Now all he had was the packhorse’s lead-rope and somebody inside the cabin started shooting.
Shooting at the door because they thought they were being invaded.
Walker dropped flat on his belly and rolled out of the line of fire.
He’d lost the rifle and he’d lost both horses. What he rolled into was a deep bank of loose snow that the wind had piled against the side of the shed. The gale had packed it semi-firm but the flakes were quite dry and didn’t adhere to one another, so that his body penetrated the drift and a small avalanche tumbled down over him. A sense of burial, of drowning, of being sucked under: impossible to get his breath.
He swam out of it and crawled on his hands and knees, shaking himself like a wet dog. His knuckles banged into something solid and when he felt for it he found the corner of the cabin: he crawled around into the lee of it and got to his feet.
Somebody fired two or three more gunshots and he heard a fellow bellow-the Major? — and the shooting stopped.
It occurred to him he could go back inside. They hadn’t seen anything; they’d never know he had tried to get away. But he had let the woman go and they would kill him for that.
Then he felt a thud and heard the slam as if from a far distance, and knew he no longer had the choice of going back inside: they had shut the door and now they would be lighting candles, counting heads.
He was behind the cabin; the woman had gone in the opposite direction. He had to find her. He had no horse, no blanket, no gun, no food. She had all those things except a gun.
He reached the corner and stepped into the shrieking wind. There was a little light, it was gray rather than black, but the grayness was opaque. He had to feel his way forward along the side of the cabin and when he reached the front corner he hesitated, half expecting the front door to slam open and the others to come charging out with guns. He stood paralyzed by that fear until the realization crept into him that they weren’t going to come out after him: they couldn’t see any better than he could out here.
The woman had gone straight out from the front door. He stepped away from the cabin, only two paces but it seemed to put him in the middle of nothingness. The wind came at him against the front of his left shoulder and if he kept the wind on that quarter he ought to be able to keep moving in a straight line toward the woman.
If she had stopped: if she was waiting for him. But why should she?
He had to find her. Find her or freeze to death out here all by himself.
10
The next hours never came back to him clearly afterward. He moved in a disoriented daze with the icy wind driving right through him. It kept blowing him off his course, or so he kept thinking. He rubbed the palm of a glove over his face, scraping off frost. Needles tingled up his legs as his feet hit the ground and his bowels were knotted with unreasoning hollow terror: a child’s awful fear that not only is the house empty but nobody will ever come back to it. Hunger, and the thought that the beans he’d eaten in the cabin had been his last meal. Shoulders and head butted into the blast, he had the feeling he was only treadmilling in his own former tracks.
The wind was a grating roar, a deep rumble like a heavy artillery barrage, and the snow driven upon it never reached the earth: it flew horizontally, beating his cheek, rolling against him with a steady weight that made him lean into it to keep balance. The world spun drunkenly. He lost sensation in the flesh of his face and tiny icicle fringes hung like sweat beads from his nose and ear lobes and eyebrows. In one lucid moment he estimated that fifteen minutes more would mark the farthest limit of his strength: find shelter or die.
Like debris torn loose from anchor he flapped through the snow and somewhere in that run of seconds or minutes he remembered the woman’s name and began to shout with the full power of his lungs: “Marianne! Marianne!”
And could hardly hear his own voice as it whipped away. He beat his hands together, staggered with numb legs… He jerked himself erect and discovered that he had fallen; yanked his body forward with the desperate knowledge that he had to keep moving as long as the muscles would pull.
A spasm of agony wrung him out. It was unendurable. So stiff with cold he could hardly move, he kept sawing painful breath into his chest to call her name and the pitch of his voice climbed in panic.
Most of the time he moved with his eyes shut, keeping the wind against his left cheek, trusting the pain in his feet to keep him moving. When the pain made way for no feeling at all that would mark the end of hope.
Now when he passed them he could vaguely see trees bending in the wind. Must have descended in the lee of a mountainside, out of the full blast of it.
His foot caught, he went down again. His belly churned; his thinking wheeled as if in a dream. He lay where he was, unable to rise and wanting sleep, and he fought a battle there and won it and forced his frozen body up. Now a strange question came to him: were his legs really moving or were they not; was he lying in the snow imagining he was walking? Something whipped his face, tingling sharply yet distantly, and he reared his head back, supposing he had run into a branch. He felt the lash of it again and blinked.
It was the woman, standing vaguely before him, slapping his face. Putting her lips by his ear: “Stop shouting. I’m here. Stop shouting.”
He realized he had still been shouting her name.
Laughter bubbled out between his stiff lips.
“Come on-come on.” She had him by the arm and he felt himself being dragged along. When she let go his arm he fell to his knees. His hand had fallen on the horse’s fetlock and the horse stirred, frightening him, but when he looked up he could make out the horse’s ghostly gray outline against the paler background, the tops of windbent pines. He could see his hands and the ground under them.
When he looked up again the woman was standing there against a tree, slumped, her stomach thrusting forward, and another bundled figure stood on two widespread legs looking down at him. Hargit, he thought. Major Hargit. You could never get away from that man. Sudden tears came in a scalding, bursting convulsion and vomit pain twisted his stomach and he fell flat on the frozen earth…
The man was bending over him, stripping off a glove, laying his fingers behind Walker’s jaw hinge. Walker felt his own pulse beat against the man’s hard fingers, and he heard the man’s voice-not the Major’s voice, not any voice he’d ever heard before: “You’ll be all right. Come on.” And the man was picking him up under the arms, lifting him onto his feet.
11
At first he thought it was a cave they dragged him into but when he looked around he saw it wasn’t quite that. A rock cliff, a slight overhang, an improvised lean-to of dead logs and saddles piled cleverly to form a kind of triangular shelter. The wind was not canceled, but at least it was reduced. Two men squatted inside; the woman went in and crowded between them for warmth and the man who was dragging Walker pushed him inside and he collapsed on the ground, drawing his knees up foetally.
The woman was crying. “Look at me. I can’t stop.”
“Take it easy, Mrs. Lansford.”
Walker felt dizzy; he couldn’t breathe. The man who had dragged him inside turned and Walker glimpsed his face. He looked like an Indian.
The others were huddled together watching him. The Indian said, “Vickers, your horse is just about done anyway. Bring him here.”
“What for?”
“Do it.”
And one of the men got up with a grunt and went out, stepping across Walker. The Indian was kneeling beside him again and began to slap his cheeks. Walker tried to jerk his head away but the Indian kept slapping him. “Got to get your circulation going, man. Don’t fight me.”
His cheeks began to sting dully. The woman said, “There’s no way to build a fire?”