Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  But all I could think of was the mules, which would this evening receive the last small bait of grain. I thought that it was still not too late to retreat down to the Rio del Norte and the cottonwood groves along its banks, where the mules might rip and chew some sort of miserable living, though bark made poor fodder. That icy eve, the company fed out the last of the corn as if no one had a care in the world. The mules ground the kernels between their molars, sipped at the creek, nipped at the few stalks of brush poking from the blue-shadowed snow, and then stood stock-still, their heads low, awaiting their fate.

  Did no one notice? Did no one pity these animals? Did my companions fear to reveal their true feelings to the others? Was Colonel Frémont so forbidding that no one of them might approach him? There was, in a few of those panniers, a good bit of macaroni the colonel had brought along. I didn’t doubt that the mules would make a feast of it. There was also some sugar, which might be poured into the feed bags with the last handfuls of corn. Maybe feeding them hot water laced with sugar would help. Maybe on the morrow I would see about these remedies.

  I found myself waiting for something. I thought surely some of the company would at least consult with the colonel, tell him how it was with the mules. But not one man did. His authority reigned so supreme among his veterans and retainers that not the slightest dissent manifested itself in the purple twilight. I cursed myself for being as subservient to him as all the rest.

  Maybe the harbinger of bad news ought to be me. Maybe I ought to brace the colonel and give him a medical opinion about the mules and urge him to retreat to safety whilst he still could and before his mules and maybe his men perished. I sat before the crackling pine fire pondering it, phrasing words in my head, making arguments, urging him in my mind to do what was needful. And yet I didn’t. I will never know why I didn’t. Nor will I know what sort of magical hold Frémont had on the rest, so that not one of us approached him with a warning. What was it about Frémont? I gazed at my brothers, who seemed perfectly at ease, though they were as aware as I that the mules were about to fail. Fail! That’s a weasel word. They were about to die. I believed that on the morrow, with no breakfast in their bellies, the mules would falter, one by one, and tumble into the snow, too far gone to rise up.

  The fires that evening were particularly cheerful. The pine knots snapped and shot sparks into the firmament. There was warmth enough to warm our front sides or our backsides, mend clothing, dry our underclothes, apply an awl to our boots and moccasins, and bring a kettle of macaroni to a cheerful boil.

  “I imagine we’ll be having mule meat soon,” I said to Ned.

  “It’s not an improvement on elk,” he replied. “It’s on the menu, though.”

  “We’ve seen our last elk until we’re off the mountains,” Creutzfeldt said. “No game here.”

  “I haven’t seen a crow for a week,” my other brother, Richard, said. “I could eat crow.”

  He thought it was amusing.

  But we did fill our bellies that night with boiled macaroni spooned into our mess cups. It tasted remarkably good for something that was nothing but boiled-up wheat.

  I could not stand my sense of foreboding anymore and restlessly cleaned out my cup and packed it in my kit, and then I worked through the snow, past the other messes, toward Frémont, all the while rehearsing what I wanted to say. It was an odd thing: no one was alarmed about anything. I was the sole worrywart in that camp.

  I found Frémont at a well-executed camp, with three feet of snow carefully scraped aside, a bright small fire warming the tent and the earth before it, and Frémont sitting in a camp chair I didn’t know he possessed. He was fiddling with an instrument.

  “Ah, so it’s you, Doctor. You’re just in time to see me take a measurement with my barometer. Actually, I’m taking two measurements, and I’ll compare my observations with Preuss.”

  I recognized one as a mercury barometer. It contained a tall column of mercury that would rise or fall in its glass cylinder with variations of air pressure.

  “A barometer,” I said.

  “An altimeter. Air pressure declines with height. This other device measures altitude another way, by recording the boiling temperature of water.”

  Indeed, this metal cylinder sat on legs just above a small kettle of boiling water, and baffles caught the steam and steered it through a jacket around the cylinder.

  “There’s a thermometer inside that cylinder. The cooler the steam, the lower the boiling point of water, and the higher the altitude. It’s all calibrated on the Celsius scale, of course, and so is the mercury instrument, which makes it easy to calculate heights.”

  “Subject to weather, temperature, and so on.”

  He smiled. “Your science serves you well. I always am glad to have learned men with me on these little trips.”

  “And have you reached any conclusion?”

  “Why, tentatively, 8,742 feet above the level of the sea, if the mercury device has it right, and I am waiting for the boiling-water device to heat the thermometer beyond all possibility of error, apart from climactic variations. It requires a little patience, does it not?”

  “We’re very high. No wonder I grow so weary, with air so thin.”

  “We’ll be going higher, my friend. The pass will be close to ten thousand.”

  I dreaded the very thought of it, and it must have shown in my face.

  “Cheer up, my friend, we’ll be up and over in just a few hours, let’s say forty-eight at the outside.”

  I found myself unable to say what I wanted to say, which is that some of the mules would not survive even that span. What was it about Frémont? Why could I not raise the issue that was causing me great anguish?

  “But of course you didn’t come here to talk about altitude, I imagine.”

  “The mules are on their last legs,” I blurted.

  “Of course, of course, Doctor, and some will perish.”

  “I was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary.”

  He smiled softly. “They are our commissary, Doctor. There will be mule steaks, boiled and fried and roasted mule over the top and down the other side, and we’ll keep our bellies full no matter what.”

  “Yes, surely.”

  “That’s why we have so many.”

  “I imagine you’ve answered my questions, sir,” I said, feeling a great need to escape.

  “Well, have a restful night, then. Preuss and I’ll keep on with our measurements. Altitude is a tricky thing to get right.”

  I nodded and hurried into the bitter night. Away from his fire I felt the flood of icy air that was quietly settling over this camp. I made my way back to my mess, sat in the warmth of the fire, and pulled off my rawhide moccasins. My stockings were frozen to my feet because of the snow that had worked in. I dared not pull the stockings loose, for fear of tearing my own half-frozen flesh, so I carefully laid my feet close to the crackling fire, which my brothers watched silently. In time I felt a tingling in my feet, the sign of life returning to them, and after an interval I was able to draw my stockings off and warm my white, frozen flesh in the radiance.

  “I am lucky,” I said to Ned. “A while more and I would be disabled.”

  To be disabled there, at that time and place, would have been fatal.

  I endured the prickly sensation in my feet as life returned to them, and then put on my spare stockings while the others were laid close to the wavering orange flame to dry. I was heartily sick of winter, sick of hardship, and worse, I didn’t know why we were here in this cold place or why we needed to be.

  “You went to see the Colonel?” Ned asked.

  “He told me about his instruments and altitude and barometric pressures.”

  “About the mules,” Ned persisted.

  I nodded, even more melancholic than before. “They are, it seems, our dinner.”

  “It’s been in the back of my mind,” Ned said.

  “The Colonel said we’d be up and over, descending the west slope in for
ty-eight hours. That’s how he put it. In hours rather than days.”

  “To make it seem shorter. How many mules will survive that long without a bite of food, carrying us, carrying loads?”

  “They’re so starved now that one mule can’t feed thirty-three men. Not even one meal,” I said.

  But all this talk about mule meat didn’t sit well with me. As I warmed my feet beside that cheerful flame, I knew that the source of my melancholia was pity. Poor, dumb beasts dragged where they would not go, yanked across streams, whipped up slopes, mauled and pushed and pulled and burdened. And now all of the hundred and thirty faithful and trusting beasts were so famished, so empty in their bellies, they could hardly make the heat that kept them alive. I knew all about cold, how cold kills warm-blooded things, how cold this night would be ten times worse for these mules because their bodies couldn’t make enough heat to keep them alive.

  I also felt embarrassed. Other men cared little about the comfort of their animals; they were simply beasts to be used, discarded, eaten, pitched aside. But there I was, wondering what sort of man John Charles Frémont was that he could be so indifferent to the suffering of animals. I realized then that a man who had no sensibility about animals could have little or none about other animals, namely the human animals who were the beasts of burden of his insatiable hunger for fame. How many living creatures would be sacrificed on the altar of his ambition?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Captain Andrew Cathcart

  I could scarcely remember a worse night. Sleep was impossible. A bitter wind tormented us, piercing through every fragile barrier we had erected, crawling under canvas, probing through caps and mittens, making a mockery of blankets. I had never known such cold, relentlessly fingering me as I lay abed. I wanted to be anywhere but there, half-frozen, my body as wretched as my soul, my mind filled with black thoughts.

  It wasn’t my plight alone that haunted me but that of every other man and the miserable mules, which had started to give out. Yesterday they stumbled, and we could scarcely put them on four feet. This morning there would be not a stitch of feed to warm them after a night of brutal wind that would steal life from them. I wondered, as I lay there in that bitter dark, whether we would see one mule alive at dawn.

  A plague on Frémont. We should have retreated from this icy mausoleum long ago, whilst we could. In the dawn, if I lived through the rest of the night, I would watch. There was yet one remedy for the mules, a great deal of sugar the colonel was hauling to flavor his tea, I imagine. In the British Isles we knew all about sweet feeds and how they perk up an animal. This dawn I would see whether Frémont would spare his mules or let them perish. He had enough sugar and some macaroni, too, to fashion a hot meal for them, a meal heated up with boiling water. I could show these Yanks a thing or two. We’d see.

  I tugged blankets this way and that and dug into my kit for more woolens, only to find I was wearing all that I possessed. I wanted more gloves, layer on layer to pull over my numb hands, and more stockings to cover aching feet, but there were none. I could lie still until dawn or brave the subzero air and walk and stomp about and maybe bring some prickles of life back to my aching limbs. I chose to lie still. That bloody wind would kill me if I left my bedroll for long.

  Dawn came slow in that time of year, but the men didn’t wait for it. They were in the same condition as I and chose instead to build fires under the flinty stars and warm themselves. It took some doing to start a blaze with wood so cold, but a little gunpowder and some pine shavings and a lot of shelter from that gale finally did the trick. But it was as if we had no flame at all. The wind raked away the heat faster than the fires could burn, and the whole predawn exercise was a worse misery than lying in our icy robes. I was no warmer after a half hour beside the roaring fire than I had been in my miserable blankets.

  We could not see the animals, and as we sat about trying to boil water for tea, all of us keeping our thoughts to ourselves, I grew aware of their silence. No coughs, no snorts, no wheeze or shuffle in the blackness. I wondered if most were dead. When the reluctant dawn did finally arrive, and we could gaze through the murk into the pinewoods where the mules had attempted to shelter from the gale, we could see that most lived. But here and there were dark lumps half-buried in snow, the gale swiftly burying them. I counted five. Several of us tramped through the thick snow to look the herd over. Those that lived stood stock-still, heads lowered, and most of them jammed together to share whatever heat they could offer one another.

  The dead mules were frozen solid. So much for mules as a commissary, I thought. We’d have to kill a living animal for food. The dead mules were rock-solid, and cutting meat from one would be like cutting steaks from a bronze equestrian statue. With saws and axes we might whittle away some meat, but I knew that if it came down to sawing and hacking a dead mule or slitting the throat of a live one for dinner, these weary men would take the easy way. The colonel’s much-heralded food supply in extremity was not a good supply at all without live animals.

  This morning we would saddle these half-dead animals and make them carry us up a wintry slope until they dropped. It took an hour to get some water boiling for coffee or tea, and I hoped the first act would be to give these animals a hot drink. But the Americans simply ignored the stock, as if the mules didn’t exist, and went about readying themselves for another assault on the mountains.

  Frémont appeared, smiling, restless, enjoying his morning coffee, saying little. I soon realized he would do nothing, absolutely nothing, for the mules this morning except grind them to death. I was too cold to hate the man but full of schemes to give a furtive handful of sugar to the beasts, preferably with hot water. In the end, I did nothing. Old habits of command prevailed. It was not for me to give orders or to disobey the man in charge. It haunts me that I did not rise up and do what I had in mind, without the leave of Frémont. I had been in the hussars too long.

  The bitter wind never quit, and I knew this would be one of the worst days of my life. And yet the camp was uncommonly cheerful. We stood at the very base of the ridge that would take us into the drainage of the Colorado River and ultimately the Pacific. The ridge was not half a mile distant, though this last assault would be steep and cruel. There was, among the company, a sense of victory. Beyond, we could tumble our way west, into warmer climes, where grass grew and a man could pull off the layers of leather and wool that now kept him alive.

  So we saddled the mules, which stumbled stupidly as we brought them in one by one, brushed the snow out of their coat, and threw packsaddles and loads over them once again. One mule simply went down, and no tail twisting could wrench him up. He had played out, lying inertly in the snow, too worn to resist the bullying. I watched it lying there, its lungs pumping irregularly, its neck arched back, its mouth open. And then with a shudder, it ceased to breathe. And even as it died, snow was filtering into its hair.

  No one came to butcher it while it was possible to do so.

  I saw Ben Kern staring, mutely, and he saw me, and a faint shake of his head told me his every thought. I felt an inconsolable sadness. The mule had died even before we raised camp and tackled that terrible grade. What would the hard day ahead do to the rest? So there they were, the Creoles and Missourians and the rest, offering not even some heated water to these miserable beasts and loading them with all the tons of gear and our own remaining fodder before leading the stumbling creatures up the valley once again, one slow step at a time, the men in front wielding giant clubs made of deadwood to hammer a trail through thick snow that sometimes reached the shoulders of men sitting on those mules.

  I counted it a miracle that the mules walked at all. They are noble beasts and were giving their last breath to the task. But as soon as the grade rose dramatically, they could go no farther and simply stood in that trench cut into the drifts, heads hanging.

  “We’ll pull them up. Then it’ll be downhill,” Godey said, so we dragged out our hempen ropes, fashioned cruel halters over the sno
uts of the mules, and tugged them upward, one step at a time. But the mules were beyond walking and simply stood where they stood. It became a great exercise of force, men in front of and behind each animal, pulling and pushing, yanking and shoving, as we climbed the last few hundred yards toward that treeless summit not far ahead.

  Then Godey’s own mule, Dick, gave out. He had treated it more severely than the rest, and now it folded to its knees and would not budge, its half-frozen body blocking the trench trail. Godey saw at once it was over for Dick and swiftly unsaddled the animal, and we pushed it into a drift, where it expired, one last sad rush of air, and then lay inert, its mouth open, tongue hanging out, neck crooked back. Godey said nothing, which was the only decent thing to do, and set off on foot, dragging the mule that had stood in line behind Dick. And so we spent a whole morning and midday struggling up the last few hundred yards to the barren summit.

  And when we got there, we saw grass, a whole slope of it that the wind had whipped free and clear. But when we finally emerged on that great cap of the world, the subzero gale blew heat out of us so swiftly that no living creature could survive there for more than a few minutes. To put the mules on that grass would be to kill them all within the hour.

  We paused up there to look about. There we were, on top of the world. The distant valley of the Rio del Norte was behind us, and beyond it, the white peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. To the north and south, range after range, peak after serrated peak whitened the landscape, beneath a bold blue sky. I saw cirrus clouds to the west, heralding another storm, and knew we were in for worse than this cold day. But that is not what stopped my heart. To the west, some miles distant, stood another wall of mountains, with a notch in them well above the one from which we all gaped at this alpine world. We had not crossed the divide. The valley into which we would now descend was yet another drainage of the Rio Grande and led to the Atlantic.