Snow Mountain Passage (36 page)

He, too, could be an apparition, a river-spirit or a river-angel. He wears an oilcloth slicker, a skipper’s cap. Strands of black hair fall below the cap to stripe his forehead and his cheeks. In the bright, dry light of morning he looks wet, as if he might have risen from underwater to take his place upon this empty deck. Jim feels compelled to test him.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Downriver.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I near quit trying. Then the wind turned. When the wind turns, you better take it. There was enough light left. I come on up.”

Jim tells him they’re waiting on the
Sacramento,
and the pilot nods. “Yesterday she was down below Sutter’s. Been bucking that headwind for days and days.”

“You think she’ll come ahead?”

“I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. With all you say they’re hauling. I’d dock at Sutter’s, unload there, and come ahead with animals.”

“That’s what I’d do, too,” says Jim.

This pilot has heard of the seven who hiked out of the mountains in the dead of winter. He has heard of one fellow’s solitary trek, hiking the last six miles by himself. With reverence he says, “The way the folks at Johnson’s found all the others was by following his bloody tracks back up into the woods, six or seven miles of blood, they say. His boots had give out. He had rags wrapped around his feet, and the rags had rotted off. Imagine being frostbit and near starved to death and hiking six miles across the snow and the rocks, leaving bloody footprints every step of the way.”

Plying up and down the river the pilot has heard of the rescue plans and of another party forming up. He’s heard they left the fort two weeks ago. “I could of gone. Lord knows, I could use the money. But I don’t like to leave the river. Some folks say the dampness can harm your lungs. I don’t mind. I like things damp.”

“How about taking us across, then?” says Jim. “What’d be your fee?”

“How many?”

“Two of us to start. With two horses.”

The pilot smoothes the dark strands gleaming against his temples and looks at Jim with a cryptic grin. “I wouldn’t charge you much. Probably nothing. I want to do my part.”

“God bless you, friend.”

In rocking backwaters his narrow, splintered gangplank scrapes the dock. The horses are skittish, climbing aboard. They don’t like this at all. Jim and Mac have to tease them and talk them into it and rein them to the masts, where they pull their heads against the reins. Jim and Mac are crossing first and hope to be at Johnson’s when the cargo team arrives. The others will kill a few more elk, build the hide boats, catch up when they can, some via the pilot’s schooner, if he’ll agree to come back and make this trip again. He won’t say yes to this, and he won’t say no.

Jim stands flat-footed on the deck, one hand on his horse’s neck, his mouth close to the ear, murmuring, while he ponders how long it will take to move forty more animals across this flow and these fifteen men with packs and saddles. He wonders how you can pay them enough to do such things as they have done and have yet to do. Three dollars per day? Why would they do it at all? Jim could not blame them if they watched this vessel till it touched the farther side then turned around and rode on back to their wagons and their ranches.

T
HE SACRAMENTO
flows on south to the delta, and the Feather River is a brown flood pouring into the Sacramento, and the Bear River dumps into the Feather, spilling down out of the foothills from a thousand rivulets and capillary trickles. As Jim and Mac follow the Bear eastward, all the fields and trails are made of mud. But the skies stay clear, rinsed clean by rain. It is warming up again, an improbable warmth, given what they can see in the far distance, the first smooth ridges and then, as from another world, as if rising from a continent unconnected to their own—snowcapped peaks against a sky of purest blue.

At Johnson’s Ranch early grass has spread a gray-green skin across the slopes. A room has been added to the small adobe. Three naked Indian men are working on a new corral, lashing limbs to thick oak posts. They watch the riders pass but make no gesture and do not speak. Jim sees a couple of wagons standing under the trees, a few tents, some rough-hewn shacks that weren’t here in November, half canvas, half logs. Drying clothes are spread upon the grass and hung from limbs. The shirts and trousers accentuate the quiet, as if they were hung out here and then abandoned.

Beyond the house they see a man sitting on the ground with his back against a felled tree, sitting very still. His hat is in his lap, his chin upon his chest. They dismount and walk over there and see that it is William Eddy with legs outstretched, sunning his bare feet. Streaked with scars and unhealed welts, they still look raw and mauled, as if Eddy had been kicking at an angry bear.

Jim says, “Hey, Bill.”

The head lifts. He is instantly awake, blinking. “Where you boys been?” says Eddy, as if he last saw them yesterday instead of four months ago.

“Riding our tails off looking for you,” Jim says.

“I been right here, just airing my feet.”

“You could win a contest,” Mac says, “with feet like that.”

Eddy has lost a couple of teeth. The freezing nights he lived through still show in his cheeks. They look stiff, chiseled, rough as granite now, breaking into pieces when he smiles an oddly hopeful smile.

“They make a pretty sight, don’t you think?”

Trying not to look at his mangled feet, Jim and Mac sit down on the trunk and watch the Indians lift a thick limb into place.

He’s been expecting them, he says, though he wonders what they’re trying to do. The rescue party is long gone. Two men alone shouldn’t be going up in there.

“We’re waiting for some others,” Jim says, telling him then of the provisions and clothing coming from the fort, and of the men and animals now crossing the Sacramento.

“Once we get to the lake, we’ll keep some to ride. We’ll slaughter some for meat.”

With a wistful grin Eddy shakes his head. “Horses can’t make it through that snow, Jim. Rescue party had to send home every one.”

“They’re all on foot?”

“Yessir. I would be too. But I had to ride back with the horses. I guess I wasn’t ready to walk that country one more time.”

He wiggles his toes and winces and looks at them expectantly, seems about to continue, then falls silent.

Mac says, “We heard some of what happened.”

“You haven’t heard it all.”

Again Eddy seems to have more to say. But he doesn’t say it.

“How about the others,” Mac says, “that come out when you did?”

“Some of ‘em moved on down to Sutter’s.”

“My wife, Amanda …”

“All the women moved on down.”

“But I guess she left Harriet at the lake,” Mac says.

“The Graveses kept Harriet,” says Eddy. “And it’s a good thing too. Where we went, no baby could have lasted a week.”

“Amanda, then … is she … all right?”

“None of us could walk nor stand up when we first come in. But we got some weight back, thanks to Johnson. She was one of ‘em rode down to Sutter’s. There’s more beds, more women around. She’s one hell of a woman, Mac, that’s all I got to say.” Eddy’s voice catches. Sudden moisture glistens in his eyes. He turns away, blinking. “You’re a lucky man, Mac … a mighty lucky man.”

Lucky she’s alive, he means. Lucky she’s on this side of the summit now, out of harm’s way. Eddy doesn’t know what else to say, or how to say it, cannot bring himself to speak of his own wife, Eleanor, and their two young ones, still holed up at the lake camp, or speak of how he joined the rescue party when his feet burned and screamed with every step and wept when he had to turn around. None of them know what to say, or where to start describing what they’ve seen since Mac and Charlie Stanton left so long ago to ride across Nevada in search of food, since Jim left the party at the Humboldt with his scalp wounds seeping through the bandages. Each man has left a family and come through these mountains and tried to rejoin them and been turned back. Three husbands, three fathers, meet again at Johnson’s Ranch and sit here thinking things they cannot speak, Mac yearning to ride down to Sutter’s and join his wife and knowing he can’t, not while Harriet is on the other side, and Jim envying Mac, wishing Margaret were now at Sutter’s, yet how lucky would he feel knowing she too had eaten of another’s flesh, had eaten Uncle Billy’s flesh? Maybe it’s a blessing that she stayed behind. He looks at Eddy’s feet, thinking of the flesh he had to eat to stay alive, and wonders how a man can do that and then just sit here in the sun.

As if Jim has been speaking these thoughts aloud, Eddy says, “Margaret told me whenever I caught up with you to tell you not to worry, that they would make it through no matter what, but to come back as quick as you can. She said the children love you and pray for you every day …”

“Did they have enough to eat?”

“That’s why we had to come out, Jim. It was gettin’ skimpy.”

“But they were warm?”

“They had a cabin. Charlie helped ‘em raise it, and them redskins. Stayed there too, as far as I could tell. After we all left, I guess Margaret and your young’uns had it pretty much to themselves. You remember those two came up from Sutter’s.”

“I do.”

“Salvador and Luis?”

“I met ‘em on the trail.”

“Well, now, by God, poor Charlie’s gone. And them redskins too.”

He stops and touches his chest, takes a deep breath as if his lungs are failing him, and expels the air. “I tell ya, boys, when we set out, I never once imagined it would end up this way …”

Again they wait for Eddy to continue. He breathes a while. Then one by one the stories come, the desert crossing, the glad arrival of Charlie and the Indians, how William Foster shot and killed his brother-in-law, how some cattle were picked off by the desert tribes and others were lost in the first storms by the lake, and how fifteen of the strongest left the lake in mid-December.

“After the summit it was twelve foot of snow, and we were doing all right, making five, six miles a day. But the sun come out, and up that high the snow’s so bright it blinded every one of us for a day. Poor Charlie, he never did get his vision back. He stayed blind, and that’s when we took the wrong route and had to leave Charlie behind. Pluckiest fella I ever knew, and he just gave out. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t walk. Rest of us, we could hardly keep ourselves from falling over. We had to leave him, Jim, it grieved me to do it. It grieves me still and will grieve me to my dying breath. We wandered up there for I don’t know how long, days went by, everybody getting crazy from the hunger and the cold. There was blizzards that went on and on and we had nothing but our blankets. We ran clean out of food and did some awful things. We all did. But I swear, the worst was what Bill Foster did, toward the end, when we’d eat up our shoelaces and every last scrap of rawhide …”

Jim waits, finally says, “What was it? What did Foster do?”

“Well, Jim, he shot them redskins.”

“Shot them how?”

“They must’ve stole something,” Mac says. “Redskins’ll steal you blind.”

Eddy shakes his head. “There wasn’t nothing any of us had worth stealing. I tried to talk him out of it. He was too far gone. For a while there I believe he just plumb lost his mind …”

“Was there any kind of fight?” Jim says.

“They were too weak to fight. Everybody was so weak I guess ol’ Foster he figured we were all goners unless somebody could give up their life. It was ugly seeing what hunger will drive you to, watching each other day and night, wondering who will be the next to go. That’s when he started yelling about shooting somebody for food. Any one of the women would have suited him fine. We talked him out of that. When the redskins got wind of what he had in mind they took off by themselves. I figured we’d never see them two again. But they couldn’t get that far. Next day we come up on their trail, the bloody prints and all, and Foster went after ‘em with his rifle.”

“And you say he went alone,” Jim says.

“That’s right. He went after ‘em. And then I heard the shots. I’ll never forget that sound. Pretty soon he come back saying we had meat and come help him cut up the bodies. I couldn’t do it. I could still hear them shots ringing through the woods. I’ll always hear ‘em …”

“Charlie spoke well of those fellows,” Jim says.

“I never touched that flesh, boys, I swear to you. I am ashamed to say I ate off Uncle Billy, and I ate off Pat Dolan, after they had froze to death, God rest their souls. I’d have sooner starved than eat off them redskins who had stuck with us that far, when they had no reason to at all and could have lit out just about anytime they cared to and made it on their own. Weren’t for them and Charlie, a whole lot more people would have fallen by the wayside a whole lot sooner …”

While Eddy talks, Jim imagines Charlie Stanton propped against a tree in a snowbank blinking at the glare. He sees Uncle Billy’s burdened eyes, the last time they spoke, beside the blue and silent Humboldt. He sees Salvador and Luis as he saw them standing by their mules in Bear Valley, quiet, patient men, watching, watching in the bright autumn sun. If their people get word of this, he thinks, it might mean a whole other kind of trouble. Indian trouble is the last thing we need. He wags his head, heartsick, bewildered. How … how … how could things go so far wrong?

By the fallen tree they sit into the afternoon, waiting for the other men. Waiting for Johnson. Bill Eddy talks, and Jim sees again the day they stood together in the desert sand with weapons drawn, facing his accusers. He wishes he had that day back. He aches to have it back. He hears Margaret’s voice again, telling him to ride away. He hears it loud and knows now that he should not have listened. He should have stayed. If he had stayed they could have made it through before the snows—this is what he imagines. Yes, he should have stood his ground. Those men who wanted to hang him, weren’t they bluffing, after all? They are not killers, as Margaret feared, any more than he himself. Though he has killed a man, he is not a killer. Eddy here, he already knew the knife was drawn in self-defense. A few more days, the others would have come around. He should have stayed and waited them out. They would of course have talked about the stabbing, as Bill Eddy here has surely talked about it more than once, being a talker, a man who’ll talk your arm off when he’s in the mood. Jim has brooded over how their stories are going to sound, although by now the eyes that saw the stabbing have seen things far worse. Far, far worse. Take Uncle Billy, who cried so loud for vengeance—what did his eyes see before they closed forever?