nothing to show for the whole try.”

  “That’s it,” Schneider said again, his voice raising. “That’s what’s behind it. Well, the goods don’t mean that much to me. I’ll go over by myself if need be. You just point out a route to me and give me a few landmarks, and I’ll chance it on my own.”

  “No,” Miller said.

  “What?”