“Well, all right, then. Naw, don’t get down.”
Oatha clicked his tongue and the pack train moved on. When he could no longer hear the harness bells, Stephen staggered out of the drift and brushed the snow from the wool of his coat.
He stood alone on the mountain, a hundred feet below the pass, listening to the wind and the sound of it pushing grains of snow over the surface like sand skimming a beach. He thought of home in the South Carolina low country, and the memory of it filled him with heartsickness in this frozen desolation.
Stephen found Russell’s horse sheltering itself on the lee side of a giant boulder. He swung up into the saddle, quirted the horse on its snow-matted neck, rode upslope in the tracks of the pack train.
At the Sawblade, the wind blew steady and scaldingly cold.
It had scoured out the snow and built a cornice on the north side, allowing Stephen to dismount onto bare rock.
He followed the burro tracks along an icy ledge. Despite the dizzying exposure, he couldn’t stop himself from peering over. He saw a red crater two hundred feet below—one of the burros had lost its footing, gone over, exploded in the snow like a viscera bomb.
The ledge ended at a recess in one of the jagged spires upthrust from the pass like a rotten canine tooth. He spotted an opening at knee-level in the back wall, a small claim hole just wide enough for a man to crawl through.
Stephen loosed the cloth buttons, reached into his coat. He thought he had a match in one of the pockets, but he didn’t find it.
He approached the hole. It went back four feet, then opened into darkness. He crawled in, wriggled himself through the tapering passageway, then finally emerged, the ground solid beneath his feet, though he had no sense of the chamber’s dimensions.
He extended his right foot. It struck something hard.
He removed his gloves, squatted down, reached forward, his fingers grazing the cold gold, bars and bars and bars of it, stacked upon one another in a cube that rose above his knees.
He lifted one of them, held it to the light that drizzled in through the hole, and as he stood in that semidark, staring down at the chunk of yellow metal, he considered the blood that had already been shed for it and wondered how much more was to come.
He thought of all the people in that haunted town two thousand feet below, how they’d endured this brutal wilderness and all its impositions—the cold, the thin air, the loneliness, maddening isolation—for just a fraction of what he held in his hand.
And in that moment, he no longer regarded the residents of Abandon and the thousand other mining camps scattered like bacteria through the West as people of ambition and courage. They were a cold, dirty, desperate, miserable lot. He saw them now so clearly. They had crossed the plains and made homes in these savage mountains and borne their myriad afflictions not because they were brave pioneers pursuing a dream. They had come for no other reason but that their ravenous hearts raged with greed.
The preacher crumpled down in the cave and wept.
STEPHEN.
At the sound of his name, he went rigid with fear.
THIRTY-FOUR
Stephen crawled out of the cave and walked back up to the pass.
Above him, the clouds had broken up, beams of afternoon sunlight passing through, bronzing random patches of forest, summits, ice fields with the strongest light he’d seen in days.
The mare stood waiting for him on the windswept rock.
As he reached her and put his foot into the stirrup, he heard it, though owing to the wind, he couldn’t immediately determine from which direction the sound had come. He looked downslope, and with the mist clearing, he could see all the way into the canyon and a line of specks near the Godsend mine—Oatha and Billy and the burros on their way back to Abandon.
He heard it again—a faint howl.
Others joined in, each of varying pitch and duration, like a discordant symphony of owls and geese and baying dogs.
Stephen pulled his foot out of the stirrup and walked to the other side of the pass, stood bracing against the wind, shielding his face with his gloves.
At first, there was little to see. Clouds sailed toward him and over him—mammoth schooners. Fog swirling in the depths below, hiding the long, broadening valley, the lake several miles south, the open country beyond. He’d taken this trail to Silverton once before—much faster than the wagon road, though more dangerous because it required a steep descent along a series of narrow ledges that switchbacked down from the cirque.
Now he gazed at those ledges, observed that the wind had blown them clean of snow, traced their dwindling switchbacks with his finger for several hundred feet until it passed over something that, from his vantage on the pass, resembled a trail of black ants ascending out of the fog.
He stood bewildered, listening to the alien howls until another sound became prevalent—unshod horses pounding the rock.
Out of sheer amazement, he stepped forward and squinted down at what looked to be an entire town on horseback—women in print dresses, suit-coated men, some still wearing their filthy workclothes, and a hatless blonde leading the procession, poorly dressed for the conditions in a bright gold evening gown. As they drew near, he puzzled at their horses’ hides, decorated with pagan hieroglyphs depicting wolves, bear, coyote, elk, eagles, trees, cacti, mountains, clouds, the arc of rivers, and as the riders rounded another switchback, facing him now, he saw that the woman in front wore the painted face of a heathen, and the gold gown was drenched in blood, the original own er’s entire scalp having been stitched into the warrior’s tonsured head, the curly yellow hair still pinned up in the fashion of the day, and around that heathen’s waist hung a belt of sunburned noses and he appeared to be smiling, his bloodstained teeth filed down into razor points, and his horse’s mane interwoven with the hair of numerous scalps still warm, still dripping, and those behind him equally outlandish, one rider naked save for cape and bowler, another so caked with blood that he seemed to be rusting, one in nothing but a blue bonnet, one in a shredded corset beaded with eyes, and they bore weaponry of every design and from across the ages—shotgun, rifle, revolver, knife, lance, bow, sword—some holding rocks still smeared with blood and brain, others wielding sharpened human femurs, one gripping a crude mace constructed of oak and leather and shards of quartz, and this parade of demons cackled and groaned, conversing in a strange, unholy tongue that sounded like some ancient form of necromancy.
“God Almighty,” said the preacher.
The trail they climbed had no destination but Abandon.
2009
THIRTY-FIVE