Spirit Wolf, page 12
Uriah shook his head in frustration. “He must have heard or seen us,” he whispered. “Or he wouldn’t have risked a jump like that. He’s safe now. No way to get to him with the horses, and without the horses, we’ll never see him again.”
Uriah sat back on his haunches and turned his attention to the valley floor below. There was something wrong. The valley was disappearing into a sea of ice crystals that marked the approach of Arctic air. And out of that sea came deer, straggling into long fearless lines like perverse lemming marching away from the sea. Over the deer a flock of birds swirled about, a living gray cloud carried on some unfelt capricious wind.
The animals seemed oblivious of everything but the need to find cover. They walked out of the mist overtaking the valley below like ghosts, their fear of predators revoked by the storm. Storms were the most vicious predators of all, and no respecters of either hoof or claw.
In the stinging cold, Montana was a hell’s Eden where predator and prey alike ran from the killer cold, seeking shelter, seeking life.
“They’re bunching up, Nash. There’s a storm coming, a bad one, and they’re bunching up.”
Uriah was up and running. He yelled for Nash to follow. Nash could barely hear his father. The wind was keening now, in anticipation. He ran along the edge of the rim where the snow didn’t impede his steps. It wasn’t far back to the horses, but Nash knew the trail stretched from life to death.
And then they were there, taking deep gulping breaths of frigid air into their lungs. The horses were nervous, jumpy, and when the Brues mounted, both animals wheeled around and put their tails to the wind. Uriah pointed them south-southwest and kicked the horses into a trot.
“We have to try to get back to camp before the snow hits. Keep close. Don’t let me out of your sight.”
It was a race against the elements, and the elements won. There were just a few flakes at first, zipping past like stones from a sling. Then the wind picked up, and the world disappeared. There was only Uriah and Nash and the horses and brutal cold. Mostly there was the cold.
The wind played hide-and-seek across the two hunters’ backs, seeking chinks in the layers of clothing laid on like armor. When the wind breached the wool and cotton, it crept forward like a line of skirmishers, leaving the flesh cold and dying in its wake. The cold was the veteran of many battles and never had it lost an encounter. The victim fled to the cover of a cave or teepee or cabin and survived, or the victim died.
Nash and Uriah were fleeing now, Uriah occasionally pulling his compass from his pocket to set their general direction. They had been lucky so far. The wind had held relatively true, and the horses’ instinct to run before it had kept them moving toward camp. But they were traveling blind. Sometimes Nash would feel Nell lunging up a hill or brushing past a copse of trees and think, This is where we skirted the top of that coulee, or, This is the hill where we first saw the ridge. But each time, he shook his head in disbelief. They had to be farther than that. If they weren’t, they couldn’t make it, not in that cold.
The wind screamed at them now. It tore the breath from Nash, and he wrestled with it so that he would not suffocate. But each time he stole a breath from the keening wind, it seared his lungs with cold.
Nash’s feet and hands hung unfeeling from his arms and legs. There was a certain relief in that; at least he didn’t hurt so much. He was tired now, and he wanted to sleep for a while, take a nap on Nell’s back. There was no harm in that. Nell would follow the roan anyway. The roan! Nash didn’t know where the roan was. He hadn’t seen the horse or his father for some time. The implications of that were beginning to sink in to his mind when Nell rocked to a stop. A nagging thought crept into Nash’s mind. If Nell stopped, he would die. Suddenly, he was very, very frightened. He must find his father, or he would die. His fear chased away the somnolence the cold had brought him, and he knew, crystal clear in his mind, that he must make Nell move. Nash screamed and kicked the horse in the ribs, harder than he had ever kicked anything. She plunged ahead and down—and foundered.
Nash knew he was dead then. He had committed the unpardonable sin. He had panicked for a moment in a Montana snowstorm, and now he was dead. Nell had smelled the trap. She couldn’t see through the stinging wind any better than Nash, but she knew the coulee ahead of her had drifted shut with snow. She knew if she tried to cross it, she would founder in the drift and die. She didn’t know the same way Nash knew he was dead, but she knew nevertheless. Still when Nash raked her sides with his heels, she jumped willingly enough. Old habits die hard.
Nash got off Nell, sliding into snow up to his armpits. He struggled like a man trying to pull himself from his own grave. Death would take him, but only after a fight, feeble as that might be. He tried swimming through the snow back to solid ground, paddling and kicking with dead feet and dead hands, but he was only sinking deeper. It seemed warmer, somehow, buried away from the wind. Maybe he would sleep for a moment, rest up before trying again. Nash closed his eyes and the world disappeared into nothingness.
Uriah had allowed the roan to have his head when he came to the snow-filled gully, trusting the horse’s senses over his own instincts. The roan hesitated and then turned at right angles to the wind, following the edge of the hidden gully to its head.
Uriah knew his trust in the horse was well founded when the roan turned his back to the wind again, holding true to the same rough compass reading they had been following. It was at that point that Uriah felt compelled to look behind him, to turn his face into the stinging wind to search for Nash. Uriah didn’t understand that compulsion any more than he understood the roan’s decision to turn away from the hidden gully, but he didn’t hesitate to follow its dictates, searching the white, shifting land for the hazy shape that would be Nell and Nash. It wasn’t there.
Uriah waited a moment for Nash to appear. He needed to have Nash appear. Uriah didn’t want to face the obvious any more than he wanted to face the stinging wind.
If Nell had stepped off the trail, if she went down, or if Nash slipped out of the saddle, he would likely be lost forever. Even now in this frigid, godforsaken wind, Nash might be lying in the snow out there, stiffening in the cold as the wind covered him.
Uriah yanked the roan’s head around. The gelding fought the reins, reluctant to turn into the wind. Uriah fought the panic he felt. He wanted to gallop screaming into the wind, shouting for his son, his only child. But he knew that would mean death for him and Nash, so he gritted his teeth and leaned into the wind and the desperation he felt.
The roan’s tracks had disappeared almost on the horse’s heels, hidden by that screaming, evil wind. But there were still tiny drifts marking some of the tracks, clues the wind had left to lure him back to death. Uriah followed them until they turned at right angles to the wind. They disappeared then, but Uriah followed the gully, marking its edge by the way the roan shied whenever he neared it. Uriah was watching the edge, face turned away from the wind, when the roan stopped.
There, through the wind and snow and the fear, Uriah saw Nell, foundered in snow over her shoulders, and beside Nell, a small dark object lay motionless in the snow. Nash!
Uriah fought off the urge to leap after Nash. That would come later, when all else failed. But for now, Uriah took the lariat off his saddle, tied a loop in one end with numb fingers, and threw the loop toward Nash. A gust of wind took the loop and carried it away from Nash, teasing him. He pulled the loop back and threw it again, and again. He was trying very hard to control the panic he felt. Uriah didn’t know if Nash was alive or dead, he didn’t know if Nash was dying while he watched. But he knew the only hope he and Nash had now came from his ability to reason. He must remain calm. He threw the loop again.
Nash was asleep when something struck him on the face. He didn’t know what had awakened him, but then it seeped into his consciousness the way the cold had seeped through his clothes. It was a rope: his father had thrown him a lifeline. Nash slipped the loop over his head and chest and under his arms. Uriah backed the roan, and Nash slipped out to the edge of the coulee. It was so easy, and it had seemed so hard.
Uriah helped Nash to his feet. Nash could see fear in his father’s face, hear it in his father’s hoarse voice. “Nash, stamp your feet. Turn your back to the wind and stamp your feet.”
Nash did as he was told. There was an unreal quality to the exercise. He was stumbling more than running in place, his frost-dead feet striking frost-dead ground. The movement set his heart pumping faster and the muscles of his legs helped force warm blood through his feet. The deadness went away a little, and his feet began to ache. That was a good sign. Maybe he would live. Maybe he wouldn’t lose his feet.
Somehow the pain was therapeutic. His mind focused on it, and he almost forgot that awful, cutting, killing wind. Nash took his mittens off and put his hands under his armpits in his jacket. Moments later, his hands began aching, too. But perhaps more important, the pain was pulling the cobwebs from his brain. He was beginning to think again, and at that point, he recognized his father’s face just inches away from his own.
“Nash, I’ve got to go into the drift after Nell. I’m asking you to back the roan when I call out. You’ve got to do it, boy, or I’ll never get out.”
Uriah turned and plunged into the snow. He pushed, scrambled, swam out to the stranded horse and dropped the loop of rope over her head. Then he grabbed the reins and scrambled back. He needed to be out of the way when Nell tried to do what he would tell her to do.
“Haw, Nell! Haw!” Uriah yelled against the wind, tugging the horse’s head around with the reins. At first Nell stood motionless. But she could no more ignore Uriah’s commands than she could ignore the call of nature. She had leaned into harness too many times.
She began lunging, struggling to do her master’s bidding. She was actually beginning to turn, even while sinking deeper in the snow. Uriah didn’t dare put pressure on the rope now. It might break her neck, but if he didn’t …
“Back the roan! Easy, Nash! Easy!”
Uriah didn’t know if he had been heard above the screaming wind, but the rope tightened, and Nell was coming around. It was critical now. The horse was almost at right angles to the rope. If she fell, she might not be able to get back on her feet, but she lunged again, and her feet caught the lip of the coulee.
“Back, Nash. Take up the slack.”
A minute later, Nell was standing in snow at the edge of the coulee, sides heaving, and Uriah was yelling again at Nash. “I don’t know where we are. I’m going to take Nell’s reins so we won’t drift apart again, and I’m giving the roan his head. If he takes us back to camp, we’ll be okay.”
Nash knew his father had left the sentence unfinished. If the horses didn’t take them to camp, if they wandered aimlessly, Nash and Uriah would pay with their lives. But there was no choice.
So they rode, rode on for hours, days, it seemed. The wind played hide-and-seek with their bodies, finding warmth wherever it hid and snatching it away.
The awareness that he was once again dead was rising in Nash, but he refused to give in to even so obvious a fact. Whenever he could muster the energy to raise his head, giving the wind a new angle of attack, he would see his father hunched on the roan like a boulder in a stream of swirling white water. He couldn’t die with his father watching—he didn’t want to be a disappointment—so he held on to his life and wouldn’t let go. That was the hardest thing Nash had ever done. It took all his body’s energy to keep his blood flowing. He tried to listen to the sound of his heart, knowing that when it quit, he could stop this pretense of life and sleep. His father couldn’t blame him if his heart just quit.
On they rode, bodies slumped in their saddles, bound for wherever the horses chose to take them, betting their lives that the horses would take them to safety before they died.
Then the animals stopped, Nell almost bumping into the roan. It must be over now. There was no need to keep up the pretense any longer. Nash was so grateful, and he closed his eyes to sleep, only to awaken to the sound of someone screaming in his face.
“Nash, we made it. Flynn set up a windbreak for the horses. Climb down, and we’ll get them taken care of.”
Nash climbed off the horse with no sense of relief, only the dread that the ordeal was not over yet. Still, it was a little better on the ground. Uriah had opened the corral, and Nash led Nell through.
Flynn had stretched a web of tarpaulins through the trees edging the windward side of the corral. The wind screamed its fury at being denied full access to the warm flesh of the horses there, but the tarpaulins held tight to their lashings, and the animals were bunched and reasonably comfortable.
Uriah filled buckets with oats for Nell and the roan and carried in the two buckets of water Flynn had left by the corral. As cold as it was, there was only a skiff of ice on the water. Flynn must have waited for them at the corral as long as he dared.
When Uriah had finished, he took some rope lying beside the corral and tied it with clumsy, frostbitten fingers end to end with the ropes he and Nash carried in their saddlebags.
Nash was standing in the lee of the tarps, stamping his feet, when Uriah walked up. “We’re going to tie this to that tree, and then walk in the direction we think the lean-to is. If we don’t bump into it, we can hang on the rope and swing back and forth in arcs till we find it. We have to be careful. We could still get lost, and we won’t last much longer without shelter.”
Nash nodded. “What about the old man, Dad?”
“What do you mean?”
“Without shelter, he’ll die too.”
“Indians are accustomed to this weather. He’ll pull through.”
“No man could live through this storm without shelter, Dad.”
Uriah bowed his head to shield his face from the wind and the snow. Then he looked at Nash. “We’re bunching up, aren’t we boy? Predator and prey and we don’t know which is which. We’ll try to find him on the way to our lean-to, but we better move fast. We don’t have much time.”
9
Nash’s body was racked by the cold. He clenched his teeth to keep them from rattling against each other. Stepping back into the fierce wind from the corral windbreak took a major effort of will.
Uriah and Nash marched along an azimuth estimated by Uriah before they left the corral, guided by compass and paying out rope behind them. Their dead reckoning worked, but still they almost bumped into the old man before they saw him. He was still sitting on the log, with his back to the wind and the buffalo robe pulled over his head, shut tight against the elements.
Uriah reached out tentatively and touched the old man on the shoulder. At first there was no movement, and Nash thought the old man might be dead, but then the robe shifted a bit, leaving a narrow tunnel leading back to the glitter of the old man’s eyes.
Uriah was shouting over the wind, and it appeared that he was screaming at the old man, venting some great anger.
“You better come with us,” Uriah said. “The storm will kill you.”
“You do not want me dead?” the old man asked.
“No, I do not want you dead,” Uriah said in a voice so soft that Nash almost didn’t hear him.
The old man nodded and rose. He stood swaying for a moment against the wind, and Uriah reached out and took the Indian’s arm. Uriah shot another azimuth, and the three of them lurched through the snow blindly following the needle on the compass, paying out more rope, but more slowly now, moving in an expanding arc from the corral toward their camp.
The navigation was more difficult this time and the men missed. They didn’t know if they had gone too far or not far enough. They didn’t know if their straight-line distance from the corral was correct or incorrect, so they began swinging in wide arcs, hanging on to the rope. Each time the group slowed, stopped, and headed back into the wind, Nash found it more difficult. The wind tore mercilessly at him, but he gritted his teeth to stop the shaking. He trudged on, one foot after another.
And suddenly, woodenly, they were there. Nash stood, leaning against the wind, until Uriah took his arm and pulled the boy down into the lean-to. It was cold there, too, but there was no wind, and compared to outside, it seemed almost warm. That illusion was enhanced when Uriah lit their kerosene lamp with shaking hands and hung it from the top brace of the lean-to. The lamp swayed back and forth as the wind buffeted the canvas, casting mellow light and deep shadows.
“Nash, get out of your boots. Take off everything but your long underwear.”
Nash tried to do as he had been told, but the knots he had tied that morning were too cunning for his numb fingers. The old man reached out and took Nash’s feet. He unlaced the boots easily and slipped off the two pair of heavy wool socks Nash was wearing. Then, by the light of the swaying lamp, the old man examined Nash’s toes and feet. He pressed the flesh. It turned white under his touch.
The old man traced the width and depth of the frostbite with his fingers. Still silent, he reached for Nash’s hands and repeated his examination there. Before reaching for Uriah’s feet, the old man looked into Uriah’s eyes for a long moment. Still Uriah jerked when he felt the old man’s touch, and his body tensed as the old man probed the extent of Uriah’s injuries.
Running Wolf reached for a rawhide bag he had carried with him into the lean-to, and the buffalo robe slipped for a moment from his face.
Nash saw the old man’s face more clearly than he had before. It was much darker than Nash remembered, and more heavily eroded by the runoff of the juices of youth. His hair was white, banded here and there with darker shades of gray, and braided into two strands that disappeared into the robe over his shoulders. The bones of his face pushed his wrinkled skin into a terrain as sharp and broken as the prairie on which he lived.
