Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

“I need you here,” Miller said. “Three—” He glanced at Charley Hoge, who was rocking himself before the fire, humming tunelessly under his breath. “Two men can’t manage the wagon and the hides down the mountain. We’ll need you to help.”

  Schneider stared at him for a long moment. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You won’t even give me a chance.”

  “I’m giving you your chance,” Miller said quietly. “And that’s to stay here with us. Even if I told you a route and some signs, you’d never make it. Your chance to stay alive is here with the rest of us.”

  Again Schneider was silent for several moments. At last he said: “All right. I should have knowed better than to ask. I’ll sit here on my ass all winter and draw my sixty a month, and you sons-of-bitches can go to hell.” He turned his back to Miller and Andrews, and thrust his hands angrily toward the fire.

  Miller looked at Charley Hoge for a moment, as if to speak to him. Then he abruptly turned to Andrews. “Dig around in our goods and see if you can find a sack of beans. And find one of Charley’s pots. We got to get some food in us.”

  Andrews nodded, and did as he was ordered. As he was poking through the snow, Miller left the campsite and returned a few minutes later dragging several stiff buffalo hides. He made three trips back and forth between the campsite and the place where the hides rested, returning each time with more. After he had made a pile of about a dozen, he poked in the snow until he found the ax. Then, with the ax on his shoulder, he trudged away from the camp, up the mountain, among the great forest of pine trees, the lower branches of which curved downward under the weight of the snow. The tips of many of them touched the whitened earth, so that the snow that held them down and the snow upon which they rested appeared to be the same, eccentric and bizarre curves to which the trees conformed. Under the arches thus formed Miller walked, until it appeared, as he went into the distance, that he was walking into a cave of dark green and blinding crystal.

  In his absence Andrews threw several handfuls of dried beans into the iron kettle he had dug out of the snow. After the beans he scooped in several masses of snow, and placed the pot at the back of the fire, so that the kettle rested against one side of the rock. He had not been able to find the bag of salt in the snow, but he had found a small rind of salt pork wrapped in oilskin and a can of coffee. He dropped the rind into the kettle and searched again until he found the coffeepot. By the time Miller returned from the forest, the kettle of beans was bubbling and the faint aroma of coffee was beginning to rise from the pot.

  On his shoulders Miller balanced several pine boughs, thick and heavy at the raw yellow butts where they had been chopped, narrowing behind him where the smaller branches and pine needles swept a heavy trail in the snow, roughing it and covering the tracks he made as he stumbled down the side of the mountain. Bent beneath the weight of the boughs, Miller staggered the last few steps up to the fire and let the boughs crash to the snow on either side of him; a fine cloud like white dust exploded up from the ground and whirled for several minutes in the air.

  Beneath the grime and dirt Miller’s face was blue-gray from cold and exhaustion. He swayed for several minutes where he had dropped the logs and then he walked with unsteady straightness to the fire and, still standing, warmed himself. He stood so, without speaking, until the coffee bubbled up over the sides of the pot and hissed on the coals.

  His voice weak and empty, he said to Andrews: “Find the cups?”

  Andrews moved the pot to the edge of the fire; his hand burned on the hot handle, but he did not flinch. He nodded. “I found two of them. The others must have blown away.”

  Into the two cups he poured the coffee that he had brewed. Schneider walked up. Andrews handed one of the cups to Miller, and one to Schneider. The coffee was thin and weak, but the men gulped at the scalding liquid without comment. Andrews threw another small handful of coffee into the steaming pot.

  “Go easy on that,” Miller said, holding the tin cup in both his hands, juggling it to prevent his hands from burning and cupping it to gather its heat. “We ain’t got enough coffee now to last us; just let it boil longer.”

  With his second cup of coffee Miller seemed to regain some of his strength. He sipped from a third cup and passed it along to Charley Hoge, who sat still before the fire and did not look at any of the men. After his second cup, Schneider returned to the edge of the circle, beyond Charley Hoge, and stared gloomily into the coals, which glowed faintly and grayly against the blinding whiteness that filtered through the trees, intensifying the shadow in which they sat.

  “We’ll build a lean-to here,” Miller said.

  Andrews, his mouth loose and tingling from the hot coffee, said indistinctly: “Wouldn’t it be better out in the open, in the sun?”

  Miller shook his head. “In the daytime, maybe; not at night. And if another blow came up, no lean-to we could build would last more than a minute on open ground. We build here.”

  Andrews nodded and drank the last of his coffee, tilting the cup up and throwing his head back so that the warm rim of the cup touched the bridge of his nose. The beans, softening in the boiling water, sent up a thin aroma. Though he was not aware of hunger, Andrews’s stomach contracted at the odor and he bent over at the sudden pain.

  Miller said: “Might as well get to work. Beans won’t be ready to eat for two or three hours, and we have to get this up before night.”

  “Mr. Miller,” Andrews said; and Miller, who had started to rise, paused and looked at him, crouched on one knee.

  “Yes, boy?”

  “How long will we have to be here?”

  Miller stood up, and bent to brush off the black peat mud and wet pine needles that clung to his knees. From his bent head and under his black, tangled brows, he raised his eyes and looked directly at Andrews.

  “I won’t try to fool you, boy.” He jerked his head toward Schneider, who had turned in their direction. “Or Fred either. We’ll be here till that pass we come over thaws out.”

  “How long will that take?” Andrews asked.

  “Three, four weeks of good warm weather would do it,” Miller said. “But we ain’t going to have three or four weeks before winter sets in hard. We’re here till spring, boy. You might as well set your mind to it.”

  “Till spring?” Andrews said.

  “Six months at the least, eight months at the most. So we might as well dig in good, and get ourselves set for a long wait.”

  Andrews tried to realize how long six months would be, but his mind refused to move upon the figure. How long had they been here now? A month? a month and a half? Whatever it was, it had been so filled with newness and work and exhaustion, that it seemed like no period that could be measured, thought about, or put up against anything else. Six months. He spoke the words, as if they would mean more coming aloud from his lips. “Six months.”

  “Or seven, or eight,” Miller said. “It won’t do no good thinking about them. Let’s get to work before this coffee wears off.”

  The rest of the day Andrews, Miller, and Schneider spent in constructing the lean-to. They stripped the smaller branches from the slender pine logs and piled them in a neat bundle near the fire. As Miller and Andrews worked on the logs, Schneider hacked from a stiff hide, the smallest and youngest he could find, a number of uneven but relatively slender thongs. His knives blunted quickly on the stonelike hides, and he had to sharpen a knife several times before it would peel off a single thong. After he had hacked a large number of thongs, he bent them so that they would fit into a huge kettle that he found among Charley Hoge’s things buried in the snow. From around the fire he raked what dead ashes he could and put them in the kettle with the thongs. Then he called Miller and Andrews over to where he stood and told them to urinate in the kettle.

  “What?” Andrews said.

  “Piss in it,” Schneider said, grinning. “You know how to piss, don’t you?”

  Andrews looked at Miller. Miller said: “He’s right. That’s the way the
Indians do it. It helps draw the stiffness out of the hide.”

  “Woman piss is best,” Schneider said. “But we’ll have to make do with what we got.”

  Solemnly the three men made water into the iron kettle. Schneider inspected the level to which the ashes had risen; shaking his head regretfully, he threw several handfuls of snow into the kettle to bring the sooty mixture up to a level that would cover the thongs. He set the kettle on the fire, and joined Andrews and Miller in their work.

  They cut the stripped logs to lengths, and set four of them—two short and two long—in a rectangle before the fire. To secure the logs, they dug into the soggy ground, cutting through the spreading roots of the trees and breaking through scattered subterranean rock, to a depth of nearly two feet. Into these holes they set the logs, so that the taller ones were facing the fire. The more slender and longer boughs they notched so that they would fit firmly, and lashed them to the thick uprights set into the ground, thus forming a sturdy boxlike frame that slanted from the foot-high stubs at the rear to the height of a man’s shoulders at the front. They lashed the branches with the urine-and-ash-soaked thongs that were still so stiff they were barely workable. By that time it was midafternoon, and they paused, nearly exhausted, to eat the hard beans that had been boiling in the iron kettle. The four men ate out of a common pot, using whatever utensils they could salvage out of the snow, beneath which they lay scattered. The beans, without salt, were tasteless and lay heavy on their stomachs; but they worked them down and cleaned the heavy pot of its last morsel. When Miller, Schneider, and Andrews returned to their frame, the buffalo-hide thongs had hardened and contracted, and held the logs together like bands of iron. They spent the rest of the afternoon stringing buffalo hides to the frame, using the thongs which had softened in their bath of urine and wood ash. All around the frame they dug a shallow trench, into which they stuffed the ends of the hides, and covered them over with moist earth and peat, so that no air or moisture could run inside the shelter.

  Before darkness came, the shelter was finished. It was a sturdy structure, walled and floored with buffalo skins, which were thonged and overlaid so that from the back and sides, at least, it was virtually water- and wind-proof. From the broad front, several hides were suspended loosely and arranged so that in a wind they could be secured by long pegs thrust into the ground. The men dug what remained of their bedrolls out of the snow, divided the remaining blankets equally, and spread them before the fire to dry. In the last light of the sun, which threw the snow-wrapped land into a glittering cold blue and a brilliant orange, Andrews looked at the shelter of log and buffalo hide that they had spent the day constructing. He thought: this will be my home for the next six or eight months. He wondered what it would be like, living there. He dreaded boredom; but that expectation was not fulfilled.

  Their days were occupied with work. They cut narrow strips of softened hide in two-foot lengths, scraped the fur from them, made four-inch slits in the center of each, and wore these like masks over their eyes to cut down the blinding glare of the snow. From the pile of small branches of pine they selected lengths which they soaked and bent in oval shapes, and tied upon them a latticework of hide strips, using them as crude snowshoes to walk upon the thin hard crust of the snow without sinking down into it. From the softened hide they fashioned clumsy stockinglike boots, which they secured to the calves of their legs with thongs, and which kept their feet from freezing. They cured several hides to supplement the blankets that had blown away during the blizzard, and they even made for themselves loosely fitting robes which served in lieu of greatcoats. They cut wood for the fire, dragging the huge logs through the snow until the area around the camp was packed and hard, and they could slide them along the iced surface with little effort. They kept the fire going night and day, taking turns during the night getting up and walking into the sharp cold to thrust logs beneath the banked ashes. Once, during a heavy wind that lasted half the night, Andrews watched the campfire consume a dozen thick logs without once breaking into flame, the embers kept at a glowing intense heat by the wind.

  On the fourth day after the blizzard, as Schneider and Andrews took axes and started into the woods to increase the stockpile of logs that grew beside the chimney rock, Miller announced that he would ride into the valley and shoot a buffalo; their meat was low, and the day promised to be fair. Miller mounted the lone horse in the corral—the other two had been turned loose to live with the oxen as best they could on what grass might be found in the valley—and rode slowly away from the campsite. He returned nearly six hours later, and slid wearily off his horse. He tramped through the snow to the three men who waited for him around the campfire.

  “No buffalo,” he said. “They must have got out during the blow, before the pass was snowed in.”

  “We ain’t got much meat left,” Schneider said. “The flour’s ruined, and we only got one more sack of beans.”

  “This ain’t so high that game will be hard to find,” Miller said. “I’ll go out again tomorrow and maybe get us a deer. If the worst comes, we can live on fish; the lake’s froze over, but not so thick a body can’t chop through.”

  “Did you see the stock?” Schneider asked.

  Miller nodded. “The oxen came through. The snow’s blowed away enough in spots so they’ll manage. The horses are looking poorly, but with luck they’ll get through.”

  “With luck,” Schneider said.

  Miller leaned back from the fire, stretched, and grinned at him.

  “Fred, I swear you ain’t got a cheerful bone in your body. Why, this ain’t bad; we’re set now. I recollect one winter I got snowed in up in Wyoming, all by myself. Clean above timber line, and no way to get down. So high they was no game; I lived all winter off my horse and one mountain goat, and the only shelter I had was what I made out of that horseskin. This is good living. You got no call to complain.”

  “I got call,” Schneider said, “and you know it.”

  But as the days passed, Schneider’s complaining became more and more perfunctory, and at last ceased altogether. Though he slept at night in the hide shelter with the other men, he spent more and more time alone, speaking to the others only when he was directly addressed, and then as briefly and noncommittally as he could. Often when Miller was off hunting for meat, Schneider would leave the campsite and remain away until late in the afternoon, returning with nothing to show for his absence. Through his apparent resolve to have little to do with the others of the party, he got into the habit of talking to himself; once Andrews came upon him and heard him speaking softly, crooningly, as if to a woman. Embarrassed and half-afraid, Andrews backed away from him; but Schneider heard him, and turned to face him. For a moment, the two men looked at each other; but it was as if Schneider saw nothing. His eyes were glazed and empty, and after a moment they turned dully away. Puzzled and concerned, Andrews mentioned Schneider’s new habit to Miller.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Miller said. “A man by his self gets to doing that. I’ve done it myself. You got to talk, and for four men cooped together like we are, it ain’t good to talk too much among their selves.”

  Thus, much of the time, Andrews and Charley Hoge were left to themselves at the camp while Miller hunted and Schneider wandered alone, speaking to whatever image floated before his mind.

  Charley Hoge, after the first numb shock that came with his emergence from the snow, began slowly to recognize his surroundings and even to accept them. Among the debris of the camp that remained after the fury of the blizzard had spent itself, Miller had managed to find two gallon crocks of whisky that were unbroken; day by day he doled this out to Charley Hoge, who drank it with the weak thin bitter coffee made by boiling over and over the grounds used the previous day. Warmed and loosened by repeated doses of the coffee and whisky, Charley Hoge began to stir a little about the campsite—though at first he would not go beyond the wide circle between their shelter and the campfire which had been melted of the snow by the heat and
their tramping upon it. One day, however, he stood bolt upright before the campfire, so suddenly that he sloshed and spilled a bit of his coffee-and-whisky. He looked around him wildly; dropping his cup to the ground, he slapped his hand about his chest, and thrust it into his jacket. Then he ran into the snow. Falling to his knees near the large tree where he had kept his goods, he began scrabbling in the snow, poking his hand downward and throwing the snow aside in small furious flurries. When Andrews went up to him and asked him what the matter was, Charley Hoge croaked only, over and over: “The book! The book!”, and dug more furiously into the snow.

  For nearly an hour he dug, every few minutes running back to the campfire to warm his hand and the blue puckered stump at his wrist, whimpering like a frightened animal. Realizing what he was after, Andrews joined him in his search, though he had no way of knowing where he ought to look. Finally, Andrews’s numbed fingers, pushing aside a cake of snow, encountered a soft mass. It was Charley Hoge’s Bible, opened and soaked, in a bed of snow and ice. He called to Charley Hoge and lifted the Bible, holding it like a delicate plate in his hands, so that the soaked pages would not tear. Charley Hoge took it from him, his hand trembling; the rest of the afternoon and part of the next morning he spent drying the book page by page, before the campfire. In the days thereafter, he filled his idleness by sipping a weak mixture of coffee and whisky and leafing through the blurred, soiled pages. Once Andrews, tense and near anger because of his inactivity and the silence that came upon the camp in Miller’s absence, asked Charley Hoge to read him something. Charley Hoge looked at him angrily and did not answer; he returned to his Bible and thumbed through it dully, his forefinger laboriously tracing the lines and his brows drawn together in concentration.

  Miller was most at ease in his isolation. Away from the camp in search of food during the day, he always returned shortly before twilight, appearing sometimes behind the men who waited for him, sometimes in front of them—but always appearing suddenly, as if he had thrust himself up out of the landscape. He would walk toward them silently, his dark bearded face often shagged and glittering with snow and ice, and drop whatever he had killed upon the snow near the campfire. Once he killed a bear and butchered it where it fell. When he appeared with the huge hindquarters of the bear balanced on each shoulder, staggering beneath their weight, it seemed to Andrews for an instant that Miller himself was some great animal, grotesquely shaped, its small head hunched between tremendous shoulders, bearing down upon them.