He held his hands toward the low fire, his head throbbing again, a whiskey hangover that wouldn’t die until noon at the earliest.
Nathan looked at him, shook his head.
“My horse and yours are dead. We’ve caught a bad piece a luck here.”
They stayed under the canvas all day, taking turns venturing out to gather wood from the abundance of rotted spruce and melting snow in the emptied whiskey jars, a tenuous proposition, the fire and ice resulting in shattered glass in two out of three attempts.
By evening, the snow had quit but the wind raged on through the night, and the sound of limbs cracking kept Oatha from the depths of restful sleep.
The second morning dawned cloudless and bright. They saddled the two remaining horses and broke camp as the first rays of sunlight struck the Teats, Oatha clinging to
Dan, Nathan to the substantial girth of McClurg.
A quarter mile out from the shelter, Dan’s horse stopped in its tracks and refused to take another step, snow to its belly, nostrils flaring in the thin air.
“I’ll make you go!”
He dismounted, grabbed the bridle strap and fought to drag the horse forward, but it wouldn’t budge, even when Dan drew his Colt and smacked the animal across the bridge of its nose.
“Enough,” Nathan said. “These animals ain’t built for this.”
“Maybe just one of us should take a horse, try to make Abandon,” Oatha said.
“Who, you?”
“To what end?”
“To get help. Bring back a sled or a—”
“Snow’s too deep,” Nathan said. “Hell, it’s just early October. We’ll get us a warm spell in a couple days. Good sod-soaker.”
“We’re almost out a provisions,” McClurg said. “We’re just supposed to wait around?”
“I ain’t in control of the weather, Marion.”
Oatha climbed down from the horse, and Dan screamed at the animal, “Go on! Get!”
“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said. “We need ‘em.”
“For what?”
“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck out—”
“I ain’t eatin my horse.”
“Circumstances like this ain’t the time to make declarations a what you will and won’t
do.”
It was snowing again by nightfall, and it didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.
Oatha could tell by the brightness of the tarp that the sun was out.
McClurg snored.
Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said, “He left.”
“Who?”
“Who ain’t here?”
Oatha saw where the wall of snow had been broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown and sagging.
“Where are the horses?” Oatha asked.
“Dan took one. The other’n keeled.”
Oatha’s head was hurting again—dehydration instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger. He’d eaten the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.
“We botched it,” Nathan said. “Should’ve walked out after the first storm. Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve froze, but we’d of had a chance.”
“You don’t think we got one now?”
They butchered the calico that had just died, cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them over a low fire. The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of what little fat there was burning off gave Oatha a charge of energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.
The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it and slept for the rest of the day.
“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later as they roasted the last of McClurg’s horse. “God’s been waitin for this, and I know he’s enjoyin ever minute of it. You just had the misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my ass.”
“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or Silverton,” McClurg said.
“I hope he’s froze. Don’t mention his name again.”
“He might come back and save us.”
“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings toward the man.”
“So tell me,” Oatha said, “you boys weren’t going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”
Nathan glanced at McClurg, let slip a little smirk. “Let me put it this way. This horrible weather saved your life.”
“I don’t get your meaning.”
“Sure you do. You was gonna try and take your leave of us your first chance. If I’m wrong, you can have my portion a Barney the horse.”
“You was gonna kill me?”
“Dan would of done the honors, him bein our resident cutthroat.”
Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over the horse’s leg.
“Why?” Oatha asked.
“For whatever money you had. For your horse. Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take you apart.”
Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever been in his life.
“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.
“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a luck, we’re in it together now.” Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife. “Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”
Two days hence, their eleventh in the shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen straight through. He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their reentry into civilization.
Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.
Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”
“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.
“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”
The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.
He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.
At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.
The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill. Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.
In the dusky silence, he thought about what Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of some deep virus in the fabric of his character.
Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.
Damn if he hadn’t been right about something.
Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long dead on a Virginia hillside.