It had been over three months.
They’d nearly made up for all of the things working against them the previous fall. They trapped more beaver — hundreds of them — than they ever had before as they worked their way up the river to its source.
They called the place Green River Lake and it was magnificent: a huge body of water overlooked by a square-topped granite tower that seemed carved to resemble the massive turret of a German or French castle. Not that either of them had seen a castle, but Ezra had a book with a picture in it. The inlets to the lake teemed with beaver and the lake itself was brimming with plump cutthroat trout.
And once they found the beaver, Jim wouldn’t stop. He urged Ezra to stay, until the two of them could barely walk due to their arthritic knees made worse by standing thigh-high in freezing water day after day checking their traps. Jim didn’t say “That’s enough” until they had to break through skins of ice to get to the drowned beavers.
By then it was too late. Winter was setting in. The logistics of transporting their bales of skinned beaver plews to Fort Bridger — it would have taken two trips — were impossible. Plus, they couldn’t leave their treasure or cache it. Indians would find it and steal it and sell off their year’s work. The Indians wouldn’t even consider it stealing. They’d consider it “finding.” Jim understood that and didn’t hate the Indians for the way they thought. They were well aware of the waves of newcomers. And they needed money and guns, too.
So Jim and Ezra built a temporary shelter, until the weather broke. But it never did.
Breakfast was fatty beaver tail and the last half of a ptarmigan Jim had shot the day before. The ptarmigan was delicious. Jim watched Ezra eat. Ezra chewed loudly and smacked his lips and his pointy tongue shot out of his mouth to catch droplets of grease on the tips of his mustache. When the bird was stripped of flesh, Ezra snapped off every bone and sucked the marrow dry until the bones were no more than translucent tubes on his plate.
Ezra said, “I’d give my left nut for coffee.”
Jim said, “Might as well. You got no other use for it anymore.”
A gust of wind hit the north wall of the cabin and shot a spray of snow inside.
“Wished I’d done a better job of chinking,” Ezra said.
“Me too.”
“Got any ideas how we can fix it? Mine wasn’t so good.”
Jim said nothing. It had been Ezra’s suggestion to fill the gaps with bear fat, thinking that the fat would freeze and seal hard as plaster. It worked for a week, until the grizzlies found it and licked it clean. One night, Jim and Ezra sat on Ezra’s bed with their .50 Hawken rifles across their knees, hoping the bears didn’t push the cabin down around them. They watched as huge wet pink tongues flicked between the logs. They could hear the bears smacking their lips and clicking their three-inch teeth. Jim went nearly mad from fear and impatience and finally went outside and shot a sow to warn them off, but the bears came back that night and licked the rest of the fat clean and tried to smash down the door. Jim and Ezra ate the sow.
“It’s gotta stop one of these days,” Ezra said, and paused. “The storms.”
“It’s winter.”
“We’re trapped by our own success.”
Jim closed his eyes. He knew he’d hear that again.
Jim blew into the cabin from outside with gouts of swirling snow. Ezra looked up from where he sat at the table shaving curls of meat from a frozen deer haunch into the pot for stew. “You look like a damned snow bear,” he said. Ezra was always observing him, Jim thought. And he never kept his observations to himself.
Jim had to use his shoulder to close the door against the wind and he slid the timber across the braces to seal it shut. He shook snow from his buffalo coat and hung it on a peg. His leggings were wet and packed with snow, and his winter knee-high moccasins needed to be greased because his feet were wet. The snow was six feet deep outside, more than halfway up the cabin. Paths outside the front door — rimmed by vertical walls of snow — led to the corral, the fur house, and to where the outhouse had been before it got buried. Yellow and brown stains spotted the top of the snow but they lasted only until the next storm. Ezra had stopped going outside several weeks before and had been using a leaky chamber pot he’d fashioned himself from pine staves. It was nearly full. He set it just outside the door each night so it would freeze solid. Unfortunately, he brought it back inside during the day.
Jim said, “Emily’s dead.”
Ezra shook his head. “How?”
“Froze to death. Hard as a rock. Must have happened last night.”
“Wolves get to her?”
“Not that I could see.”
“Is she too froze to quarter?”
“Ezra,” Jim said, “I ain’t eating Emily. She was a good horse. I ain’t eating her.”
Ezra shrugged. “What’s dead is just meat, Jim. You know that. You ate horses before.”
“We had to,” Jim said. “We had nothing else.”
“Just thought you’d like something new for a change.”
“Not horse. Horse reminds me of Birdwing and all that happened.”
The first winter, after they’d gone all the way to the other ocean with Colonel Ashley’s merchant party and turned around and struck out on their own to become trappers, Jim had taken a wife. A pretty Crow named Birdwing. While Jim and Ezra were out scouting creeks, the Pawnee broke into Jim’s cabin on the Bighorn River and took her. Jim and Ezra pursued the Pawnee for a month and found them and killed them all, only to find out Birdwing had died of disease the week before. On their way back, with Jim mourning and not speaking for days, the Pawnee found them. The bucks killed their pack horses and chased them into the badlands, where they literally rode their good horses to death in order to escape. And ate them.
“Birdwing,” Ezra said, after about five minutes of shaving meat into their pot. “You still think about her.”
Jim grunted.
“I think about that little whore at Fort Laramie,” Ezra said, smiling manically. “The redhead. I think about her every night before I go to sleep.”
Jim took a deep breath and said, “I know. I’m only ten feet away from you.”
Ezra guffawed. He’d never been contrite about that. Even when he worked himself so furiously he sometimes fell out of his bed.
“All I know,” Ezra said, “is this is the last of our fresh meat. Unless you can kill us something real soon, Emily might start looking pretty good out there.”
“I ain’t eating Emily,” Jim growled. “She was a good horse.”
“And now,” Ezra said, “we’re plumb out of horses.”
“We can get some come spring,” Jim said. “We can trade some plews for ’em if we have to.”
“Never should have come up this far,” Ezra said, shaking his head.
Jim turned away, his rage building.
“Sorry,” Ezra said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You could have left any damned time,” Jim said through clenched teeth. “I wouldn’t have stopped you.”
Three months and Ezra hadn’t said it, Jim thought. Three months Ezra had held it in.
“After all we been through together?” Ezra said.
That night they ate deer meat boiled in melted snow and didn’t say one word to each other. The wind sliced through the cabin and the tallow candle shimmered and blew out. They finished eating in the dark. Jim kept waiting for Ezra to light the candle again because he had the matches. Ezra just ate, and sucked on his mustache and beard for dessert.