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.
When the willow strips were pliable again, I took each of them and bent them into an oval and tied them, selecting the two best ovals to keep. Then with the rawhide strips tied across them, I made rough snowshoes.
Before nightfall I took the rifle, strapped on the snowshoes, and went out to give them a test run. They were not the first pair I had made, and they worked well. Trailing down the valley toward the chute, I saw it was rapidly choking with snow over the ice. Escape by that route was completely out of the question.
I circled around, and ventured toward the valley of Ange’s cave. When almost to the bare shoulder where the bristle-cone pines grew, I turned back to reach my cave before dark. It was at that moment that I heard the shot.
Stunned with the shock, I stood stock-still listening to the echo of it racketing against the solemn hills.
The echo lost itself against the snow-clad hillsides and I remained still, shivering a little in the cold, alone in a vast world of sky and snow, scarcely willing to accept what my ears had heard.
A shot… here!
It had come from the canyon below. Someone was down there! Someone was at or near Ange’s cave.
Here? In this place?
XIII
A sudden crack of ice . . . the breaking of a tree laden with snow? . . . No. This had been a , clear, sharp, unmistakable.
said, you ain’t… aren’t… alone. Who knew of the cave below? Or of the valley? Ange, so far as I knew. Cap knew what I’ld told him, but Cap couldn’t have made it up there if I’d given exact directions, which I hadn’t. His hold on life was still too weak.
-Ange . . . ? That was mighty foolish to consider. She had no reason for coming up. Whoever had been following me down below? Could they have found some way into that valley? that seemed the most likely.
If I started for the canyon now it would be full dark before I got there, and I’d see nothing anyway. The thing to do would be to go back to the mine and hole up there until daybreak. One thing was a copper-riveted cinch. If those were in the canyon they were snowed in like I was, and, unless I was much mistaken, they were a lot less able to cope with it.
We Sacketts had never had much to do with, and back in the mountains we learned to make out on mighty little, but we learned how to rustle. There wasn’t one of us boys who hadn’t traveled miles by himself and lived off the country before he was sixteen.
Since then I’d had very little but rough time, what with soldiering and all. A Montana-from-Texas cattle drive is not exactly a place for softening up, and it seemed like I’d spent half my life getting along on less than nothing.
Hardship was a way of life to me, and there were few times when I wasn’t hungry, cold, or fighting rough country for a living. Being snowed in up here in these mountains wasn’t a pleasant thing, but somehow I’d survive. But those others now … ?
When I got back to camp the horses were close around the cave. I brought them inside and wiped them off. Mostly I fussed over them to keep their spirits up. They were smart enough to know we were in trouble, but being cared for made them confident that all was well.
I wished I could be so sure myself.
When I had my fire going I took off my sheepskin coat and shed my vest before putting the coat back on. I always try to have a little something extra to put on when out in cold weather. Main thing a man has to avoid is sweating. When he stops moving that sweat can freeze into an icy sheet inside the clothes.
I fixed myself some grub, and sat by the fire with Blackstone open. Time to time, I’d squint in the firelight to make something out.
These last few months, after I went to bed, sometimes I’d lie awake into the night, a-contem-plating things I’d read, or trying to say things, using the words taken from that book. By the time spring came I had hoped my talking would be better.
And, time to time, I had thought of Ange. . . . About the time I was doing for her and she was half-dead from starvation and exhaustion, when I thought maybe this was my woman. I spent a sight of time daydreaming around, just contemplating her, and all about her.
But there wasn’t much left to think about She’d made that plain the other night in the store. Might have been better to let Batch shoot me. Only I didn’t believe that. I’ve heard of men killing themselves over a woman — most fool thing I ever heard