Wolf Willow

  The river bent, they dragged their burden along, they yielded to his murmurings and to their own exhaustion and let him sag a minute onto the ice, and then hauled and dragged him onto his feet and staggered on. The right bank was low and brushy; the wind came across it so that they leaned and fought across its whipping edge. Rusty freed his left hand and scoured the wrist of the mitten across his eyes and looked into the blast for the slant of the dugway, and saw nothing but the very throat of the blizzard. It was more than muscle and will could endure; panic was alive in his insides again. Even a hundred yards was too much; they could fall and die before the others could overtake them, right here within a few rods of safety. He gasped and sucked at his drooling lip, lost his hold on Panguingue’s hand, felt with anguish how Spurlock slid away and went down.

  Somehow they got him up again; somehow they struggled another hundred feet along the ice, and now a cutbank curving into a left-hand bend cut off some of the wind, and Rusty heard Panguingue grunt and felt the veer and stagger as he turned in toward the bank. Rusty still could not see it, but starting up, slipping, he put a hand down to stay himself and felt the dugway. Strengthless, they leaned into the bank; Spurlock tried to lie back; they held him with difficulty, and lifting the blanket to look into his face Rusty saw his eyes frozen wholly shut with teardrops of ice on the lashes. Above the dark beard the cheekbones were dead white.

  When they tried to move him again, he sagged back against the bank and gave them his limp arms to haul at, and their combined strength was not enough to get him onto his feet, much less to start him up the steep dugway. They tried to drag him and stopped exhausted after six feet. The glare of uncertainty, fear, helplessness, was in Panguingue’s glimmer of eyes and teeth. Rusty understood him well enough. Leave him? The others would soon come along. But if they didn’t come in a few minutes he would be dead. Again they lifted and hauled at Spurlock, got him halfway, and felt him slip and go comfortably down again. Panguingue let go. “We better try to get up to the cabin. Schulz might be there.”

  “Suppose he isn’t?”

  He heard the forlorn, hopeless sound of Panguingue’s snuffing. The face looked at him, bearded clear to the eyes.

  “You go,” Rusty said. “I’ll wait here with him.”

  A snuffle, a momentary look, and Panguingue ducked away, scrambling with hands and feet, to disappear over the dugway edge.

  For a while Rusty lay beside Spurlock on the slope, his blanket huddled over to cover both their faces, and simply waited, without mind or thought, no longer afraid, not hopeful, not even aware or sentient, but simply waiting while the gasp of breath and hammer of heart labored toward some slowing-point. He could not feel his feet at all; his hands were clubs of wood. Driven inward from its frontiers, his life concentrated itself in his chest where heart and lungs struggled.

  A little later there was a stage in which his consciousness hung above him, like the consciousness in a dream where one is both actor and observer, and saw him lying there, numb already nearly to the knees, nearly to the elbows, nose and lips and forehead and the tender sockets of the eyes gone feelingless, ears as impersonal as paper ears pinned to his head. What he saw was essentially a corpse huddling over another corpse. He recognized the fact without surprise or alarm. This was the way it ended, this was the way they would be found.

  Under the blanket’s hood was a darkness and stillness. He felt how absurd it was, really. Absurd for men to chase around an arctic prairie wearing themselves and their cattle to death. Absurd. Take a rest, now, and ...

  Coming? Who? Qu‘appelle? Old wolf, old walker of the snow, old windigo, qu’appelle? He smiled. It was a joke between them.

  He heard now neither the wind nor the dry rustle of his mind. Inside the blanket the air was still, red-dusky, not cold. But as he moved to make his legs more comfortable the hillside toppled, a dull anguish of unwilling sensation spread in his throat, and he struggled back up, straightening the elbow that had given way and let him fall across Spurlock’s up-jutting face. A powder flash of terror lighted up his whole head. The imprint of Spurlock’s chin, unyielding as stone, ached in his Adam’s apple. The face of a corpse—his too? But it was not his own pain so much as the appalling rigidity of Spurlock’s jaw that shocked him. The man was dying, if not dead. Something had to be done, he couldn’t just wait for help from Panguingue or the others.

  His hands clutched and shook the stiffening bundle, the unfeeling hooks tried to close, to lift. “Edl Ed, come on! We’re almost there, man! Get up, you can’t lie here. Only a little way farther. Ed! Ed! You hear? God damn it, Ed, get up! Come on, move!”

  His eyes were full of catastrophic tears; he dashed them away with a fold of the blanket and threw a look up the dugway and gulped a burning throatful of the wind. He heard the voices wail and howl around the eaves of the riverbank, and he bent and slapped and pounded and tugged, screaming at the clownish, bearded, ice-eyed, and white-cheekboned face that turned and whimpered under his attack.

  Gasping, he stopped a moment, threw another look upward. The top of the bank was less than thirty feet above him. Beyond that, within two hundred feet, should be the cabin. Five minutes, no more than ten even on hands and knees. He looked in anguish for the outfit, possibly coming up the river ice, and saw only trails of drift vanishing around the bend. The boys rendering their fantastic duty to the horses could not possibly come in time. And Panguingue must have found the shack deserted or he would have been back by now. Was he stopping to build a fire, or was he too exhausted to come back? Or was he lying in the snow himself, somewhere between the cutbank and the cabin?

  “Ed! Wake up! Get up and walk! It’s only a little wayl”

  Hopeless; inert and hopeless. He could not help the tears, though he knew they would be his blindness and his death. “Please, Ed! Please, come on!”

  In a clumsy frenzy he hauled and yanked and dragged; his frantic strength skidded Spurlock a yard or two up the dugway, and when Spurlock began mumblingly to resist with arms and legs, Rusty attacked him with three times more fury and by slaps and kicks and blows reinforced his resistance until, miraculously, Spurlock was on his feet. With hooks and shoulder Rusty helped him, braced him, shoved him upward, moved him a step, and another; and crying encouragement, panting, winded and dead-armed and dead-legged, forced the man foot by foot up the dugway path until he felt the ground level off and the wind fling itself full against them.

  They toppled and almost fell. Spurlock sagged and started to sit down and Rusty barely managed to hold him. He could not see more than a bleared half-light—no objects at all. His tears were already ice, his lashes stitched together, and he could make no move to clear his sight without letting Spurlock slip away, probably for the last time. Savagely he rasped his face across the snow-slick wool of Spurlock’s blanketed shoulder; with what little vision he could gain he glared straight into the wind for the dark wall or icicled eaves that would be the cabin. The wind drove down his throat; his shouting was strangled and obliterated; it was like trying to look and shout up a waterfall. The wilderness howled at him in all its voices. He was brought to a full stop, sightless, breathless, deafened, and with no strength to move and barely enough to stand, not enough—frantically not enough—to hold the weight of Ed Spurlock that despite every effort he could make slid away and down.

  With a groan Rusty let him go. Both hands rose to rub the wristlets of his mittens across his sealed eyes. Pain stabbed through his eyeballs as if he had run across them with sandpaper, but he broke the threads of ice that stitched him shut, and looked again into the gray and howling wind, saw a square darkness, a loom of shadow in the murk, and thought in wonder, My God, we’ve been right against the shack all the time, and then the darkness moved and the wind’s voice fell from whine and howl to a doglike barking, and Panguingue was there shouting in his face.

  Relief was such pure bliss to him that he was rendered imbecilic by it, and stood mouth open and cheeks stretched to force open his eyes, watchin
g Panguingue try to pull Spurlock erect. He loved Panguingue, the stoutest and decentest and bravest and most dependable man alive. Merely his presence brought not only hope but assurance. It would be no trouble now. And even while he was bending to help he heard the unmistakable dig and clump of the Clydes behind him, and turned to see them clear the dugway with tennis balls of ice rattling in their fetlocks and Jesse hanging to the lines behind them, and then the others—one, then another, then another, leading the pony.

  What had been impossible was suddenly easy, was nothing. Among them they hoisted Spurlock to his feet. Rusty felt an arm around him, the urge of someone else’s undiminished strength helping him along through a thigh-deep drift that gave way abruptly to clear ground. His head sounded with hollow kick ings and poundings and with one last defeated howl of wind, and he saw icicles under the shack’s eaves like yard-long teeth, and the wind stopped, the noises fell, the light through his sticky eyelids darkened, his nostrils filled with smells of mice, kerosene, sheepskins, ham rind, sardines, and a delirious tropical odor of cinnamon and cloves like his mother’s spice cupboard, and someone steered him and turned him and pushed on his shoulders, and Ray Henry’s whisper said, “O.K., kid, take a load off your feet.” He felt safety with his very buttocks as he eased himself down on the rustly hay-stuffed tick of a bunk.

  Later he sat with his aching feet in a dishpan of snow and water, and when the pain in his hands swelled until it seemed the fingers would split like sausages, he stooped and numbed the ache into bearability in the same dishpan. His eyes were inflamed and sore; in each cheek a spot throbbed with such violence that he thought the pulse must be visible in the skin like a twitching nerve. His ears were swollen red-hot fungi, his nose that had run and drooled incontinently all the way through the blizzard was now so stuffed and swollen that he gurgled for air. He knew how he looked by looking at Little Horn, who had got wet to the knees when the Clydes went through the rapid, and who sat now on an apple box with first one foot and then the other in a bucket of snow. Little Horn’s skin showed like a flaming sunburn through his reddish beard. He had innocent blue eyes like Jesse‘s, and the same blunt chin. When he was twenty years older he would look a good deal like Jesse—they were members of the same tribe. Now he lifted one tallowy foot from the deep snowprint in the pail and set it tenderly on the floor and lifted the other into its place, and looked across at Rusty with his mild ironic eye and shook his head in acknowledgment of something.

  Ray and Jesse were squatting by the bunk against the side wall where Spurlock lay. Each had a blotched foot in his hands, each was massaging it and sousing it with snow. At the head of the bunk Buck worked on Spurlock’s hands. Spurlock’s fiery face looked straight upward; his teeth were set; he said nothing. Back by the door Slip and Panguingue had just finished washing each other’s faces with snow. All of them, emerged from their cumbersome wrappings, looked disheveled as corpses dredged from a river. Rusty marveled at their bony hairless feet, their red hands, their vulnerable throats. They were making a good deal of talkative noise, their skins were full of the happiness of rescue, and not yet quite full of pain.

  Little Horn looked at Panguingue’s wet face. He said to Rusty, “Ain’t that the way it goes? Of all the people that might of froze their feet and got a good wash out of it, who is the one God damn boy in the outfit without even a frozen toe but old Pan?”

  Jesse said from the end of Spurlock’s bunk, “Cold couldn’t get through that crust.”

  “B.S.,” Panguingue said. “I’m just tougher than you. And besides, I froze my face damn good.”

  “Snow washed some of the protective layer off,” Little Horn said. “No, more I think of it, more I think you shouldn’t make any mistake and wash them feet till spring, Pan. We’ll need somebody around to do the chores while we get well.”

  “Hey, by God,” Panguingue said. “How about my face?”

  “Just leave it go. A little proud flesh would improve it.”

  “B.S.,” said Slip, in imitation of Panguingue’s growl, and he and Panguingue threatened each other with pans of snow. From the other bunk Ray Henry said, “Feelin’ ‘em yet?”

  “You’re damn right,” Ed Spurlock said through his teeth.

  “Better let ‘em set in the water for a while,” Ray said. “The slower they come back the better.” He stood up, looking at Rusty. “Rusty, you needin’ that dishpan for a while?”

  “No, take it.” He moved his feet carefully out onto the dirty board floor, and the foreman shoved the pan under Spurlock’s dangling feet. Standing over Rusty, burly, matted-haired, grave-eyed, totally enigmatic to the boy but restored to his position of authority and respect, he said, “How you doin‘? Feelin’ yours?”

  “Enough,” Rusty said. He raised his head a little. “What’s the cure for frostbite?”

  “Whiskey,” Jesse said from beside Spurlock.

  “Fine,” said Little Horn. “Just what we ain’t got.”

  “If we had some rocks we could have some rock and rye,” Slip said. “If we had some rye.”

  “No particular cure,” Ray said to Rusty. “Thaw it out slow, keep away from heat, little arnica if you get sores, cut it out if you get gangrene. And wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Depends how bad you are. You and Little Horn, maybe a week, ten days. Ed maybe two-three weeks. It’s the hands and feet that lay you up.”

  “What do we do, stay here till we’re well?”

  “I expect we’ll cobble up that tongue and beat it for the ranch soon as it clears off.”

  “Vacation with pay,” Little Horn said. “Peach pies. Whiskey every hour, while Panguingue does the chores. I tell you, Rusty, there’s no life like a cowboy’s.”

  But Rusty was thinking of the two weeks they had just gone through, and of the cattle that had gone streaming miserably downwind from the Horse Camp corrals, the gaunt exhausted horses that had hung around the tent and wagon until the wind literally blew them away. “What about the calves?” he asked. “And what about the horses?”

  “Horses well have to round up, some of them anyway. They’ll winter out all right, but we need work ponies.”

  “You mean—ride out there and hunt through all that country and drive them on back to the ranch?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I tell you,” Little Horn said, and lifted his left foot out of the bucket and raised his right tenderly in, “there’s no business like the cow business to make a man healthy and active. There’s hardly a job you can work at that’ll keep you more in the open air.”

  Rusty smelled the coffee that Jesse had put on the fire as soon as he got it going. He saw the flaw of moisture the spout cast on the stovepipe, and he moved his pain-distended hands cautiously, cradling them in his lap. The shack’s growing warmth burned in his cheeks. Over on the other side of the stove Slippers’ face, purple in the bare patches, black where the beard grew, brooded with its eyes on the floor. This was the leathery little man who would ride out to bring the ponies back across sixty miles of rough country. And maybe one or two others—maybe himself—with him. The very notion, at that moment, moved the boy to something like awe.

  “What about the calves?” he said.

  For the first time expression—disgust? anger? ironic resignation? —flickered across Ray’s chapped, bearded mouth. “The calves. Well, the ones that ain’t dead by the time this one blows out may find some willows to gnaw in a coulee, and if we get a chinook they’ll have feed and come through all right. If we don’t get a chinook the wolves are gonna be very fat by spring.”

  “But we aren’t going to try rounding them up again.”

  Ray turned away with the flicker widening momentarily on his mouth. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Don’t be impatient,” Little Horn said, and hissed sharply as he moved his foot and bumped the pail. He set the heel on the floor and looked at the swollen toes, looked at his sausage-like fingers, shook his head. On the bunk Spurlock rai
sed one foot from the dishpan. “Wait a minute,” Jesse said. “Got enough of that footbath for a while?”

  He helped the legs with their rolled-up pants to straighten out in the bunk. In the silence that came down as the pain of returning blood preoccupied them Rusty heard the undiminished wind shriek along the icicled eaves of the shack and swoop away. Smoke puffed out around the rings of the stove lids, lay there for a minute like fat white circular worms, and was sucked in again. Shaggy as cavemen, weather-beaten and battered, they huddled back against the walls and away from the stove and contemplated each in his own way the discomforts of the outraged flesh. Each retired within his skinful of pain and weariness, and among them Rusty Cullen, as weary as any, as full of pain as any—pain enough to fill him to the chin and make him lock his jaw for fear of whimpering. He made note that none whimpered, not even Spurlock; the worst was an occasional querulous growl when one moved too fast. Jesse, the old-timer, the knowing one, Nestor and patriarch, unfrozen except for a touch on the fingers and ears, moved between them in stockinged feet and flipped the coffeepot lid with the edge of his palm, saving his tender fingertips, and looked in. The mystic smells of brotherhood were strong in the shack. The stove lids puffed out worms of smoke once more, and once more sucked them inward. The wind went over and around them, the ancient implacable wind, and tore away balked and shrill.

  The Rusty Cullen who sat among them was a different boy, outside and inside, from the one who had set out with them two weeks before. He thought that he knew enough not to want to distinguish himself by heroic deeds: singlehanded walks to the North Pole, incredible journeys, rescues, what not. Given his way, he did not think that he would ever want to do anything alone again, not in this country. Even a trip to the privy was something a man might want to take in company.

  The notion insinuated itself into his head, not for the first time, that his sticking with Spurlock after Panguingue left was an act of special excellence, that the others must look upon him with a new respect because of it. But the tempting thought did not stand up under the examination he gave it. Special excellence? Why hadn’t anyone praised him for it, then? He knew why: because it was what any of them would have done. To have done less would have been cowardice and disgrace. It was probably a step in the making of a cowhand when he learned that what would pass for heroics in a softer world was only chores around here.