matter.
I rose, turned my back to kingdom come, and started up, steadying my rate into the mule pace that had gotten me this far. That’s how I was thinking about myself as of late, like some Marine mule that didn’t have enough sense to lie down and die. It wasn’t the most comforting of thoughts, but it got me up the hill.
Thankfully, the majority of the snow had been swept from the ridge, making it easier to spot solid footing. It was now fully dark, and the only good thing about that was that I couldn’t see the passes that led east and west thousands of feet below.
The wind seemed to have let up, and I was glad that of all the elements I was contending with, the ever- prevalent Wyoming wind had been the one to decide to give me a break. That was a miracle in itself.
Maybe the Old Cheyenne in the Camp of the Dead or the Crow from the Beyond-Country were holding back the wind for me with their arms outstretched, battered by the gusts and ceding none.
Sacred lands for the Cheyenne and the Crow, we whites had been in the Bighorns for only a couple of hundred years-they had been here for thousands. There is a knowledge that comes of a place you’ve lived in for that long. These high mountain canyons that had served as highways for the indigenous peoples, allowing them passage from one hunting ground to another and relief from the summer heat below and the gathering of medicines, are their most hallowed grounds. At the center of all this grandeur and history was the mountain that I was climbing- Cloud Peak, 13,167 feet of geologic event.
But right now, it was just cold as hell.
I tried to distract myself by thinking of other things; I thought about the story that Virgil had told me about how he had lost his grandson that sunny October afternoon. I’d wondered about the animosity that seemed inherent in the relationship that he had with his son, a man who, after not seeing his father for so many years, had responded by spitting in his face. I could only imagine the panic that must’ve overtaken Virgil when he’d returned to the truck to find only the indentation in the saddle blanket seat cover. To not know what had happened to the boy-it was almost as if the gods themselves, the ones from the giant Crow’s stories, had come and whisked Owen White Buffalo away.
The boy stands, and there was no fear in him; he could see the other that would welcome him and make him whole again. He dreams of the truck from which he was taken, silent now without his breathing. It is almost as if it is as it was meant to be, in that he never saw himself as a man; never saw himself as tall and broad- shouldered.
He sees the knife the almost-man carries at the side of his leg and worries for his grandfather, the one who has blamed himself for so many things. The one who will sit in the tin shack, the television the only voices to hold the silence of lost battles away-one more tragedy to take the place of all the others. The sound of breaking glass thrown against the thin walls as the boy’s memory stands before him, eagle-armed, waiting to be lifted by his grandfather and the gods.
Shade’s bullet had detoured at the thirty-fourth canto, which described the lowest ring of hell, the ninth circle, reserved for those who would betray. Traitors-Virgil’s last remark. He had warned me about the driver, just as he’d taunted me with the words innocent people, over and over again.
Granddaughter.
Had Virgil developed shaman tendencies since cloistering himself in the mountains? He’d made those prophecies with so much certainty, just as he’d predicted the death of someone close to me as we’d crossed the frozen surface of Lake Marion. I don’t think he’d meant his own death or mine-but then, whose?
Granddaughter.
I was glad it was a girl, if it was at all. I continued to cultivate the fantasy. She would look like my daughter; she would look like my wife. I held that thought since it comforted me above all the others.
I tripped over something, stumbled and caught my balance. I looked to see what it was and saw that I’d angled toward the very edge of the cliffs between Cloud Peak and Bomber Mountain and almost stepped blithely into the limitless void.
The ice water that ran through my bowels wasn’t figurative.
There were swirling masses of snowflakes that changed direction with the brief gusts that moved the air-and then nothing-blackness, farther than I could see, a thousand feet at least.
I breathed in and consciously told my feet to step back. I must’ve been getting close to the Knife’s Edge; as a matter of orienteering, it should’ve been just to my left.
Pushing the goggles up, I glanced in that direction but everything was still invisible. It was as if the world fell away from me in all directions.
I was feeling disoriented and dizzy, so much so that I was afraid I might fall down and a hell of a lot farther than I wanted. I planted the butt of the rifle stock in the snow and kneeled in front of the raised lip at the precipice. My stomach surged, and I felt nauseous, almost as if I had fallen.
My lungs burned as I forced air in and out, and I finally laughed at myself for coming so far to almost end like this. The laugh echoed across the divide and bounced back at me again and felt so good, I did it a few more times.
It was a good thing I’d stumbled over the stones at the edge, or I’d have joined the Thunderbirds of Crow legend. I thought about how it would’ve felt flying for those few brief seconds before I dropped like a two-hundred- and-fifty-pound side of beef.
I reached out and patted the rocks piled at the edge that had up to this point resisted the urge to follow their brethren below. The flat of my hand thumped against their raised surface.
It didn’t feel right.
The snow was stubborn where it had melted from the warmth of something underneath and then frozen again. The rifle fell to my side and clattered in an attempt to throw itself over the edge, but I slapped it still and pulled it back to me. I finally pushed the chunks of ice and snow away, revealing what appeared to be the great, silver-humped back of a grizzly bear.
“Oh, Virgil.” My voice sounded strange in my mouth, and my eyes risked tearing; I could feel them freezing in the stubble on my face. “Even dead you find a way to save me.”
16
I sat there for a while with my hand on his immense back and then carefully stacked a rock cairn at the edge of the cliff with the few loose stones that I could find so that if anything happened to me, someone would recover his remains.
It was the closest I’d come to just quitting, sitting down in the snow and going no farther. I would just stay here with my buddy and collect snow till the spring thaw.
But that wasn’t what he wanted.
I thought about all the things that Virgil had told me and wondered what he’d been thinking about when he died. I imagined that he was probably thinking about the same thing I’d be thinking about when my journey ended: about his family, his loved ones-and even the not so loved.
Rising up slowly, I was aware of the weakness in my legs, the numbness in my feet and hands, and the fog in my head-it was as if I could feel myself, bone by muscle by tendon, slowly coming apart. The headache had returned with a dull thumping and with pain behind my eyes. I thought about the dreams I’d been having, what they meant, and maybe even who could’ve sent them.
I looked down at the mass of fur, once again covering with snow.
He wanted his grandson back, and I was the only one here to do the job.
Feeling the bone in my pocket, I knew it was time to go get the rest of Owen White Buffalo. I could feel the cold, creeping ruin that Raynaud Shade brought with him, an infection that trailed him like a curse. He and I were coming down to it now. There would be nowhere to go for either of us.
I picked up the rifle that I’d left lying in the snow and turned east. I looked at Virgil for just a moment more. “A-ho, baa-laax.”
I stepped down onto the Knife’s Edge on my numb feet, my hobbled legs, and with a headache that split my
