by Win Blevins
From the spring Jedediah went back himself. By late afternoon Gobel stood with his friends among the Indians.
And the Indians had two other gifts for the white men. The first was some ground squirrels, which the trappers found better-tasting than dried horse meat. The second was to show them something. A certain water reed was quite edible.
Sam ate it fiercely. Even if he still didn’t care about his life, he was damn tired of being hungry. “Not bad,” he said.
“A help,” said Jedediah, “where there’s water to grow it.”
The four men nearly managed a chuckle.
On June 19 they walked fifteen miles and crossed another line of hills. Though they found no water, some wild onions made their dried horse meat more palatable that evening.
The next night—eureka!—they found water.
Their salvation now, their only hope, was the snow left on the mountaintops. The ravines that carried the snowmelt down gave the only possibility of water or grass. Later in the summer, when the snows had melted away, the country would be utterly impassable.
Days of walking, days of water, days of no water, days of a dwindling supply of meat. Evenings of silence, from men too tired to talk. Sometimes Sam found the energy to play his tin whistle.
On June 25 they walked along with some friendly Indians, who showed great curiosity about all the white men’s belongings and insisted on handling everything, especially the guns. Jedediah wrote in his journal,
I fired off my gun as one of them was fingering about the double triggers. At the sound some fell flat on the ground, and some sought safety in flight. The Indian who had hold of the gun alone stood still, although he appeared at first thunderstruck. Yet on finding that he was not hurt, he called out to his companions to return.
Jedediah tried, over and over, using signs, to find out from these Indians where the Salt Lake was. But instead of answering, they merely repeated his signs back to him.
Frustrated, he led his party off on its own way. As luck had it, they found water several times that day, and replenished their horns and kettles.
That evening, as he doodled out some music, Sam watched Coy hunt pack rats. The creatures lived around the roots of the sagebrush. Coy would wait with infinite patience until one came out and then pounce. However hungry the men got, Coy always found food. Sam thought, If we men die of thirst out here, at least you’ll survive. But Paladin won’t. That bothered Sam.
That night they camped on the bank of a soda lake. Just before they got to camp, one of their horses wandered into a bog, and the four trappers couldn’t pull him out. Finally, they killed him and dried about a quarter of his flesh. They’d finished every shred of dried meat from the previous horse.
All four men had the same unspoken questions. How long will this meat last? When will we come to mountains, where we can shoot game? How many days to the Salt Lake?
None had any answers.
In that camp, and others to come, the tin whistles spoke when tongues could not.
June 22 brought twenty-five miles of walking, the discovery of a creek, and no meat. The next day, they walked down the creek until it disappeared into the bed of a dry lake, filled their horns with brackish water, walked on, and made a dry camp. Jedediah recorded that they’d walked thirty-five miles. Sam marveled at how bouncy Coy looked, when Sam was wretchedly tired.
Very early on the morning of June 24, as his men plodded forward, Jedediah Smith climbed a nearby hill to scout for water. Even with his telescope he saw no hopeful signs except for a snow-topped mountain fifty or sixty miles to the northeast. The captain dared not think of their prospects of walking fifty or sixty miles without water.
When I came down, I durst not tell my men of the desolate prospect ahead, but framed my story so as to discourage them as little as possible. I told them I saw something black at a distance, near which no doubt we would find water. While I had been up on [the rise], one of the horses gave out and had been left a short distance behind. I sent the men back to take the best of his flesh, for our supply was again nearly exhausted….
[When] they came up [with the flesh], they were much discouraged with the gloomy prospect, but I said all I could to enliven their hopes and told them in all probability we would soon find water. But the view ahead was almost hopeless.
With no other choice, the four trappers forced themselves forward through the midday heat. Their feet sank in, for the sand was soft, almost sucking at each moccasin sole on every step. Jedediah called for a rest in the shade of a cedar. They drooped to the ground and hung their heads.
“You know,” said Diah, “a man can live without water. The Indians don’t drink for days during their vision quests and their sun dances. It’s the heat that’s getting us.”
“We Irish, we’re not used to this sun.”
“Water would cool us off,” said Sam.
“Well,” Jedediah said, “this heat would be terrible even if we had enough to eat and drink. Under these circumstances, you boys are heroes.”
Sam laughed out loud. The last thing he felt like was a hero. Closer to a moron.
Coy yipped. Sam stopped laughing and frowned at the pup. You better not be mocking me.
The four gazed at each other, and thought each other ridiculous-looking. All day long the sun whacked their faces and hands, raising blisters. The temperature, they knew, was well over a hundred degrees.
“It makes me yearn,” Evans mused, “for the cool earth of a country churchyard.”
Death. Yes, cool and restful.
Jedediah’s sudden thought was different. “The earth is cool.” He pondered it “Even a foot down,” he said, his voice rising, “the sand is cooler. Let’s bury ourselves in the sand. It will cool our bodies off.”
Sam cackled.
“The linchpin word here,” said Evans, “does seem to be ‘bury.’”
But the captain was determined. He fetched the only shovel and started digging. “Just a little down, and it will be far different.”
He pitched sand out of the hole vigorously. The man bristled with energy, thought Sam, and his capacity for work was endless. He’s the damn hero.
Even a foot down, they could all see the sand was darker, more moist.
Before long Jedediah got the first hole deep enough. “Squat in it,” he told Evans, the smallest.
The four studied each other. This was worth laughing about, or crying, they didn’t know which.
Evans climbed into the hole. He squirmed around and got comfortable. “Not really half bad,” he said.
Jedediah started pitching sand on top of him. Soon nothing of Evans showed but his arms, shoulders, and head. “By the breath of God himself,” said Evans, “it’s a miracle. All of you go ahead and do the same.”
Gobel took the task of digging the second hole.
“Get in,” he ordered Sam.
Sam didn’t care whether he was in or out, but the temperature of the earth did feel good. Mother Earth, he thought, remembering that he was a Crow.
Gobel then dug a monster hole for himself and climbed in. His grin would have lit a dark cellar.
Jedediah dug the last hole and pulled the sand on himself with his hands. Damned hero, Sam thought again.
They laughed at themselves. A damned funny sight, four heads and four pairs of arms sticking out of sand that stretched for miles upon miles in every direction.
Sometimes Coy lay peacefully behind Sam. Sometimes he sniffed at Sam’s arms, or Evans’s or Smith’s, as though to make sure they were still alive. He went nowhere near Gobel. The big man had cooed several apologies to the pup, but Coy didn’t care.
As the earth cooled their overheated bodies, they gabbed. They spoke of nothing in particular. First Evans told of going with his father to catch a salmon each spring. The fish made their return to the fresh streams of Ireland every May, and the first one caught was pure joy. Gobel spoke of gardening for the first time. (Funny to think of the huge man tending small plants with deli
cate fingers.) Strawberries, he’d planted. He’d never tasted anything as good, even to this day, as the first strawberries he grew himself. Sam spoke of the Sunday afternoons when his father used to take him and brother Owen down to the river to swim. They had a good eddy that made a nice, deep hole. Dad tied a heavy rope to the branch of a thick tree, and the boys swung out over the water, bare skin shining, let go, and made a huge splash in the river.
From time to time Coy sniffed a hand or face and lay back down.
After a while, Jedediah observed, “Seems like our talk goes around two things, water and food.” They all grinned at that. The grins faded as they thought of the country they were stranded in, without either food or water. And sitting up to their necks in sand wasn’t going to fill their bellies or quench their thirst.
“Time to move on,” said Jedediah.
That night he wrote in his journal,
After resting about an hour [covered with sand], we resumed our wearisome journey and traveled until 10 o’clock at night, when we laid down to take a little repose….
A short time after sundown I saw several turtledoves, and as I did not recollect of ever having seen them more than two or three miles from water, I spent more than an hour looking for water, but it was in vain.
Our sleep was not repose, for tormented nature made us dream of things we had not, and for the want of which it then seemed possible, and even probable, that we might perish in the desert, unheard of and unpitied.
In those moments how trifling were all those things that hold such an absolute sway over the busy and the prosperous world. My dreams were not of gold or ambitious honors, but of my distant, quiet home, of murmuring brooks, of cooling cascades.
After a short rest we continued our march and traveled all night. The murmur of falling waters still sounded in our ears, and the apprehension that we might never live to hear that sound in reality weighed heavily upon us.
The next night, as they lay in their blankets, Sam Morgan could bear it no longer. Bear what? He didn’t know. Being hungry all the time? Getting weaker and weaker? Dwindling to skin and bones? Feeling his throat ache, his tongue and lips cracked from the dry air?
Every night now he dreamed of banquets passing before his eyes—a Christmas goose cooked by his mother surrounded by potatoes and carrots from the root cellar, followed by pies hot from the oven. He woke to delusions of hearing—it felt like true hearing—the delightful sounds of running water, there in a land of dry lake beds.
Or was it something else? The death I left in California. Yes, he actually used the word “death” to himself. The child I abandoned in California? The woman I will never touch again, whose eyes I will never gaze into?
Lava boiled inside him, an anger huge and corrosive—it was a new, outlandish blast of feeling. The magma ran molten through his veins. It scourged his soul.
Yes, he said to himself in some terrible way. Yes, in the face of the unknowable. Yes, in the face of a well-earned hell.
Suddenly he was furious. He sat up and peered into the darkness. All right, death, who are you?
No answer.
Where are you? The words sounded savage in his mind.
The answer came sweet and seductive—My spirit lies in Meadowlark’s grave.
He used the name of his beloved freely now. He had nothing left to protect. He lay back down.
Meadowlark is dead, he said in his mind.
Meadowlark is dead.
The lava that boiled up was a kind of courage.
“Meadowlark is dead,” he said out loud.
His voice quavered, so he said it again, more firmly. “Meadowlark is dead.
“There is no hope.
“I have no hope.
“I am dead.
“I have no hope.”
Over and over he repeated these words, loudly and softly, sometimes with a stinging lash, sometimes with a seductive drawl, often with a stony flatness. Sometimes for the word “hope” he substituted the name of his daughter, which in Spanish meant “hope.” “I have no Esperanza.”
He fell into a trance of repetition. Time evaporated, and the heavenly bodies ceased to move. He twisted in his blankets. “Meadowlark is dead. I have no hope. I abandoned Esperanza. I am dead.”
A torturous sleep mercifully took him away. He pitched all night, and murmured incoherently. Among the words were “Esperanza, me, dead …”
When he woke up, the world was fully light. His companions were on their feet. Sam was angry.
What should he do now? His friends stood ready to go, to live. He looked at them, they at him. He stood up, took Paladin’s reins, and trod along behind Jedediah.
Hell, why not?
The dead man walks on.
The morning of June 25 dawned brilliant and desolate. They moved out before the sun topped the eastern line of hills and tramped steadily, mindlessly on. Within an hour the heat was more oppressive than the previous day’s. On they trudged. No one spoke—even Evans’s merry wit was stilled.
The landscape close before them was either sagebrush flats or salt wastes. Far in front gleamed the ridges and the lofty summit of the mountain, a cool, snowy height they would never reach.
Four men stumbled toward it. Sam wondered exactly where, around what rocky spur, beneath what sagebrush, he would die.
He wondered what Coy would do when his human brother was gone. Would he find a mate among the beasts? Would he always miss his human companion?
Sam looked at Paladin and his heart poinged. Out here, some while after Sam and the other men died, she would simply drop. The coyotes and buzzards would reduce her to a skeleton, and the winds would dry even that.
About midmorning Evans collapsed.
With no idea why, Sam fell down beside him. Maybe this is it. Probably this is it.
Evans’s face was very flushed, his skin hot and dry. No question he couldn’t get up. Diah and Gobel slid Evans into shade. Sam crawled over and joined them.
“You’re overheated. We’re going to bury you in sand,” the captain told Evans.
Gobel did the digging this time.
Sam dropped into the darkness inside himself. Maybe I could get up. He looked around at the desert. If I did, I might walk another half mile, a mile at the most.
He gazed at the foot of the mountain. Several miles away, it might as well have been on the far shore of an ocean.
This is the time. This place is as good as any.
Evans slid into his sandy hole. His face was empty, spiritless.
The captain looked questioningly at Sam.
“Bury me too,” said Sam.
Without a question, Jedediah dug the hole.
Sam crawled in.
Shovel by shovel, now, the end of his life fell on him, the weight of his misdeeds and his stupidity.
He drifted away—where didn’t matter. When he came back, he had an additional thought. Amazing how good the cool sand feels. Then, My grave welcomes me.
It was done. Sam and Evans were buried to their armpits.
Sam looked into the face of the Irishman who would be his companion in crossing the big river. He gave Evans a weird grin. I’m glad death is a chuckle.
Diah knelt between the two of them. “Gobel and I will walk on to the mountain. If we find water, I’ll bring some back to you.”
If. Diah, that if, it’s as far as ever a far can be …
The four men rested their eyes on each other. Since they were men, they didn’t speak of love.
“Leave my rifle close at hand,” said Sam. Diah was doing that anyway. Sam wanted the Celt with him, his lasting bond with his father.
Sam reached out and patted Coy. “Bring Paladin to me,” he said.
Diah did. Sam nuzzled her nose. They traded breath.
“Promise me you’ll never kill her,” said Sam.
“I won’t,” said Jedediah. “For any reason.”
They both knew better.
Sam smiled. His possible sack was at hand, Evans’
s next to him. Their pistols and rifles were within reach. We wouldn’t want to go undefended against Indians, would we?
Sam thought that was a hoot. Dying is a hoot.
Sam faced another way while Jedediah and Gobel trundled off. He looked any other direction.
A splash of shade kept the sun off. It was big enough for a few hours, until midafternoon, when the sun circled well to the west. Sam hoped his spirit would be somewhere else then. He didn’t want to get slapped by the sun even one more time. The air was calm, the desert quiet. A perfect place.
Sam reached into his possible sack and got out his pipe. Sacred pipe, Hannibal said he should call it. He gently laid it on its wrapping of deer hide, pipe and bowl separate. If he joined the pipe and bowl, the pipe would be a living being, an object of power.
“You gonna smoke and say words to the directions?” asked Evans. Nothing the Irishman ever said sounded quite serious.
“Later, maybe,” said Sam. He hadn’t smoked the pipe since …
The pipe has failed me.
“Then how about a little conversation to ease the way?”
Sam was cooling off, feeling better. That won’t last long, not weakened by near starvation and deprived utterly of water. Sam knew the stories of how thirsting men died. Unlike starving men, who went out meekly, thirsting men screamed their way out, raving lunatics.
But it’s not the thirst, Diah said, it’s the heat.
Fear pinged him. Death, come, and come quickly.
“Conversation?” repeated Evans.
“Maybe later.”
Sam felt of his medicine bag, which lay on the sand in front of him. He opened it up and got out his two pieces of guidance, the buffalo fur and the piece of paper with Hannibal’s words. Picking up one piece with each hand, he let his mind drift, he didn’t know where. He remembered the night Hannibal said those words, and Sam lit out for the West. He remembered Christmas dinner that day, when the woman he thought was his announced her betrothal to his older brother. He remembered the day before, when he and that woman became lovers, first lovers.
“You know,” said Evans suddenly, maybe a long time later, “I didn’t expect it to come this way. I thought I’d get me brains scrambled with a chair broke over me head, or an Injun arrow through the lights. I never thought on easing out slow. But this way of dying, it feels not half bad. I’m cool, I’m restful, I’m not hurting. I have a good friend. And we’re buried up to our necks. Damn near our necks. Two grown men, sitting in the sand, just their heads sticking out, having a bit of a talk. Isn’t that a tickle?”
