civilization.
Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.
Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”
“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.
“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”
The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.
He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.
At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.
The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill. Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.
In the dusky silence, he thought about what Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of some deep virus in the fabric of his character.
Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.
Damn if he hadn’t been right about something.
Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long dead on a Virginia hillside.
After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning bright, the snow soft. Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the agony behind his eyes.
There passed periods of sleep, stretches of consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked up, the sky stood empty.
The next day, no one left the shelter, the men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of color.
“We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.
Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in wonderment.
“Ya’ll hear that?”
“What?” Nathan said.
“Dan’s come back.”
Oatha cocked his head. “I don’t hear nothing.”
“He’s callin out for me.”
“You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said. “Ain’t a soul out here but us. Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze. Saw him two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it, but there you go.”
“That’s sad,” Marion said.
“No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of the situation. Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”
“Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha asked.
“Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever done.”
Oatha lay there considering it, decided Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the strength to stand, much less walk the remaining ten or however many miles it was into Abandon. And for the first time, lying there with the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t seem so bad.
Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of his mind.
When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through the opaque membrane of the canvas.
“I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this unending misery.”
McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin. His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.
“You awake, Marion?” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Ask you something…you believe in God?”
“Don’t reckon. You?”
“Sometimes.”
“How you figure you’ll come out if in fact he’s runnin this show?”
“Don’t know. Ain’t been particularly good or bad. Just sort a plodded my way along. I was friends with a Navajo when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Man named Sik’is. He was always talking about walking on the good, red road.”
“Ain’t heard of it. Where’s it at?”
“Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you know? Way a living. Balance and harmony—”
“This some spiritual bullshit?”
“It’s like walking the path where you’re the best version of yourself. I don’t know. Always sounded nice to me. Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out. Start living right, you know?”
“Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of a injun. You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”
“Me and my brothers fought against the Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”
“I kilt five, two in fair fights. Three was plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles City. Young man. We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit kickin.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”
“You ashamed of it?”
Marion seemed to reflect on the question, then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon. But it’s a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the one you’re starin at. Figure it was that young man’s time, and if it hadn’t been me, it’d a been—”
A shotgun blast exploded in the forest, trailed by a shout of unabashed joy.
Marion struggled up off the ground. “Son of a bitch hit somethin.”
Oatha felt the excitement bloom in his gut, Marion already on his feet, lumbering out of the shelter.
Nathan hollering, “Boys, come look at this! Shot us a elk!”
It required immense effort for Oatha to sit up, and he had to employ a spruce branch to leverage himself out
