I’d probably take my goggles off for that.
Then it would be a case of simply bulling my way up the incline that led to the lightning-hammered top of Cloud Peak. At that point, there would be nowhere else for Raynaud Shade to go, or me either, for that matter.
I rose, turned my back to kingdom come, and started up, steadying my rate into the mule pace that had gotten me this far. That’s how I was thinking about myself as of late, like some Marine mule that didn’t have enough sense to lie down and die. It wasn’t the most comforting of thoughts, but it got me up the hill.
Thankfully, the majority of the snow had been swept from the ridge, making it easier to spot solid footing. It was now fully dark, and the only good thing about that was that I couldn’t see the passes that led east and west thousands of feet below.
The wind seemed to have let up, and I was glad that of all the elements I was contending with, the ever-prevalent Wyoming wind had been the one to decide to give me a break. That was a miracle in itself.
Maybe the Old Cheyenne in the Camp of the Dead or the Crow from the Beyond-Country were holding back the wind for me with their arms outstretched, battered by the gusts and ceding none.
Sacred lands for the Cheyenne and the Crow, we whites had been in the Bighorns for only a couple of hundred years-they had been here for thousands. There is a knowledge that comes of a place you’ve lived in for that long. These high mountain canyons that had served as highways for the indigenous peoples, allowing them passage from one hunting ground to another and relief from the summer heat below and the gathering of medicines, are their most hallowed grounds. At the center of all this grandeur and history was the mountain that I was climbing-Cloud Peak, 13,167 feet of geologic event.
But right now, it was just cold as hell.
I tried to distract myself by thinking of other things; I thought about the story that Virgil had told me about how he had lost his grandson that sunny October afternoon. I’d wondered about the animosity that seemed inherent in the relationship that he had with his son, a man who, after not seeing his father for so many years, had responded by spitting in his face. I could only imagine the panic that must’ve overtaken Virgil when he’d returned to the truck to find only the indentation in the saddle blanket seat cover. To not know what had happened to the boy-it was almost as if the gods themselves, the ones from the giant Crow’s stories, had come and whisked Owen White Buffalo away.
The boy stands, and there was no fear in him; he could see the other that would welcome him and make him whole again. He dreams of the truck from which he was taken, silent now without his breathing. It is almost as if it is as it was meant to be, in that he never saw himself as a man; never saw himself as tall and broad-shouldered.
He sees the knife the almost-man carries at the side of his leg and worries for his grandfather, the one who has blamed himself for so many things. The one who will sit in the tin shack, the television the only voices to hold the silence of lost battles away-one more tragedy to take the place of all the others. The sound of breaking glass thrown against the thin walls as the boy’s memory stands before him, eagle-armed, waiting to be lifted by his grandfather and the gods.
Shade’s bullet had detoured at the thirty-fourth canto, which described the lowest ring of hell, the ninth circle, reserved for those who would betray. Traitors-Virgil’s last remark. He had warned me about the driver, just as he’d taunted me with the words innocent people, over and over again.
Granddaughter.
Had Virgil developed shaman tendencies since cloistering himself in the mountains? He’d made those prophecies with so much certainty, just as he’d predicted the death of someone close to me as we’d crossed the frozen surface of Lake Marion. I don’t think he’d meant his own death or mine-but then, whose?
Granddaughter.
I was glad it was a girl, if it was at all. I continued to cultivate the fantasy. She would look like my daughter; she would look like my wife. I held that thought since it comforted me above all the others.
I tripped over something, stumbled and caught my balance. I looked to see what it was and saw that I’d angled toward the very edge of the cliffs between Cloud Peak and Bomber Mountain and almost stepped blithely into the limitless void.
The ice water that ran through my bowels wasn’t figurative.
There were swirling masses of snowflakes that changed direction with the brief gusts that moved the air-and then nothing-blackness, farther than I could see, a thousand feet at least.
I breathed in and consciously told my feet to step back. I must’ve been getting close to the Knife’s Edge; as a matter of orienteering, it should’ve been just to my left.
Pushing the goggles up, I glanced in that direction but everything was still invisible. It was as if the world fell away from me in all directions.
I was feeling disoriented and dizzy, so much so that I was afraid I might fall down and a hell of a lot farther than I wanted. I planted the butt of the rifle stock in the snow and kneeled in front of the raised lip at the precipice. My stomach surged, and I felt nauseous, almost as if I had fallen.
My lungs burned as I forced air in and out, and I finally laughed at myself for coming so far to almost end like this. The laugh echoed across the divide and bounced back at me again and felt so good, I did it a few more times.
It was a good thing I’d stumbled over the stones at the edge, or I’d have joined the Thunderbirds of Crow legend. I thought about how it would’ve felt flying for those few brief seconds before I dropped like a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound side of beef.
I reached out and patted the rocks piled at the edge that had up to this point resisted the urge to follow their brethren below. The flat of my hand thumped against their raised surface.
It didn’t feel right.
The snow was stubborn where it had melted from the warmth of something underneath and then frozen again. The rifle fell to my side and clattered in an attempt to throw itself over the edge, but I slapped it still and pulled it back to me. I finally pushed the chunks of ice and snow away, revealing what appeared to be the great, silver-humped back of a grizzly bear.
“Oh, Virgil.” My voice sounded strange in my mouth, and my eyes risked tearing; I could feel them freezing in the stubble on my face. “Even dead you find a way to save me.”
16
I sat there for a while with my hand on his immense back and then carefully stacked a rock cairn at the edge of the cliff with the few loose stones that I could find so that if anything happened to me, someone would recover his remains.
It was the closest I’d come to just quitting, sitting down in the snow and going no farther. I would just stay here with my buddy and collect snow till the spring thaw.
But that wasn’t what he wanted.
I thought about all the things that Virgil had told me and wondered what he’d been thinking about when he died. I imagined that he was probably thinking about the same thing I’d be thinking about when my journey ended: about his family, his loved ones-and even the not so loved.
Rising up slowly, I was aware of the weakness in my legs, the numbness in my feet and hands, and the fog in my head-it was as if I could feel myself, bone by muscle by tendon, slowly coming apart. The headache had returned with a dull thumping and with pain behind my eyes. I thought about the dreams I’d been having, what they meant, and maybe even who could’ve sent them.
I looked down at the mass of fur, once again covering with snow.
He wanted his grandson back, and I was the only one here to do the job.
Feeling the bone in my pocket, I knew it was time to go get the rest of Owen White Buffalo. I could feel the cold, creeping ruin that Raynaud Shade brought with him, an infection that trailed him like a curse. He and I were coming down to it now. There would be nowhere to go for either of us.
I picked up the rifle that I’d left lying in the snow and turned east. I looked at Virgil for just a moment more. “A-ho, baa-laax.”
&nbs
p; I stepped down onto the Knife’s Edge on my numb feet, my hobbled legs, and with a headache that split my skull with the shearing force of a blue-green glacier.
A lot of people who try to climb this mountain make it this far but no farther. You can convince yourself that you’re on solid ground and nothing’s going to happen to you up to this point, but when you have nowhere to look but down, the game changes. I had the benefit of not being able to see very far, but it was as if the dancing flakes snapping into the distance and disappearing from view were pulling at me, reaching and trying to take me with them into the darkness.
I thought again about the spirits that I’d encountered in the mountains more than a year ago and the resonance they’d placed in my life, even though I still refused to believe that they existed. Maybe they’d left me, deserting me in the same manner in which I had deserted them.
There was a high ridge to the left that flattened and then sloped away, unlike the one on the right side that just fell off precipitously. If I fell, I was going to concentrate on falling to my left.
The snow was deeper on the downhill side, making it that much more treacherous, so I found myself listing to the ridge. I put a gloved hand along the edge, using it like a rail, and kept my vision sturdily planted ahead of me in hopes that my meandering boots wouldn’t lead me astray.
There were shadows ahead, indistinct and nebulous, writhing with the flying snow. I tried to concentrate on the shapes, but as soon as I looked, they would swirl away and dissolve in the dark air.
It was getting a little spooky so I did what I usually do when I got those feelings; I took off my one glove and slipped the. 45 from my holster. The long gun was fine, but I couldn’t see further than twenty feet and decided the sidearm would do for indiscriminate shooting. There wasn’t anyone else up here other than Raynaud Shade, so it wasn’t like I was going to hit anybody who was innocent.
There was no reason for it, but I stopped, hesitating on taking that next step almost as if I were standing in a minefield. My head was killing me, but I must’ve heard the faint click in my synapses. He was somewhere out there, and it was possible that he was seeing better than I was.
“Move.”
I threw myself to the left helped by an aberrant gust that seemed to propel me, and fell against the spine of the Knife’s Edge. I felt the air move along with the two rounds from the Armalite as they bored holes through the snowflakes like angry, hunting eyes. Both shots passed through the spot where I’d been standing only a second ago.
Lying there in the snow, I tried to triangulate the fire at least enough to give me an idea of where he might be-with the visibility as limited as it was, he had to be close.
The Sharps was underneath me, but the Colt was pressed against my chest and I turned my head, looking at the slight ridge that broke up into another scree field. There were a few large boulders off to the break line west where I knew from experience there was another drop-off of a couple of thousand feet. I could make out secondary fracture lines in the snow just back from the edge, one in particular about four feet in width that ran from the crest. Climbing off the Knife’s Edge in that direction was a death trap of crevasse-ridden overhangs. One minute you would be walking, the next you’d have broken through and be falling close to a mile.
In the other direction, there was a steep incline that simply sloped off into nothing.
Cloud Peak was like an island in the sky with only one gangplank, the one I was on. I had him trapped, but he also had me; in fact, this was the perfect spot to pin somebody down, and here I was, pinned like a cushion.
He could move farther down the scree field, but that meant revealing himself. I could hope that he’d do that, but I had a suspicion he was too smart.
Time, in a sense, was on neither of our sides; reinforcements were eventually coming, but unless they showed quickly, it was just a question of when they’d find the two of us dead-not if. I wasn’t sure of his condition, but I was starting to ebb. My extremities were numb, and I was shivering violently again. My body was trying to tell me that enough was enough, and was focusing its last resources in trying to keep my vital organs warm.
I raised my hat from my head and moved it around a little, but my feeble attempts didn’t draw his fire. The steadily falling snow made it impossible to see, so I slumped back, careful to slip the strap of the Sharps from my shoulder along with the ascent pack. I rubbed my head with a hand that was rapidly feeling like a club. I swiped some of the snow onto my face to try to revive myself but still felt lethargic and a little confused.
I put my hat back on my head, rested the. 45 on my chest, and shoved my hand into my armpit, my middle finger feeling like a stick. In any other situation it would’ve been funny; generally, the middle fingers, being the longest, are the first to become immobile from frostbite-Vic would’ve been mute.
That was when the wind resurged, climbing and slapping me to blast over the black rock of the west face.
I’ve heard it said that the Eskimos have hundreds of names for snow; Wyomingites have just as many for wind-few of them complimentary. I rolled to my side, giving the blasts of heat-robbing cold my back, but it wasn’t going to do a lot of good.
Cold always wins-it’s the natural state of things. I was going to have to get moving soon. If I didn’t move, in less than two hours I would be dead.
The snow was already creating ridges around me, the high points of my profile forming sculpted edges, but it seemed different, as if the snow was not only changing color but texture, too. Sand; it was like sand, and as I watched, the wind began to winnow the dunes-and then me along with them. First the shoulder that I’d damaged in Vietnam folded into itself and blew away, my ear, then a leg, a hand, quickly followed by a wrist, a foot. It was all very strange, as if I were watching myself disintegrate into the wind.
Eroded.
I closed my eyes to try and stop the pounding in my head and drifted away with the dense fog-just for a few seconds.
Just for a few seconds. The boy can see the knife even as the almost-man holds it beside his leg, knows what it means. He raises his fists at him and remembers the story his grandfather told him about the mating rattlers, and how their chopped-off heads struck at his hands. There was another story that he had told the boy, one in which the big man killed his first snake, a bull that his grandfather’s father said you should let live so that the field mice don’t eat you out. His grandfather’s father had tied his grandfather to a bucket and lowered him into a well because of killing it. Down in that darkness he said that he had seen stars in full day. It is like that now for the boy, as if he is looking out of a well. He looks for stars, but there is only the almost-man. He waits, and at the last moment throws himself, all fists and feet flailing. He feels a fist connect with the almost-man’s nose and sees the spasm of anger that leaps in the cold eyes. He is satisfied with this; he will not die without passion.
Spindrift powder was flung around me so quickly that I was sure I was still blowing away with it, and I pulled my legs and arms into a parachutist’s tuck.
The hurting was gone, and it was good not to have to feel the pain any longer. The creeping cold was working its way through me as if it were something alive, but at the core of my body I still felt warm and almost calm. It made no sense, but that’s how it felt and it was almost as if it had a voice as it inexorably continued to immobilize me. Humming, that’s what it was like-humming.
I listened to the noise that flew away with the pirouetting flakes, distorted and inhuman. I was sure I must have been the one singing, but I couldn’t seem to stop. Besides, it felt good, and I kind of forgot about my tired legs, my bursting lungs, and my throbbing head. I lay there hunched against the jumbled rocks, convulsively humming and shivering. I could feel the two parts of myself, the one unemotional and objective, the other, manic.
I felt disembodied and limbless. All my thoughts of death were matter-of-fact. Maybe I was too tired to be scared. Maybe if I were more afraid, I wo
uld be able to fight harder.
It wouldn’t be long.
Long.
A couple of hours.
Hours.
I was facing east after all. The sun would rise, but would I see it?
“Longer than a couple.”
My eyes almost disjointed themselves flying open. “What?”
“Sunrise will be at five forty-three-seven hours from now. You will have died long before then.”
The voice was coming from behind me, and I partially raised my frozen body onto one shoulder as I fumbled with the. 45, turned my head, and looked into the wind, sure that Raynaud Shade had snuck up on me somehow.
I studied the outline of something huge right there beside me in the darkness. Its head was immense and had two small ears on top-the damaged one turned toward me in attention.
“You’re dead.”
The bear head shifted down to look at me, and I swear the ears again articulated. “Hmm?”
“I saw you; I saw your body.”
The great opening below the bear’s snout hung wide, and it was as if he was speaking from its maw, already swallowed. “I do not remember dying.”
I sat up a little more. “You weren’t breathing, and you were frozen.”
“Was I?”
“Yes, right down there before you get to the Knife’s Edge.”
“Hmm… I must have been resting.”
“Virgil, you were dead.” I thought about it. “You are dead.”
He placed his huge hand on my shoulder where I could feel the weight of it, heavy like the granite on which we were crouched. “I guess I’m not; I’m here.” He scooted his girth in closer to me, and now I could see at least part of his face in the shadows. “What are we doing?”
He looked normal-well, with the exception of the ears on the bear-head cloak that continued twitching. Distracted by this, it took a moment for me to remember my situation, and I grabbed his arm. “He’s up there with that Armalite.”
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