Nothing moved through the gray veil of the rain. I rode down into my valley. The mine was as I left it. But the trail along the chute was two feet deep in water, and the rain would soon make it impassable. The other route would have to be my way out.
Picketing my horses, I went into the mine and went to work with my pick. The gold was richer than ever, and the quartz so rotten that it crumbled tinder my boots.
The rain continued ... a steady, persistent downfall that could easily turn to snow.
No time to think of Ange . . . nor of Cap, or anything but getting the gold out and down the mountains.
When next I came out the rain had ceased, but there was an odd lightness to the air that left me uneasy, and it bothered the horses also.
Several deer and an elk were feeding in the meadow across the valley, and that might mean a Storm was coming. They usually came out about sundown. The valley was quiet, the clouds pressing low down over the peaks. The rain started again, scarcely more than a mist.
Returning to the mine, I worked hard for another and then built a fire and made coffee. My head ached a little from not eating, and it was hard to settle down, with that feeling in the air.
But part of my uneasiness was the fear of being (missing section -- snowed in?)
Beside my fire I worked long into the night, pounding up the quartz. Maybe the gold I'd come was only a pocket. Maybe the quartz would harder farther own into the rock, or the gold change its character and require milling to get it out. Of such things I knew next to nothing. When night came I brought the horses in close cave, built a fire deeper inside, and mixed batch of sourdough bread. I made a good meal turned in.
Middle of the night I woke up.
It was cold. I mean, it was really cold. It was colder than I'd ever believed it could be. The horses were crowded together, heads down. I stepped out of the cave into a strange, weird world of ice.
Ice ... crystal ice in the moonlight that fell through torn clouds. Ice on the trees, ice on the rocks, gleaming ice on the meadow grass. Ice on the willows, making them like a forest of slim glass sticks.
It was strange, and it was beautiful, and it had the shine of death.
Nobody would be traveling any trail in the mountains until that ice was gone. Those eyebrow trails . . . those brink-of-the-precipice trails, those rocky crossings, those sheets of rock--all would be sheets of ice now, where no horse could maintain its footing, where even a man in moccasins would scarcely dare to move.
The thought of the trail into the valley where Ange had been made my hair stand on end.
If the sun came out it would melt fast enough. But it was late in the season ... suppose it snowed first? Any step might start an avalanche.
Going back inside I built my fire bigger, and then I came out with a piece of sacking and commenced to clean off the horses. Ice was on their winter coats, and it crackled when I broke it free. They knew I was trying to help them and they stood very still, their eyes helpless and frightened.
It was the worst sleet storm I'd ever seen, worse even than the pogonips in Nevada. A lot of tree branches had broken under the weight of the ice. It was a white, crystalline world . . . like glass, everywhere.
Food ... I would need food the worst way.
With the intense cold I would need more than usual to keep warm, and there was no telling how long I'd be stuck here. Maybe all winter.
There was no sense wasting time. Every step, even on the flat, would be taken at the risk of a broken leg. The trails were out of the question now, the gold itself was unimportant. From now on, it would be a fight to survive.
It was still a couple of hours until daylight, but I got my axe, went outside, and cut a couple of good chunks from a log that I'd dragged up, and built a fire that would last.
The horses stood stiff-legged, afraid to move on the slick ground, so with a shovel I went around and broke up the ice and shoveled some of the waste rock from my mine over the ice. Then I went to the woods, knocked the ice loose from a tree trunk, cut off the heavier limbs, and packed them back to the cave. The moonlight was gone. I added fuel to my fire, put on the coffeepot; and commenced to study out the situation. There might be some way of getting out that I'd overlooked.
With daylight, the first thing would be to find and kill a deer or two. As long as the cold held I'd not have to worry about the meat spoiling. 'Dawn came under a sky of cold gray clouds. I went out and started to hunt for a deer. The appaloosa moved to the edge of the ice that sparkled the grass and began to paw at it to get at the grass. He was a Montana horse and used to such.
Shortly before noon I found a buck.
nightfall it was colder, if anything. I'd butchered my deer and hung the meat up. I'd skinned properly and saved the hide. If I was here for the winter I was going to need as many such hides as I could get. And all the game I would have a chance at was right there in the valley now.
Huddled in my blankets, I sat over the fire all night long. I was going to have to wall up the mouth of that cave. The wind crept in there, fluttered my fire, and brought the cold with it. The morning broke with the flat gray clouds still shielding the sun, the wind knife-edged and raw, the glassy branches shaking slightly, clashing one against the other like skeleton arms.
The horses tugged woefully at the frozen grass, and the ice cut their lips until they came to me, whimpering. Down by the stream where the grass grew taller, I shattered the ice and cut the grass to take back to them.
This could not go on. Somehow I was going to have to get down the mountain. I wanted to take the horses with me if it could be done. Yet I knew it could not. ... And without me in this high valley they would die.
That night I broiled a venison steak, and ate it, hunched over the fire, cutting it in strips to handle it better.
Snow fell that night, and when day came one of my pack horses was down with a broken leg. The shot that killed him echoed down the ice-choked valley.
Through lightly falling snow, I went down the valley to the chute. The stream was frozen over, and the chute was a solid mass of ice. The water had risen still more, and the ledge down which the trail wound was now under several feet of water. To get out by that route was out of the question. Ange had lasted out a winter up here with her grandfather. How had they done it?
Their cave was bigger and better sheltered, and there was a lifetime of firewood in the huge old logs that lay among the boulders . . . but could I get down the trail to the bottom?
Could I even get to the canyon? Up where the bristlecone pines grew the wind had a full sweep, and it would be even colder than here. The trail, if I could reach it, was five hundred feet down a sheer face that was probably sheeted in ice.
That would be a last resort. For the time being I would remain where I was and try to last out the storm.
Taking the shovel, I went out and knocked more ice from the grass to give the horses a fighting chance. They knew how to get at it themselves, but the ice roughed up their lips and bloodied
their hocks. The snow kept falling, covering the ice with a mantle, making the ice all the more dangerous. Suddenly the appaloosa's head came up sharply and his ears pricked.
I got out my Winchester. Nothing moved within the limited area I could see through the drifting snow. Listening, I could hear nothing.
Walking with extreme care, I went to the willows at the edge of the creek and cut several long slender lengths which I carried back to the cave and placed on the floor not too close to the fire.
Always, on the range, I carried with me a bundle of rawhide strips, most of them "piggin strings" for tying the legs of cattle when branding. Every cowhand carried some for emergencies on the range. And I was going to have a use for them now. 1 The horses showed no tendency to wander, but remained close to the cave. All through the morning and into the afternoon I kept busy reducing the rest of the quartz to gold I could pack out.