Butcher's Crossing (15 page)

Shortly after dawn, they found water.

Afterward Andrews remembered as if from a dream the first sign they had that water was near. In the early light from the east Miller stiffened in his saddle and raised his head like an alert animal. Then, almost imperceptibly, he pulled his horse in a slightly northerly direction, his head still raised and alert. A few moments later he reined his horse more sharply north, so that Charley Hoge had to dismount from the wagon and prod the oxen toward Miller’s horse. Then, as the first small edge of the sun came above the flat line in the east, Andrews was aware that his horse had begun to quiver beneath him. He saw that Miller’s horse, too, was straining impatiently; its ears were pitched sharply forward, and it was held by Miller’s taut reins. Miller twisted in his saddle and faced those behind him. In the soft yellow light that fell upon Miller’s face, Andrews could see the cracked lips, raw and slightly bleeding from the distended cracks, parted in a grotesque smile.

“By God,” Miller called; his voice was rasping and weak, but it held a deep note of triumph. “By God, we found it. Hold your horses back, and—” Turning still farther around, he raised his voice, “Charley, hold on to them oxen as hard as you can. They’ll smell it in a few minutes, and they’re like to go crazy.”

Andrews’s horse bolted suddenly; startled, he pulled back with all his strength on the reins, and the horse reared upward, its front hooves pawing the air. Andrews leaned frantically forward, burrowing his face in the horse’s mane, so that he would not topple off.

By the time they came in sight of the stream, which wound in a flat treeless gully cut on the level land, the animals were quivering masses of flesh held back by the tiring muscles of the men. When the sound of the stream came to their ears, Miller called back to them: “Jump off, and let ’em go!”

Andrews lifted one foot from a stirrup; as he did so, the horse, relieved of the pressure of the reins, lunged forward, spilling Andrews to the ground. By the time he got to his feet, the horses were at the stream, on their knees, their heads thrust down into the shallow trickle.

Charley Hoge called from the wagon: “Somebody come here and give me a hand with this brake!” With his hand and with the crook of the elbow of his other arm, he was pulling against the large hand brake at the side of the wagon; the locked wheels of the wagon tore through the short grass, raising dust. Andrews stumbled across the ground and climbed upon the wagon by way of the unmoving wheel spokes. He took the hand brake from Charley Hoge’s grasp.

“Got to get them unyoked,” Charley Hoge said. “They’ll kill theirselves if they go at this much longer.”

The brake jerked and trembled under Andrews’s grasp; the smell of scorched wood and leather came to his nostrils. Charley Hoge jumped from the wagon and ran to the lead team. With deft movements, he knocked the pins from an oxbow, and jerked the oxbow from the yoke, jumping aside as the ox lunged forward, past him, toward the stream. Miller and Schneider stood on either side of the team, trying to quiet the oxen as Charley Hoge unyoked them. When the last ox was unyoked, the three men went in a stumbling trot across the ground to a spot a few feet upstream from where the animals were lined.

“Take it easy,” Miller said, when they had flung themselves down on their stomachs beside the narrow, muddy stream. “Just get your mouths wet at first. Try to drink too much, and you’ll make yourselves sick.”

They wet their mouths and let a little of the water trickle down their throats, and then lay for a few moments on their backs, letting their hands remain behind their heads, the water trickling softly and coolly over them. Then they drank again, more deeply; and rested again.

They stayed at the stream all that day, letting the animals have their fill of water, and grazing them on the short dry grass. “They’ve lost a lot of strength,” Miller said. “They’ll be a full day getting even part of it back.”

Shortly before noon, Charley Hoge gathered some driftwood that he found along the stream, and started a fire. He put some dry beans on to cook, and fried some side meat, which they wolfed immediately with the last of the dried biscuits, washing it all down with quantities of coffee. They slept the afternoon through; while they slept, the fire died down beneath the beans, and Charley Hoge had to start it again. Later, in the darkness, they ate the beans, undercooked and hard, and drank more coffee. They listened for a while to the slow, contented movement of the livestock around them; and themselves contented, they lay on their bedrolls around the embers of the campfire and slept, hearing in their sleep the quiet thin gurgle of the stream they had found.

They resumed their journey before dawn the next morning, only a little weak from the ordeal of thirst they had endured. Miller led the party with more confidence, now that water had been found. He spoke of the water as if it were a live thing that attempted to elude him. “I’ve found it, now,” he had said back at the camp beside the stream. “It won’t get away from me again.”

And it did not get away. They made their way westward in an erratic course over the featureless land, finding water always at their day’s end; usually they came upon it in darkness, when to Schneider and Andrews it seemed impossible that it could be found.

On the fourteenth day of their journey, they saw the mountains.

For much of the previous afternoon, they had traveled toward a low bank of clouds that distantly shrouded the western horizon, and they had traveled into the night before they found water. So they rose late that morning.

By the time they awoke, the sky was steel-blue and the sun was burning heavily in the east. Andrews rose from his bedroll with a start; they had not remained so late in camp during all the journey. The other men were still in their bedrolls. He started to call to them; but his eyes were caught by the brilliant clearness of the sky. He let his eyes wander unfocused over the high clear dome; and as they settled to the west, as they always settled, he stiffened and looked more closely. A small low uneven hump of dark blue rose on the farthest extremity of land that he could see. He sprang up and went a few steps forward, as if those few steps would enable him to see more closely. Then he turned back to the sleeping men; he went to Miller and shook his shoulder excitedly.

“Miller!” he said. “Miller, wake up.”

Miller stirred and opened his eyes, and came quickly to a sitting position, instantly awake.

“What is it, Will?”

“Look.” Andrews pointed to the west. “Look over there.”

Not looking where Andrews pointed, Miller grinned. “The mountains. I reckoned we should be in sight of them sometime today.”

By this time the others were awake. Schneider looked once at the thin far ridge, shrugged, got his bedroll together and lashed it behind his saddle. Charley Hoge gave the mountains a quick glance and turned away, busying himself with the preparations for the morning meal.

Late in the morning they began again their long trek westward. Now that their goal was visible, Andrews found that the land upon which they traveled took on features that he had not been able to recognize before. Here the land dipped into a shallow gully; there a small cropping of stone stood out from the earth; elsewhere in the distance a scrubby patch of trees smudged the greenish-yellow of the landscape. Before, his eyes had remained for most of the time fixed upon Miller’s back; now they strained into the distance, toward the uneven hump of earth, now sharp, now blurred, upon the far horizon. And he found that he hungered after them much as he had thirsted after the water; but he knew the mountains were there, he could see them; and he did not know precisely what hunger or thirst they would assuage.

The journey to the foothills took them four days. Gradually, with their going, the mountains spread and reared upon the land. As they came nearer Miller grew more impatient; when they nooned at a stream (the number of which increased as they traveled), he was hardly able to wait for the stock to water and graze. He urged them on, more and more swiftly, until at last the crack and hiss of Charley Hoge’s whip was regular and steady and the oxen’s lips were flecked and dripping with white foam. They drove late into each night, and were on the move again before the sun rose.

Andrews felt that the mountains drew them onward, and drew them with increasing intensity as they came nearer, as if they were a giant lodestone whose influence increased to the degree that it was more nearly approached. As they came nearer he had again the feeling that he was being absorbed, included in something with which he had had no relation before; but unlike the feeling of absorption he had experienced on the anonymous prairie, this feeling was one which promised, however vaguely, a richness and a fulfillment for which he had no name.

Once they came upon a broad trail running north and south. Miller paused upon it, got off his horse, and examined the path that had been worn in the grass.

“Cattle trail, looks like. They must have started running cattle up from Texas.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t here the last time I come through.”

Late in the afternoon, just before dark, Andrews saw in the distance the long thin parallel lines of a railroad, which found a level course by winding among the gentle hillocks that were beginning to swell upon the land; but Miller had already seen it.

“My God!” Miller said. “A railroad!”

The men increased the paces of their mounts, and in a few minutes halted beside the humped foundation of the road. The tops of the rails gleamed dully in the last light of the sun. Miller got off his horse and stood unmoving for a moment. He shook his head, knelt, and ran his fingers over the smooth steel of the tracks. Then, his hand still upon the metal, he raised his eyes to the mountains, which now loomed high and jagged in the orange and blue light of the afternoon sky.

“My God!” he said again. “I never thought they’d get a railroad in this country.”

“Buffalo,” Schneider said. He remained on his horse, and spat at the rails. “Big herd. I never seen big herds yet, where a railroad’s been in a few years.”

Miller did not look up at him. He shook his head, and then rose to his feet and mounted his horse.

“Come on,” he said abruptly. “We got a long way to go before we set up camp.”

Though they passed several clear streams, Miller forced them to travel for nearly three hours after dark. The travel was slow, for as they approached the mountains the land was more broken; frequently, they had to skirt large groves of trees that grew near the streams, and had to bypass several sharp hills that rose vaguely out of the darkness. Once, in the distance, they saw the glimmering of a light that might have come from the open door of a house. They continued their drive until they were out of its sight, and for some time afterward.

Early the next morning, they were in the foothills. A few pines were scattered on the sharply rising sides of the hills that cut off their view of the mountains. Miller, riding ahead, guided the wagon along the land that gently rose up to the hills; he pointed to a sharp strip of pines that descended from one of these, and they made in that direction. The hills dropped sharply into a valley; at the bottom of the cut, the land leveled on either side of a small stream. They followed this draw onto a broad flat valley, which stretched to the very base of the mountains.

“We should hit the river by noon,” Miller said. “Then we start to climb.”

But it was shortly after noon when they came upon the river. The land on the side from which they approached was clear; a few sumacs, already tinged with yellow, and a few clumps of scrub willow straggled along the bank. The bed of the river was wide; it was perhaps two hundred yards from the rise on their side to a steep ledge on the other. But for many yards beyond either bank, and in the bed itself, grass was growing, and even a few small trees and shrubs. Through the years, the river had cut away at earth and solid stone; now it ran thin and shallow at the center of its path in a swath no more than thirty feet in width. It ran smoothly and clearly among rocks, some flat and some thrust sharply up from the bed, here and there breaking into whirling eddies and white-topped riffles.

They nooned at the point at which they had first approached the river. While the other stock was grazing, Miller mounted his horse and rode away in a northeasterly direction, following the river’s flow. Andrews wandered away from Charley Hoge and Schneider, who were resting beside the wagon, and sat on the bank. The mountain was a mass of pines. On the far bank the heavy brown trunks raised thirty or forty feet before the boughs spread to hold deep green clusters of pine needles. In the spaces between the huge trunks were only other trunks, and others, on and on, until the few trees that he could see merged into an image of denseness, impenetrable and dark, compounded of tree and shadow and lightless earth, where no human foot had been. He raised his eyes, and followed the surface of the mountain as it jutted steeply upward. The image of the pines was lost, and the image of the denseness, and indeed even the image of the mountain itself. He saw only a deep green mat of needle and bough, which became in his gaze without identity or size, like a dry sea, frozen in a moment of calm, the billows regular and eternally still—upon which he might walk for a moment or so, only to sink as he moved upon it, slowly sink into its green mass, until he was in the very heart of the airless forest, a part of it, darkly alone. He sat for a long time upon the bank of the river, his eyes and his mind caught in the vision he had.

He was still sitting on the bank when Miller returned from his downstream journey.

Miller rode silently up to the resting men, who gathered around him as he drew his horse to a halt and dismounted.

“Well,” Schneider said, “you been gone long enough. Did you find what you were looking for?”

Miller grunted. His eyes went past Schneider, and ranged up and down the line of the river that he could see from where he stood.

“I don’t know,” Miller said. “It seems like the country has changed.” His voice was quietly puzzled. “It seems like everything is different from what it was.”