0e8fbb6bd4a5e1dacf79d0eb01695727 by Les Weil

Author:Les Weil
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter XXIII

Dick Summers pulled the hood over his head and brought his capote closer about him. There was no place in God's world where the wind blew as it did on the pass going over to Jackson's Hole. It came keen off the great high snow fields, wave on wave of it, tearing at a man, knocking him around, driving at his mouth and nose so that he couldn't breathe in or out and had to turn his head and gasp to ease the ache in his lungs. A bitter, stubborn wind that stung the face and watered the eye and bent the horses' heads and whipped their tails straight out behind them. A fierce, sad wind, crying in a crazy tumble of mountains that the Indians told many a tale about, tales of queer doings and spirit people and medicines strong and strange. The feel of it got into a man sometimes as he pushed deep into these dark hills, making him wonder, putting him on guard against things he couldn't lay his tongue to, making him anxious, in a way, for all that he didn't believe the Indians' stories. It flung itself on the traveler where the going was risky. It hit him in the face when he rounded a shoulder. It pushed against him like a wall on the reaches. Sometimes on a rise it seemed to come from everywhere at once, slamming at back and front and sides, so there wasn't a way a man could turn his head to shelter his face. But a body kept climbing, driving higher and farther into the wild heights of rock, until finally on the other side he would see the Grand Teton, rising slim and straight like a lodgepole pine, standing purple against the blue sky, standing higher than he could believe; and he would feel better for seeing it, knowing Jackson's Hole was there and Jackson's Lake and the dams he had trapped and the headwaters of the Seeds-kee-dee not so far away.

Summers bent his head into the wind, letting his horse make its own pace. Behind him plodded his pack horse, led by the lariat in his hand, and behind the pack horse came Boone and Jim and Poordevil and their animals.

It was known country to Summers, the Wind range was, and the everlasting snow fields and the Grand Teton that could come into sight soon, known country and old country to him now. He could remember when it was new, and a man setting foot on it could believe he was the first one, and a man seeing it could give names to it. That was back in the days of General Ashley and Provot and Jed Smith, the cool half-parson whom the Comanches had killed down on the Cimarron. It was as if everything was just made then, laid out fresh and good and waiting for a man to come along and find it.

It was all in the way a man thought, though, the way a young man thought.

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