Novel 1978 - The Proving Trail (v5.0) Read online

  Behind us, death. Before us, freezing cold, miles of hard riding…possibly a chance.

  Turning briefly, I looked back. I could see a faint glow in the darkness through the snow. The window.

  From my scabbard I fumbled my Winchester. With frozen, numbed fingers I steadied the rifle, and then I fired three fast shots through that window.

  Shoving the rifle down into the scabbard, I rode on into the night and the snow. At least I had left them a defiance. I had thrown them a gesture. Whatever else they knew, they knew I was not defeated.

  And now, the storm…

  Chapter 3

  *

  IT WAS COLD, bitter, bitter cold. I had to find the opening of that Indian trail, and it was narrow, scarcely to be seen even in the best of weather, but the roan and I had been down that trail several times for short distances. Would he know now where I was going?

  The wind was directly in my face, and to catch a breath I had to hold my head down, try to get my mouth and chin behind the edge of my coat. The snow was growing deep, even out here on the flat. Several times the roan stumbled. He was dog-tired, I knew, and in no shape for such a trip as this.

  The wind was like a wall of iron, cold, cold iron against which we pushed and pushed. Suddenly the roan slipped and almost fell. He scrambled, regained his feet, and stood trembling. Then I remembered. Just to the right of that opening there was a sort of gentle slope where the ground fell off several feet in a gradual slant. Was it there? Was that why the roan had slipped?

  Taking a chance, I pulled his head over and urged him forward. He took a tentative step, then another. Liking the level ground, he went on, and suddenly something black loomed beside us and I knew it was the big spruce. I urged him in close to it and swung down.

  Every bone in my body ached, every muscle was bruised and sore. I was in no shape to walk, yet I must save the roan. We needed each other, that horse and me, if we were to survive at all. From here I thought I could follow the trail, for it wound down along through the trees and rocks, narrow, tricky, but possible.

  Leading the roan, I walked on, stamping my feet from time to time to shake off the numbness from the cold. We could not go on like this. Somewhere, somehow, we had to find shelter. An overhanging cliff, a wind-hollowed cave, some fallen trees—anything. We had to find shelter and we had to have a fire.

  Pausing, I peered into the storm, turning my head slowly, trying to find something, anything. And there was only the snow, the staggered ranks of the spruce, and the howling wind that lashed the trees like a gigantic whip. We pushed on and on.

  Again I paused, trying to judge the distance we had come since finding the trail—if this was it. A quarter of a mile? A half mile? More…probably a little more. My brain seemed dull. It worked slowly, but I fought desperately to remember. Had there been a place in the part of the trail I knew, any place that offered shelter? A riding man in wild country naturally looks for such things, but I could remember nothing.

  We started on. I walked and walked. Then suddenly I slipped. My feet shot from under me, and I fell heavily. For a moment I lay there, ready to quit. The roan nudged me with his nose, urging me to get up. I put my hands down to push myself up.

  Ice. My hands were on ice. That was why I had slipped…ice under the snow. I struggled erect and stood there, my shoulders humped against the wind. Ice meant water. This must be the stream the old Indian had mentioned. The stream that flowed from a cave.

  A cave?

  I turned left up the mountain and walked gingerly on the ice, holding to the bed of the small stream. We walked on, the roan following meekly enough. The wind seemed to ease…or was that my imagination? We plodded on, one step at a time. The wind was easing off…or else we were in the lee of a cliff…something.

  No longer was I a thinking, reasoning being. The cold was numbing my brain as well as my feet and legs. Enough of intelligence left to tell me that either we found shelter quickly or we would both die.

  I slipped, almost fell. This time I gathered myself together more slowly. I took a step on. The ice was tilting ahead of me…or was tilted. It was a slope, a steep place in the drop of the stream. Working myself to the right, I tried to find an opening in the thick brush along the bank. It was a wall, stiff, frozen branches, closely intertwined. We climbed, and this time the roan slipped and fell.

  It was all both of us could do to get him back on his feet. I stood gasping with effort, pain stabbing my side. Something was black before me. There seemed a break in the wall of brush. I went into the narrow opening, pulling the horse after me. Suddenly we were out of the wind. I put my gloved hand to my face. It was stiff and cold.

  There was a path or opening. I followed along, and suddenly the cave was there, a black opening. I went in, leading the roan.

  It was dark and still. I peered around, seeing nothing. My hands were numb, feeling like thick clubs. I beat them against each other, against my legs, then tucked them into my armpits. Numb with cold, I began to move, stiffly, slowly, sweeping the snow from the saddle, from the roan’s back.

  I must move and keep moving. My eyes slowly were adjusting to the darkness, and I could see I was in a room no more than twenty feet in diameter, off which seemed to run at least two dark passages. There was scattered wood on the floor, left from campfires of the past. Overhead there was an opening, a sort of crack through which smoke could find a way out.

  When I stamped my feet, it was like they were made of wood, yet stamp them I did. Working very slowly, I got a few sticks together, but my hands were too clumsy to hold a match. What I needed was simply to keep moving, and here, out of the chilling wind, I might slowly recover the warmth my body needed.

  Fumbling with the cinch, I succeeded in loosening it and swinging the saddle off the roan. With a quick smash of the saddle blanket against the rock wall, I cleared it of most of the accumulated snow and ice, and began to wipe the roan, rubbing warmth back into it, and at the same time into myself.

  It was a long time, for my movements were clumsy from the cold, but slowly my own blood began to flow more freely. Kneeling down, I gathered some slivers together, a few pine cones and some sticks from a pack rat’s nest. With infinite care I put together some dried leaves and part of the stuff of the nest itself. Then I struck a match. It had long been a matter of boyish pride that I could start a fire with but one match. Fortunately, it worked for me now.

  The flame caught, blazed up, licked hungrily at the long dry sticks. I added fuel, extending my still-cold hands to the warmth.

  As the light grew, I peered around to see what kind of place I had come to. There was a considerable pile of fuel stacked against the walls, and an old tin bucket, several Indian pots, a gourd dipper, and some odds and ends of rope harness. Somebody, Indians no doubt, had been using this cave.

  At the door I scooped up a bucket of snow and put it near the fire to melt and warm up. When the water was warm, I took it to the roan, who drank long and gratefully. With my coffeepot, which I had in my gear, I made coffee.

  While the water was coming to a boil, I wiped my Winchester dry, and my pistols also.

  Thoughtfully I looked at the twin six-shooters. They were expensive, but hard up as he had often been, pa had never parted with them. For the first time I found myself curious about that.

  Why? Why would pa, the least violent of men, have carried two guns? He never wore them both in public, and I had never seen him draw a gun except to clean it.

  It dawned on me then that I actually knew very little about my father. Little? Did I actually know anything?

  In the dark and lonely cave, with the storm howling outside and the bitter cold, I crouched by my fire with its light flickering on the walls and thought of my father, that strange and lonely man.

  For I knew now that he had been lonely. Only now did little things come back to be remembered—the clumsy ways he had tried to show affection, and the lost man he had become when ma died.

  We never talked of her. Whene
ver I mentioned her, he got up, left the room, or turned from me. I know now it was because he liked to think she was not dead, that she was just out somewhere and would soon be back.

  I remembered him as he was, in his threadbare frock coat with its worn velvet collar. Even when shabby, he had something of elegance about him. Yet why did I know so little? Was there some reason for being secretive? Or was he just not given to talk of his family? If there was a family.

  Where he was born, why he had come west, or where he met ma, I never knew, nor had I given thought to it until now.

  Once, sitting in our room at the hotel, he had read something in the paper that irritated him. He slammed it down and with a sudden anger that was so unlike him he said, “Son, get an education! Whatever you do, get an education!”

  It was cold. I went to the door of the cave, into which the wind whipped from time to time, and peered out. I could see nothing. That we were back from the faint trail we had followed, I knew, but how far back? And when the storm ended, would we be visible?

  Again I checked the guns.

  From the pile of wood I took a fair-sized log and added it to the fire. It was almost warm in the cave now. At least we would not freeze.

  What would happen back there? Would they try to get out? Or would they be trapped in the old cabin? There was a little food left, how much I did not know, but a little. There was not enough to last one man even a week, let alone several men, and some of them would die.

  Between the cave wall and the fire, I made my bed and lay down upon it, my guns beside me. Hands clasped behind my head, I returned again to the thoughts of my father. I hadn’t spent much time with him, not as much as I could have. There’d been a couple of times when he seemed to want to talk, but I was in no mood for listening. I’d been rude at times, and it shamed me to recall it. He had wanted to tell me something, I think, but I’d been only a youngster and full of myself and not anxious to hear a lot of talk about the past or his boyhood. Because of that I’d missed learning what he might have told me.

  Dozing on the bed, I suddenly recalled ma’s voice saying, “Why don’t you go back? Or is there some reason why you cannot?”

  If he made a reply to that, I did not hear it. Only her words, “I am not thinking of us, only of you.”

  “It is too late,” he said then. “It would not be the same.” And then, after a minute or two, “I dare not…I must not start that all over again. It is better that they never know.”

  I was very young then, and the words meant nothing. Just grown-up talk. But why did I not forget the words? Why did I remember them now?

  Pa was gone now. He was dead.

  Yet he had not killed himself. For one thing I knew about pa—he wasn’t a quitter. Until the end, fail as he might, he would be in there trying.

  That started me thinking about his gambling. When ma was alive, he had never gambled. Come to think of it, he had not gambled until just the last two or three years.

  One night I’d seen him throw down a deck of cards in disgust. “I’d just as soon never see a card again!” he said suddenly.

  “Why don’t you quit playing if you don’t like it?” I asked him.

  He stood there for a minute looking at nothing and then he said, “It’s the only way. It’s the only chance now. Just one good winning! That’s all I ask!”

  At the time I did not believe him. Now I began to wonder. Little bits and pieces of things began to come back to me as I lay there in the half-warmth of the cave.

  Ma was gone. Pa never seemed to want anything. I mean he was not much for spending money, even when we had it. All of a sudden the answer was there. He wanted it for me.

  I sat up on my bed and put a stick into the fire, and then another. Of course! Why else did he want it? I remembered a couple of times when he looked at me wearing that old blanket-poncho of mine, and my boots with the heels almost wore off, and my beat-up old hat.

  “Damn it,” he said once, “I wish—”

  He never finished what he was going to say. He just taken his hat and left, and that night he lost the thirty-odd dollars we had between us.

  Next morning I made six dollars breaking horses at fifty cents a head. I got tossed a couple of times, but I rode them. When you don’t eat unless you ride, you ride. It’s simple as that.

  One time when I was sick, he stayed up night after night caring for me. I was eleven then, or twelve. I just taken it for granted, and never really thought of his health. Only time I thought much of that was when I come in the room one time and pa was washing. It was the first time in all the years I saw him with his shirt off, and I saw those two bullet wounds low down on his left side.

  I made some comment, but he brushed it off and changed the subject. I kept after him, so he finally said, “I got shot one time. It doesn’t matter.”

  Lying there, I tried to piece it all together but I came up with nothing, and it began to irk me. Who was pa, anyway? Why couldn’t he go back? And if he could have, where would he have gone to?

  By that time I’d warmed up some, and I went to the cave opening and stepped outside into the shelter of a corner of the cliff. The snow was swirling out there, falling fast and blowing just as much. If they were in trouble back at the cabin, I was in trouble out here. Any time you get caught ten thousand feet up in a heavy snow, you’re in trouble, and I was. Outside there was a deadfall, a tree that had toppled over close to the cave, and I tried to drag it inside, but it was frozen to the ground. I broke off a big branch, though, and it cracked like a pistol shot.

  I got that branch inside, then some slabs of bark and other fuel lyin’ about. It would help a little, when the ice melted off it.

  It was a long, long night. Every few minutes I’d have to wake up and add fuel to the fire, and on a cold, windy night a fire can eat up a lot of wood. Fortunately, there was a good bit stored inside.

  Come dawn I awakened stiff with cold and my fire down to gray ashes. After a bit I got it going again and built it up good and warm.

  I went to the cave mouth to size up the situation. Everything was white and still. The wind had died down, but it was cold, real cold. It must’ve been thirty below or better, and it didn’t look like it was going to get better fast. Furthermore, if they came looking, they would find me. I had to have the fire to keep from freezing, and they’d smell the smoke if they got anywhere close.

  For a long time I stood shivering, studying the layout before me. There was an Indian village down off the mountain somewhere, and the trail should take me there, but an Indian trail in the mountains can take a body into some almighty scary places, and somewhere there might be a lot of ice. Yet when I thought of what food I had, the fuel that was left, I decided I had to chance it.

  The snow crunched underfoot when I went back inside. I added a couple of sticks to the fire and then I saddled up. The roan didn’t offer any arguments, so I guess he didn’t take to that dark old cave no more than I did. About an hour after daybreak we rode out of the cave and taken the trail to wherever we were going.

  We walked a spell, then trotted to warm up a mite, and then I got off and walked to keep warm. I had pa’s watch and I figured to keep going at least four hours, and then see where we were. Meanwhile, I’d keep an eye out for another camp, as I had no idea how long the roan could take it…or me.

  We dipped down into the spruce, ragged, windblown trees that grew shaggier and shaggier. The snow was knee-deep, and in some of the canyons off the trail it looked to be twenty, maybe thirty feet deep. But the trail led down, circling among the trees, rounding boulders dropped off the ridge.

  When I’d been riding or walking for four hours, we just weren’t anywhere. I saw no tracks of man or beast, and my feet were like clumps of ice again.

  Once again the trail led upward, and I found myself riding across a great tilted slab of rock covered with snow. From where I came upon it to as far as I could see in the low clouds that shrouded the peaks, there was at least three miles of unbroken exp
anse. Nowhere was there a track of man or animal.

  A lonely wind prowled above the snow with eerie, threatening whispers. In the vast silence even the roan seemed uneasy, and I was glad when I glimpsed a way off into the forested valley below, yet I held back, looking doubtfully at the steep slide that would take us down the first fifty feet or so. But the roan tugged at the bit, so I let him have his head and he went right into the notch and down the slide without hesitation.

  Now we were in a thick, dark stand of spruce, a place of absolute silence. We crunched along, but here, too, I saw no tracks. Animals were simply not stirring, and of course the bear and the marmot were both hibernating, although there was no telling about a bear. He might wake up, be hungry, and go on the prowl even in the deepest winter.

  At nightfall I found a corner of a cliff that gave us a break from the wind. I found a slab of rock that I could tilt up to serve as a reflector for my fire, and I got the roan in close to the wall, then built a fire.

  There was wood aplenty as there is apt to be in high mountain country where wind and frost wreak havoc with trees. It was a cold night, but come daylight we were on our way again, and then all of a sudden the trees petered out and there we were, facing a trail one horse wide, covered with snow and probably ice under it. Down below, in a deep, wide valley, I could see a thin trail of smoke. So there were folks down there, of some kind, there was warmth, probably food. And we had to use that trail to get there.

  It was unbroken snow. What lay under it a body could not guess, but we were going to have to go that way, and one stirrup would be hanging out in space with maybe two thousand feet of open air under it.

  I tell you I swallowed a couple of times. I looked at the trail and felt the cold sweat start. The roan seemed edgy but willing. He started for the trail, tossed his head a couple of times, then with ears pricked he started forward.

  “Boy,” I said, “if you slip—!”

  He taken a step, then another. My boot scraped the side of the cliff, the other hung out in space. The roan walked on and headed for a bend around which we could not see. One thing I knew, that horse had to keep going. He couldn’t back very well on that narrow path, and it was a cinch I couldn’t get off unless over his hindquarters, which I wasn’t aiming to do.