The next morning he packed and was off. Ten days later he again stood on a summit and looked round him; what he saw . was not black forests but the plains of the upper Sweetwater where it left the mountains. He was looking at the Oregon Trail about eighty miles west of Independence Rock, and at a wagon train creaking and squealing in six inches of snow. Another batch of greenhorns would be caught in the mountains, as the Donner party and others had been caught; or they would be if the sky suddenly opened and dropped a couple of feet of winter. Was it more Mormons down there? He wondered why any man was fool enough to want more than one wife. These people were still two or three hundred miles from the polygamous saints, and a thousand from the Dalles or Sacramento. They might have to eat their leather caps and their harness before they got through.
He felt an impulse to ride down and ask these people why they hadn’t stayed back east where they belonged. Did they believe, as so many had, that out west there were gold nuggets as big as melons lying up and down the canyons and streams? And soil so rich that cabbages would grow as large as kitchen stoves? What tales the jokers had told, who had been out west and gone back east! Two years ago Sam had ridden over to a train, and a woman, sitting in a covered wagon, had wiped at her eyes with a wrist gray with alkali dust, peered at him over red eyelids, and asked if all the men out here wore skins and married squaws. None of the immigrants seemed to have the slightest sense of the kind of world this was. What they sought was not the scented valleys, the clean sky the majesties and grandeurs, but a spot where they could all huddle together as neighbors and poison the earth. They made him think of the marching army ants and the seven-year locusts. There they had been, three hundred of them, with their beds and tables and crying children and bawling cattle, and their foolish notion that they would soon be rich and well on their way to heaven. Astride his horse, Sam looked at the long wavering line, like pencil markings against the white. Now and then he would turn his gaze from the half-frozen beasts, the cold wagon tires, the stiff dust-saturated canvas flapping. in the wind, and look north and west at the immense world of valleys, mountains, rivers, and sky. Soon there would be no trails left, no forests with berry gardens in their cool depths, no water ouzels dipping and diving at the feet of cascades, no larks singing their arias, no prairie movements that from a distance looked like dark flowing waters but were herds of buffalo, no wolf song, no cougar cry, no horn call of the loons. Over on the Big Snake not many hundreds of years ago there had been stupendous eruptions of boiling lava that flowed over the plains south and west for more than a hundred miles—a red-hot hissing and steaming death flow that had killed everything it touched, and made utter desolation, black and grotesque and dead, of hundreds of square miles. For Sam and men like him the immigrant trains were another kind of death How: looking east, he saw in fancy a thousand miles of them, as broad as a buffalo emigration, dust-gray and plodding and exsanguine and inexorable, coming in from the east to cover the earth. He recalled what old Bill had said: "Shore as shootin they’ll shove us up the peaks and offen the peaks into the ocean, and cover this whole land with their privies."
Laramie had become an expanding assemblage of log huts and tents, surrounded by piles of buffalo hides as large as haystacks. By July 5 in only one season, 37,171 men, 803 women, 1,094 children, 7,474 mules, 30,615 oxen, 22,742 horses, 8,998 wagons, and 5,720 cows had passed this fort on their way west. In the past two years scores or hundreds of people and beasts had drowned while trying to cross the North Platte in their shrunken and rickety wagon beds used as boats. He hoped the Almighty knew what He was doing. It was not for a mere man to say that a thing was good or bad, which lay farther than he could see; but men like Sam would have preferred to join an Indian tribe and move north than live where neighbors made life a hell all around them.
Leading two packhorses, he crossed the trail and rode south, but turned time and again to stare curiously at the creeping wagons, tongue to tailgate and looking like hideous monster-bugs. In fancy he imagined their sucking mouths, like a locust’s; their legs like cactus spines for seizing and holding; their round unblinking opaque-looking eyes that sought in life only what the mouth could devour; and their long sandpaper feelers that nervously twitched and flicked and shook with eagerness when the creature sensed that it had touched an object that could be eaten. During the past hour he had built such a loathsome image of the immigrants and all that they seemed to hunger for that he felt a twinge of shame and was glad when the day lowered and opened its belly to spill out the big white flakes. He began to hum a Haydn theme.
A hundred and thirty miles and three days later snow was still falling when Sam sat in its lovely gloom and looked at the cabin. It seemed to him that many years had passed since he had slipped up to it to find what was left of his wife and child. His were not the kind of wounds that time could heal.
Dismounting, he went over and stood by the door; and when he looked at the spot where she had been murdered he felt, with almost no loss of intensity, the deep hurt, the anger, the injustice, the idiocy in the divine arrangement and the loneliness of bereavement that he had felt when he set her skull on his palm. He had looked at the stark white of the teeth, remembering the soft ripe lips that had covered them; at the empty caves, thinking of the marvelous eyes that had had their home there. He recalled now all the lights and living things that had been in those eyes; the gorgeous mane of her hair; the whole face and the whole delightful body; and all the living wonder of her that somehow, by a will stronger than his own, had become no more than a few bones and his memory of her. It was this kind of thing that wrenched a man’s heart loose and blotted the soul out of him: if only something could survive that was more than the least of what a thing had been! If, of a flower, there could be more than the dry dead petals; of man, more than bones bleaching after the wolves were done with them; of his child, some part somewhere of the brave mountain man that he would have been. Far north (it was eight hundred miles or more) he had three times removed stones so that he could reach in and thrust in an armful of flowers. Three times his hand had softly moved over the pitiable and absurd remains; and crushed petals and rubbed their essence over the two skulls. How utterly death separated the lover from the things he loved! Here by the cabin door he kicked the snow away, and sitting where she had fallen, he played a few of the melodies he had played during those few immortal weeks when they were man and wife.
33
ALL THE MOUNTAIN MEN men had known what kind of winter it would be; it was the second most paralyzing in the memory of the oldest Indians of the north country. It set in early and deepened fast. By mid-December the Missouri was frozen across at the Big Bend, and the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Bighorn. August was feeling the chills of September when Kate saw the first blight on her flowers. She did not know that it was frost; she thought her plants needed water, and daylong for a week she trudged up the hill. By October even the late bloomers were stricken, the primroses, asters, and gold stars. The nights were cold and clear, and when the moon was up Kate sat with her children until it went down.
During her years on the Musselshell she had not been conscious of a lost husband. She no longer saw Sam striding along the spine of high mountains, or heard him filling the heavens with deep organ tones. Her life had steadily drawn in to the heart of it, until it encompassed only her children and their flowers. Except in moments of fitful sleep or when chewing at food that was old and stale and tough she gave all her time to her children and their garden, watering and weeding all day, even when there were no weeds, and reading noble verses or singing old hymns half the night. She had been thirty-five when her family was massacred: she was not an old woman now but she looked as old as the hills around her. Bill had come by after the killing of the Indians and had been startled on finding her hair completely white. It was not gray but white, with the look of cotton. Her face was deeply seamed and the skin over it looked like leather. Her body had shrunk until she was barely five feet tall; and it was bent and misshapen, like aspens on northern hillsides after the deep snows of winter. It was not labor that had prematurely aged her but want of food and sleep: she had been so completely devoted to her children that for days on end she had not eaten, and she had slept only when too exhausted to read or sing. During these years she had not once lain down to sleep but had sat by the door. She had so little grasp of the realities and was so far gone to heaven that she did not understand that the moon was not capricious in its appearances but came at certain hours. She got the habit of sitting by the door because she thought the moon might appear at any moment, day or night. One dream she had dreamed so many times that she had only to doze and it came again. She was in heaven with her children and everything there was inexpressibly tender and beautiful. The river of life lay clean and holy and nourishing, and away from it in all directions were gentle hillsides, abloom with flowers and redolent of orchards; and over all of it was a blue sky as impeccable as God. All the people around her were mothers with their laughing and loving children, gathering flowers, eating berries, drinking from the river, and singing glad little songs of love and thanksgiving. Kate was so happy that she gave off little laughs and cries in her sleep; and on awaking she was so filled with the glory of it that it seemed to her that all her life she had fed on the light and love of the other world. Her world, the lonely hills around her, empty but for her garden, she was only dimly aware of, if at all; for she had been approaching heaven dream by prayer and was at last on its threshold, even when awake, and was ready to enter and be with her angels.