Rocky Mountain Company (20 page)

“No, you will make the hair bad. We got good robes,” she said.

“You can tan ’em, since you haven’t got enough to do.”

“I will!” she retorted hotly.

At the wagon, the engagés unhitched the yokes from the carcasses and hooked them to the wagon again. The animals responded sluggishly, stumbling through the heaped snow. Dust Devil knelt beside one cow, and began her buffalo prayer.

“Thank you buffalo cow for your meat, giving me flesh to eat, like your brothers and sisters,” she sang in Cheyenne. “May your spirit be happy in the next world, knowing you have given me your flesh.”

Maxim was staring at her, but it didn’t matter. The big cow lay on its side, a lump of cooling flesh too heavy to handle. She pulled out her shining knife and began sawing through the brisket, feeling the resistance of the thick hide as she cut and hacked. Snow landed on her bare hands and didn’t melt. It mixed with the red gore and iced there, driving sensation from her fingers until she could scarcely tell that her knife was in her hands. She knew the danger, and hoped to warm her hands within. But the carcass had cooled too long, and her hands met only with sharp cold when she forced them inside the belly of the cow. Still, it had to be done. She wanted the offal out before it froze there.

“Help me,” she snapped at Maxim. The boy was worthless, but she needed more hands to pull out the guts.

He stared at her, horrified, and then reluctantly pulled off his mittens and plunged his reddened hands into the cavity, looking half-sick.

“Don’t throw out them boudins,” Fitzhugh said from horseback. His red beard had collected a load of snow.

She snorted at him. “Do you think I don’t know how?”

At last the innards lay in the snow, too cold to steam, and she turned to the next cow, already exhausted. It grew colder, and the snow had become stinging pellets that would torture them all the long way back. She could not even feel her hands, and feared the knife might slip as she sawed into the brisket again.

While she wrestled with the second cow, the engagés wrestled with the gutted one, trying to lift it into the wagon. Its weight was too much for them, and it didn’t help any that the Pittsburghs had no tailgate at the rear of their waterproofed boxes. Fitzhugh dismounted, cursing as he landed on his bum leg, and added his own strength to theirs, to no avail.

“Reckon we’ll have to quarter it,” he muttered.

“Take the hide off first,” she demanded.

But he ignored her and pulled the ax out of the wagon. “We better do this fast afore it freezes up and we do too,” he said. And with that, he sunk the ax deep into the carcass, severing muscle and bone. It angered her, even though she knew they had to do something fast. She wanted the robes.

The light dimmed. She didn’t know whether daylight had played out, or whether the lowering clouds had grown darker and thicker. She wondered if they’d get back to camp, and whether anyone had brought a steel striker and a flint. She sawed furiously while Maxim pried the stiffening brisket apart. And then it happened: the knife struck something hard, recoiled in her numb hand, and slashed deep into Maxim’s thumb. He jerked his hand back as bright blood gouted out, and mixed with the pink slime on the carcass and the snow.

“Ow!” he cried, jumping up. Blood sprayed everywhere.

She stood swiftly on numbed limbs and grabbed at him. “Let me look,” she said crossly, half-believing it had been the boy’s fault for trying to help with something he knew nothing about.

Fitzhugh and the three engagés had finished quartering the cow into huge bloody, snowy chunks, and were loading the last of them. It took three engagés to lift a quarter over the back of the wagon and into its belly.

“My thumb!” cried Maxim.

She caught him at last and pried his good right hand from his slashed left one. She could barely see the trouble because of the scarlet blood. But it welled from a deep gash below the lower knuckle. Maxim held back tears and looked frightened.

She didn’t know how to stop that much bleeding.

Fitzhugh limped over to them, cursing the snow and his pain-lanced leg. He stared a moment. “Got to stop that fast,” he muttered. “Tourniquet. Sew it up. But we want a needle and thread.” He peered about, looking for something. “Put a hot knife to it, maybe,” he muttered. “You got starter?”

She shook her head.

“Somebody’s got a flint,” he roared. The engagés who crowded around Maxim now, shook their heads.

“Hyar, now,” he said, digging in his kit for an old calico shirt he was using as rifle patching. He tore a generous strip of the green cloth and wrapped it hard around Maxim’s hand, while the boy winced. Tears built under his eyes. Red swiftly spread out upon the green. Then Fitzhugh tore a broader strip and wrapped it around the boy’s upper arm and began twisting it tighter and tighter.

“It hurts,” Maxim cried.

“We got to plug up the bleeding. This’ll set you back, some, boy.”

“I’m bleeding to death!”

“Go fetch us a good stout stick so’s we can twist it tight,” Fitzhugh said to Provost. The engagé nodded and walked toward a juniper shrub, ax in hand.

Blood oozed through the bandage and dripped into the snow. Maxim looked pale. Dust Devil stared angrily at him, and then turned back to her butchering. Whitemen were weaklings, she thought, as she began sawing through the brisket again. Time closed in on her now; she had to gut the cows before they froze. Behind her, she heard them working with Maxim, tightening the tourniquet with the stick.

“I’m going to tie this bandage tight with some whangs,” Brokenleg said. “And then git into the wagon, boy, and outa the wind.”

When she’d opened up the second cow she plunged her numb hands inside and began tugging at guts, which finally tumbled out and into the snow. Then she turned to the third buffalo and began the whole thing over again, feeling her flesh goosebump and the snow rob the heat at the center of her body. She made little progress because her hands weren’t working right, and it angered her. Maybe they had offended the spirit of this one.

Brokenleg saw her struggling, and the pathetic cut she’d started in the freezing animal. “Git aside,” he said roughly. She glared and delayed as long as she could as a matter of pride, and because it felt good to resist him. But finally she stood up, knife in hand, her skirts covered with frozen bloody muck.

“Guerette, Provist, turn her on her back,” he said. The engagés grabbed legs and pulled at the cow. Fitzhugh’s axe slashed down, chopping straight into the chest, and then he whacked his way down the brisket with savage strokes, opening the cow in seconds, the stiffness of the half-frozen flesh helping him complete the crude cut. Then, with a grim determination, he hacked out the innards, and began quartering the cow, completing the whole business swiftly. They loaded the snow-caked quarters, while Maxim huddled at the front end of the wagon, and without a moment’s delay, Provost began whipping the reluctant oxen into the northern gale.

She knew she must walk, move, run before she froze. The wind didn’t seem terribly cold, but the snow had wormed its way into her hair, and down her moccasins, and up her legs, and down her neck, melting into icy water that sucked heat from her. Heading into the storm felt terrible. The oxen bawled and rebelled, not wanting to walk that direction, but slowly the burdened wagon creaked through snow, leaving sharp trenches behind it.

Ahead, Fitzhugh on his horse broke trail on one side, while Gallard, beside him, broke trail on the other. As light dimmed they pierced into the mouth of the storm, grimly northbound up the bottoms along a vanished trace. After a while Fitzhugh halted, letting the oxen sag in their yokes, and clambered painfully into the wagon.

“I got to let some blood through, Maxim.”

She peered into the gloom, over the pile of meat, and saw him loosening the tourniquet.

“How does it feel, boy?”

“It prickles. I’m so cold.”

“Let’s see that paw.”

Fitzhugh examined the bloody bandage. “Plumb froze up. It ain’t bleein’ anyway. You’ll be all right.”

“I feel sick.”

“Well, that’s natural. We’ll git on home, if we can see our way.”

“What’s home?” Maxim asked bitterly.

“I reckon they’ve got another tent rigged up and some dandy fires roarin’. And the other wagon’s got the sheet on it too. It’s not a house, but it’ll do. And this’ll blow off in a few days.”

Fitzhugh twisted the stick tight again. “You can do this yourself, boy. Every fifteen, twenty minutes. Let her bleed. And if your hand don’t start up leakin’ again, maybe you can quit the tourniquet pretty soon.”

“I’m so cold. And hot.”

“Stomp around some. Walk when you can.”

But Maxim didn’t respond.

Guerette and Provost whipped and hawed the snow-caked oxen again, driving into a deepening dusk, and the wagon creaked forward. Once the wagon lurched violently, tilting to the left and then slowly righting itself. A wheel had dropped into a snowfilled hole. She wondered if they knew where they were going. How easy this would have been with a few horses and travois, she thought angrily. They struck a mass of trees and veered away from it, a sure sign they were no longer on the well-worn trace. The snow ceased to sting her face, though it whirled in, and she realized her skin had ceased to feel. Even her eyelids caught the hard flakes and held them.

An ox fell, dragging its yokemate down also. Engagés poked and prodded, but it lay in the snow unmoving and uncaring.

“Get shut of it,” Fitzhugh commanded. Weary engagés, floating like ghosts in the last light, unhooked the front yoke to get at the middle one, and freed the downed ox from the heavy wooden collar twisting its neck as it lay on the ground. Not even when freed did it stand, and neither did its mate. It took precious time, and the last of the light, to work the wagon and remaining yokes around the unbudging ones.

“I’m ridin’ ahead to git some help,” Fitzhugh said. “Don’t whip these others too much. We got to save them so’s we can git out and trade. We’re not far now.”

He vanished into a cavernous gloom while the rest stood around, not knowing whether to keep walking and stomping and running to stay warm, or whether to crawl in beside Maxim, where at least the stinging wind didn’t probe through every layer they wore. They crawled in, stumbling over the mountains of meat, and collected at the front of the box in the icy calm.

“I want to go home,” Maxim mumbled.

She settled beside him, discovering not warmth but at least respite from the brutal blowing snow, and not comfort but less pain. Right now, she thought, they could be in the warm, lined lodges of her people, sitting around crackling fires, listening to the wind chatter the smoke flaps. They could have traded all they brought to her people, and have a great pile of fine robes to take back to the whiteman’s world. And her people could have been well armed with rifles and powder and ball to make them strong against their enemies. But instead of listening to her, these pale ones all huddled here without a fire, some of them on the very edge of crossing into the other world.

She knew she’d had her fill of this. A desolating loneliness settled on her, and along with it a yearning for her village, her people. The vision of her father and mother and clan grew so powerful she gasped inwardly, filled with the light, filled with medicine. She remembered the warmth of the lodgefires, and how the cowhide cones caught and held the heat, and vented the pungent smoke through the windflaps. She thought of proud, lean warriors the color of her own flesh, muscles rippling along powerful torsos, warriors who knew how to hunt and kill and protect the old ones and the very young, and bring home gifts to their happy women. Some had courted her once, played their flutes before Fitzhugh had come.

But then the happy imaginings of her mind slipped away, and the dark coldness returned. If she lived through this night, she would leave him.

The stupid bay offered no help. It had one notion in its thick skull, and that was to turn its tail to the wind and stinging snow. Fitzhugh hadn’t any idea where he’d wandered, except that it wasn’t far from the camp. He reckoned they’d travelled most of two hours before the oxen gave out.

The wind had sluiced the heat out of him, yanking his coat back and sliding icy fingers across his ribs and down his neck. His leg had stopped hurting and that was always a danger sign. Only the wind gave him direction, but it came in gusts and eddied from the side. He could see nothing: the whiteness of the snow was little help beneath the massed stormclouds. The snow looked as black as everything else.

The horse stopped again and refused to heed the prompting of his heel. He reined the animal slightly left and tried again, and the horse walked forward a few steps. A branch whipped across his face, stinging him. Cottonwoods. He’d probably drifted toward the river. It came to him that he couldn’t find his way forward or backward, and might die. He’d been in tight corners in the mountains, more of them than he could count, and he knew this one had turned dangerous. He’d gone to the Rocky Mountain College, as the beaver men had called it — the only college where a student graduated or died. He cursed himself for not taking the simplest precautions, such as bringing a flint and striker, and a coal oil lantern. And for leaving the others and the safety of the canvas-covered wagon with its puckerholes drawn tight against the wind.

Well, the graduating class at that college learned one thing: never to give up. Even then more than a few went under, and for a moment he played the rollcall through his mind, solitary trappers, partnered trappers, men who rode out of the rendezvous in the summer and never came back. He knew his fingers were frostbitten, and the end of his nose, and his toes weren’t far from it. It angered him, and anger felt good when he could feel nothing else.

He yanked the horse left until he felt the northwind savaging his right cheek and neck, and then kicked it brutally with his good leg. His horse had to learn to take one-boot commands. The river. The horse shied and stopped. Fitzhugh booted it. The horse stumbled forward, dodged what had to be a great cottonwood, and stopped. Brokenleg kicked again. They made progress through the cottonwoods. He knew they were among them by the lash of branches. Once a limb brained and almost unseated him.