But she persevered and waited for the moon. It rose, round and frozen and wintry wan, and appeared and disappeared as the winds hurled curtains of snow across its face. The next morning the temperature had fallen to ten below zero, and in the next few days it fell fast, as the second movement came in. The first had been a vast playful statement of themes, as the winds rearranged the snowface of the earth; and if Kate had had any interest in the marvels of a northern winter she could have looked in any direction and seen the buxom contoured sculpturing of the drifts, the great massifs and mesas of winter white, as Canada hurled its insane genius over the scene. It was a world of superlative purity and loveliness, but Kate could only sit, mute, shivering, half dead; or struggle desperately with the immense drifts that had been flung against the north wall and around the corners; or kneel and dig down to try to find her old snowpath. After the cold became more intense the snow surface was frozen in jewels, and diamond-ice hurled against her face stung like flame. The winds, now denied the joy of sculpturing, seemed to put aside the softer instruments, such as cello, viola, and flute, and to bring in the horns and trumpets and kettledrums. The second movement was allegro mounting swiftly to presto: though for Kate it was only wild winter shrieking, a sharp ear could have heard delightful variations on several themes, as the winter’s instruments poured their marvelous harmonies down the valleys and across the prairies and over the high white mountains. Everything in their path the winds played upon; and when they found an object such as Kate’s hut, or a naked stone ledge, or a flock of tall shuddering cottonwood trees, the voices would change in both intensity and pitch, and sometimes leap up and down an octave or two, as they modeled the themes to fit the curves and contours of the world. Or when wild and high, and climbing with shrill nerve-shattering energy to the highest notes, they struck the dimples of dells and ravines, the cellos and violas would take over, the harps and flutes, and small soft melodies were played in wind eddies under overhanging snow-laden plants and in the blind stone-walled canyons. Sam would have loved it; shouting with all his being to make himself heard, he would have played one of the themes over and over in different keys, as in the third overture to Leonore, and imagined that his melodies were small vocal pockets riding the winds. He would have gone singing and dancing over the earth, and returned, when weary, to eat four elk steaks and sit by the fire with his pipe and praise the Lord.
The fiercer harmonies and wilder movements, even the major themes, were not for the female, whose nest-budded instincts compelled her to seek the tranquil. By the end of the second movement, when the temperature had sunk to more than thirty below, Kate was so numbed and lifeless that she could barely move. Hunger pains would force her, perhaps once but never twice in twenty-four hours, to crawl out of the pile of bedding and over to the north wall, where in the gloom her cold hands would feel around and over and through the things there. There was nothing she could chew, except sugar or flour, and the mice and insects had destroyed most of those. There was dried elk and deer flesh. There were raisins in skin bags, frozen as hard as stones. She would take back to the bed a little fruit and a chunk of meat; she would lay them on the hard frozen earth and after crawling into the pile of bedding try to wrap it evenly all around her; and she would then feel over the ground until her hand came to the food. She would put three or four raisins into her mouth and for ten or fifteen minutes suck at them; the meat she could neither bite nor break, and so had to put her teeth and lips over an edge of it and try to warm and soften it and suck nourishment out of it. There was no hurry; she had all day and night for this one simple task.
When dark came and the moon was there, a wan candlelight in the winds, she would again crawl out of her bedding and feel around in the pile for the Bible. She could not walk out over or through the snow, for the wind with one thrust would have put her down; and so on hands and knees she crawled until she was about where she used to sit; and there she sat, almost blown away, and stared hopefully for sight of her children. But they never came any more; the snow was deeper than the sages and there was no place for them. When her frozen body and numbed mind understood that they were not there she would turn over to hands and knees and crawl back to the bedding, and there she would sit, her ears and nose frozen, her eyes looking at the moon or down at the garden spot—back and forth through the long night, or as long as the moon was up.
Before the divine orchestra brought in its third movement Kate's right hand and both feet were so frozen that blood no longer flowed through them; and before that movement gave way to the fourth her legs were frozen to the knees. She semed not to know it. It was the seventh day of the winds and she no longer crawled over to the north wall. The temperature had fallen to more than forty below, and the instruments were now all percussive and in high keys. There was nothing the winds could do with the earth; the streams were frozen almost to their bottoms, the trees to their hearts; and in the white seulptured landscapes there was no change, no matter with what force the winds struck them. The winds were now in high piercing tones, thin and wild, and seemed to be preparing for the coda; and then, in a black evening, all the instruments built steadily to the 'drst fortissimo, and in deafening apotheosis came roaring past Kate’s door in such cyclones of sound that the sky literally was filled; and on top of it all, in frenzied explications, came the first crescendo, and on top of it the second, in such thunderous frozen magnificence that Kate was lost within the soul of it.
The next morning there was utter silence. Kate Bowden was dead. She sat there in her wraps by the door, frozen almost solid, her face toward the garden, her frozen left hand on the Bible, her frozen eyes looking up for the moon, in a temperature of fifty-two below. Two weeks later snow fell again, and for the next two months she was gently and softly buried. Snow drifted in over her and half filled the shack, until there was no sign of her, and no sign of garden or graves. Over the whole scene was spread the purest winter white.
34
ALMOST A THOUSAND miles south, where Sam had a tiny cabin back under a stone ledge, the temperature never fell to more than twenty below but he knew that it was much colder up north. He worried about Kate but told himself that she had been inured to the cold of northern winters and would be all right. He did not suspect that on the Musselshell it was so arctic that trees split open half their length, old deer, elk, and antelope frozen as hard as stone dotted the white foothills, old buffalo bulls had been blown down and covered over, and the feeblest of the coyotes and wolves had succumbed to the northern winds. It had been a good winter for Sam; the extreme cold had produced thicker fur and when spring came he had three packs of beaver, otter, fox, and mink. On arriving at his chosen spot he had moved fast to lay in a pile of wood by a ledge, and several hundred pounds of elk flesh; and each evening after supper he had honed his skinning knives, filled his pipe, warmed a spot for his bed, and slept as cozily as the grizzly in its depth of fat and fur.
It was May before he could beat a path out of the mountains. It was the twentieth of May before he reached the Laramie post. Charley was in from the Powder, Cy from Lightning Creek, Bill from the Tetons, George from the Hoback, Hank from the Bighorns, and McNees from the upper Sweetwater. They had no news except a rumor that Abe Jackson had died of his wounds, and that the nation seemed to be moving toward a war over slavery. As for the past winter, it was the worst, Bill said, since Adam was kicked naked out of Eden and went off alone in the cold. He had wished he had a squaw, for he still loved the wimmins, he shorely did. He guessed he was getting old, for he sometimes felt queersome and had more pains than a politician had tricks. Looking in the mirror of a pool, he had seen gray in his hair and beard; and one day he had tired at an elk standing broadside at two hundred yards and hadn’t even scairt the beast. "I didden even raise a hair, I shorely didden." George said he spected they should all be gittin a fambly and settlin down. Nice Californy weather and kids in the dooryard.