2
It wasn’t much. The slope under the snow turned from ground to rock, the horses stumbling, and as they left the trees behind them, the incline grew steeper, and about the only good thing was that the higher they went, the more the wind seemed to lessen, as if the walls of the draw provided cover. Then the slope leveled off, and they were into a narrow pass, the wind easing enough that with the snow no longer gusting he could see rock walls and patches of boulders and bare stretches of rock where the snow had drifted off, the wind keening across the cliff tops up there but down here mostly still, and directly ahead a little to the left was a corrugated metal shed, dark against the snow. But that wasn’t what he looked for. Assuming it would be on the wall closer to the shed, he glanced that way, looking all along, and there it was, the entrance to the tunnel, a half-hidden hole in the side of the cliff.
He nudged his horse slowly over to it. What helped to hide the tunnel were the mounds of snow-covered rock that spread out on either side of it, too obvious to be camouflage, more likely just the stone that the miners had blasted out of the tunnel and dumped outside to form a windbreak. He saw the loading car tumbled on its side against a mound of rock before he realized there’d be railway ties and tracks under the snow, and dismounting he gave the bay’s reins to Sarah—he had taken it instead of the half-blind buckskin—telling her to wait a moment, walking toward the entrance, stumbling over a length of track hidden in the snow even though he had been prepared for it. He stepped onto where the ties would be between the tracks and walked up to the entrance, peering in at the tall thick timbers that had been used for supports along the walls and across the ceiling. He tugged hard at one just at the entrance, ready to leap back if it gave way and the ceiling shattered down, but it held, and taking a breath he walked carefully in, his footsteps echoing as he tested the next supports farther along, not tugging as heavily but using enough strength all the same to be able to tell if they were secure. He tested them like that all the way along, walking carefully, hardly breathing, until about thirty feet from the entrance, just where the dim light from the air out there was giving out, he came up against a solid wall of rock and timber and debris from a cave-in, pausing, turning, looking around, walking out.
“It’s all right,” he told Sarah, feeling the wind again after the absolute stillness of the mine. He helped her dismount, leading the two horses over the hidden track and up along the ties into the mine where they could see the uncertain footing exposed and manage it better. The air was still again.
“Is this where we’ll be staying?” Sarah asked.
He looked at her. It was one of the few things she had said since the day before when Claire had died. Her face was spiritless, but there was a faint edge in her voice as if she hoped that this would finally be the end.
“No,” he said. “That’s what they’ll expect us to do. From the map this is the only obvious shelter anywhere around.” His voice echoed. “But they won’t be sure until they follow our tracks up here, and I’m counting on the wind to cover the tracks and make it hard for them. I figure we’ve got maybe half a day before they get here. That’s time enough.”
She didn’t understand.
“What’s the matter, aren’t you hungry?” he asked. “Food. We may not have much, but while we’ve got the chance, we’re going to make a feast.”
And for the first time in a while her eyes had light in them, not much but it was a start, and her face changed a little, hard to tell but it looked like the effort at a smile.
He loosened the cinches on the horses, not wanting to take their saddles off in case somebody came and they needed to get out of here fast. He started to untie the sleeping bag from the back of the pinto, wanting to wrap it around her, and then thought better.
“I’ve got some work for you to do.”
He didn’t mean it to sound abrupt, but it came out that way, and instead of putting her off, the thought of something to do made her seem more interested.
“What is it?”
“There’s been a cave-in down at the end. I want you to be very careful. I want you to go back there and get some wood. I don’t want you to take any from the cave-in itself. There’s plenty of bits and pieces lying around back there without your having to touch the cave-in. If you do, you might start the thing coming down on you.”
She looked reluctant now.
“There isn’t any danger. Just stay away from the rocks and you’ll be fine.”
She studied him, unconvinced, nodded slowly, and turned reluctantly to do her job. He tied the reins of the horses under the tracks and went outside.
3
The shed was first, but even as he passed it, he found what he was looking for, a piece of corrugated metal leaning half covered by snow against the side. It was about two feet square, exactly the right size for what he needed, and picking it up, the thin metal difficult to keep a grip on through the woolen gloves that he taken from his saddlebags, he went around to the door of the shed, trying it.
The door was padlocked, and he didn’t want to break in, didn’t want to make it obvious that they’d been here. Even with the wind as reduced as it was, the horses’ tracks were filling in, and with luck the tracks would be completely gone by the time their hunters came. Blinking, eyes watering from concentration in the wind, he worked around the shed, no windows, coming to a corner where the sheets of metal had begun to separate from the post they were anchored to. He pried at one, pulling it farther from the post until there was space enough to get through, and squeezing, he ripped the shoulder of his coat on a nail as he went in.
The place was five feet by eight feet, the crack he come through giving him light enough to look around. There was a workbench that took up one wall, nothing on it. There was a motor, he didn’t know what kind or what for, that took up one corner, long since rusted over. A pile of junk in another corner, more of it under the bench. The place had obviously been for making repairs or storing equipment. The men who worked in the tunnel had probably lived in cabins or tents down in the trees, leaving as soon as the vein played out.
He looked at the rip in his coat, afraid that the nail had gone clean through and that the coat wouldn’t keep out the cold any longer, but it was only the outer layer of wool, the inner layer was still all right, and feeling better he stooped to sort through the junk in the corner. Rusty cans, their labels faded, illegible, empty liquor bottles, cogs and wheels, the head of a hammer. He picked that up, putting it in his pocket, sorting lower. A dry brittle nest at the bottom, probably from a field mouse, but no sign that it had returned this year or ever, a few specks of gray fur among the twigs and yellowed grass. He put everything back the way he had found it.
The pile under the workbench wasn’t much better, more pieces of machinery, more cans and bottles, a pair of cracked leather boots with open toes. Except that underneath everything, close to the wall, there was an old pot with a hole rusted through, and he took that as well, replacing everything, slipping through the crack in the corner out into the wind, careful not to rip his coat again as he eased past the nail.
Sarah was setting down a pile of wood and starting back for more when he came up past the mounds of rock into the tunnel.
“What’s that for?” she asked, pointing toward the piece of corrugated metal.
“That’s our fireplace.”
He meant it to sound like a joke, but it wasn’t. Just as he had not wanted to break the lock on the shed and make it obvious that they’d been here, so he couldn’t build a fire in the tunnel and scorch the rock and maybe burn some ties. He had to leave this place looking the same as when they’d found it.
“Here,” he said, setting the metal on the rock floor between the tracks and the wall. “We’ll build a fire on this, and when we’re done, we’ll bury the ashes in the snow outside. They’ll never know we cooked anything, so they’ll think we’re weaker than we are, and maybe they won’t push after us as hard. Hand me some of that wood. While I think of it, w
hy don’t you get down your sleeping bag as well, and that’ll give us something soft to sit on.”
He was hunkered down, breaking the dry splintering wood into little pieces, making a small pile of them on the metal, leaving a small hole at the bottom to let air in.
“Matches,” he told himself, taking them out of his pocket. Like the salt he now carried on him, they were one thing he’d been careful never to be without. He lit one, reaching it into the hole in the wood, waiting for it to catch, but it didn’t. He heard Sarah standing beside him, breathing. He struck another, and another. The third one caught, a tiny flame that licked at the wood and curled a splinter and spread along it, licking at another, spreading along it as well until flames darted faintly through the top. The horses tugged at their reins to get back from it, and he shifted the metal a little away from them, putting on more wood.
“But not too much,” he told her. “Just a few pieces at a time and not very big at that. We don’t need a fire to warm thousands, just one to cook on.”
The wood was crackling now, a faint gray-white haze rising, vaguely pungent.
“In the summer this place is damp. The wood must have started to rot. Now that the cold is coming out of it, the rot must be what we’re smelling.”
He watched the smoke drift up and waft toward the back of the tunnel, then rise a little more and drift toward the opening.
“Good,” he said, taking off his gloves and rubbing his hands, holding them palms down over the flames. “Good. Here, get closer to the fire while I fix our supper.”
Three cans in the pack he had taken from the hotel. He held them up. “Which one?”
She said she didn’t care.
“Well, pick one just the same.”
“The bean with bacon soup.”
He pulled out his knife and the head from the hammer, sitting down beside her.
“Hold the can. Be careful I don’t cut you.”
He pressed the knife point down on the edge of the can’s lid, raising the hammer, slamming down, puncturing the metal. He held up the knife and inspected the tip. Then with a series of quick raps he worked the knife all around the lid until it was open. He checked the knife again, setting the open can on a corner of the metal, close enough to the fire to get warm without burning. Then he put another piece of wood on the fire, picked up the pot from the shed, and scraped the knife against the rust in it, tipping the pot so the specks fell out.
“Well, it might not be very sanitary and there might be a hole in it, but at least it’s a pot,” he said. Standing, he went outside to pack some snow in it.
The wind was stronger outside, and he was grateful to come back to the fire, tipping the pot against a rock so the melted snow would collect in a corner away from the hole in the bottom.
“I think this batch we’ll throw out and say we sterilized the thing.”
The second batch was warm and gritty, leaving the taste of pennies in his mouth. Even so, it was water, and he waited a bit to make sure it wasn’t going to make him sick before he handed it to Sarah. She took a sip and made a face, but she didn’t say anything and she finished it.
“Now some salt,” he said, and he was so dehydrated that when he licked a handful out of his palm he didn’t taste it.
They needed to put their gloves on to pass the can of soup back and forth, blowing on it, sipping, and once he took too much, burning the roof of his mouth, but the sauce was thick and the beans were something solid to chew and there were little specks of brownish-red bacon floating on top. They finished the soup before it seemed they even got started.
“I’m still hungry,” Sarah said.
“So am I,” he said, knowing they ought to save their food for as long as they could but not caring. “Which one this time? The tomato soup or the peas?”
“I hate tomato soup.”
“Sure, but you hate peas too. Which one?”
“I guess the tomato soup.”
And while she held the can, he hammered the knife around it.
4
The food made a difference. His head felt clearer, his body more alert as he carried the square of metal with the glowing coals on it out into the open, the wind scattering some of the sparks even before he chose a snowdrift well away from the tunnel and buried everything. The wind had changed direction now, gusting up the draw rather than across it, so that their tracks were filling in faster, and once he had made sure that the horses hadn’t left any droppings, once he had taken the rest of the wood back to the cave-in, arranging it in among the rocks so it looked as if it hadn’t been touched, he was fairly certain that their hunters would have a hard time telling if he and Sarah had been around or not. He cinched the horses tight again, untied their reins from the tracks and led them out of the tunnel into the wind, helping Sarah onto the pinto, then getting on the bay himself. The wind was at their backs as they turned left, passing the metal shed, crossing the rest of the pass and starting down the opposite draw.
The rocks gave way under the snow and blended into ground and dead grass and pine needles under there. Then they passed a tree and another tree and they were in the forest again, riding past two roof-collapsed tumbled cabins, snow seeping into them, that he had guessed would be down here. The snow was deeper again, drifting up almost to the horses’ knees. He decided to angle to his right across the slope rather than down it, wanting to stay up where the close rise of the bluff behind them would give them some shelter from the wind. Then their progress became monotonous again, the good feeling from the fire and the warm food slowly diminishing almost as if it had never been, his mind and body growing numb again from the cold and the snow and the wind. There had been the goal of the tunnel and the fire and the food. With no other vivid goal in front of him, he found himself concentrating solely on the pattern of his horse’s hooves, one footfall after the other, his coat clutched tightly around him, his hands bunched up inside his gloves.
They went on like that through the rest of the afternoon and into evening, and he couldn’t tell when the change of light was from the sun going down or from the high thin gray clouds that grew lower and thicker and darker as they went along. He realized that the trees seemed to be gathering denser around him as he worked along the slope, that his range of visibility had gotten shorter, grayer, and he would soon need to decide where to spend the night. There really wasn’t much choice anyhow, a hollow among the trees or a spot where dead timber had fallen together, one as good as the other and second-rate at best, but he couldn’t afford to go any farther and maybe lose so much visibility that he couldn’t make any choice at all, so he arbitrarily chose the fallen timber. Dismounting where the branches formed a kind of cave, he tied the horses, unsaddled them, and placed the saddles at the entrance, forming a windbreak. He packed down the snow, set the saddle blankets on top, put the sleeping bag on the blankets, and helped Sarah crawl in. Then using rope, he retied the horses so they were closer to the entrance, giving them room enough that they could paw at the snow for whatever grass might be under there, but still close enough to where he and Sarah would be sleeping that they would act as a further windbreak.
He crawled into the sleeping bag with Sarah, zipped it shut, and felt the soft insulation of the bag above him and beneath him and the harder saddle blankets under that and the snow at the bottom. He snuggled close to Sarah, trying to give her heat. It felt strange and awkward to have his big snow-stiffened boots pressing down against the bottom of the sleeping bag. Sarah’s own boots were hard against his knees whenever either of them shifted position, but he couldn’t take the chance of removing his boots or hers in the cold and never getting them on again, and the best he could do was loosen them, letting the blood circulate, hoping for as much comfort as he possible. Which wasn’t much. As the wind rose and fell, growing stronger, night gathering around them, they hunched down farther into the sleeping bag, their heads totally muffled against the cold. Their breath vapor collected damply along the top lining of the bag, the close suffo
cating dampness becoming so much for him that he put his head out into the air again, and the sharp bitter cold stung the inside of his nostrils, froze the mucus in there so that he needed to duck his head back in under the warm close folds of the sleeping bag again.
The wolves woke him, first a few, then what seemed a pack of them howling nearby. Then they didn’t sound very close at all, and he realized that the wind must be carrying their commotion to him, but the horses were skittering nervously just the same. He thought about crawling out and tying them more securely, but he had already done the best he could, and he couldn’t stay up all night out there with them.
“What is it?” Sarah asked, half asleep.
“The wind.”
“The other thing. What is it?”
“Wolves, but they’re far. There’s nothing to worry about.”
He had his gun out, though, and he kept it next to him all through the night, dozing, waking with a start, listening to the nervous snorting of the horses, dozing again. The snow had drifted up over the saddles onto the sleeping bag when he finally wakened. He felt the pressure on him before he knew what it was, and fumbling to get his head out from under the sleeping bag, he saw the several inches of snow weighing down on him. He kicked with his knees to get it off, rousing Sarah, crawling out over the saddles into the bitter cold morning air, still no sun, everything dull and gray, needing to squint anyhow as he looked to see if the drift of snow on the sleeping bag meant another storm in the night. Turning to check the horses, he saw that the pinto was gone. He didn’t know when or how. The thick branch of fallen timber he had tied the pinto to wasn’t broken, and he knew that his knot had been good enough that it should have held, but the rope was gone, and then he saw where the pinto tugging at the rope must have snapped off another smaller branch that had projected and kept the rope from slipping off the bigger one. It didn’t matter. The horse was gone, and the wind had drifted its tracks so that he couldn’t follow it, and the wolves would have gotten it by now anyway.