Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston

Author:James D Houston [Houston, James D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7304-9352-5
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2001-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

AROUND THIS SAME time William Eddy borrowed a rifle and started hunting. If there was anything out there, he would find it. He hated to come home with nothing. One day he brought back a coyote, another day an owl. Then we got word he had taken a grizzly bear. He had shot it twice and clubbed it to death. The men who went and helped him haul it out of the woods said it weighed eight hundred pounds or more. Eddy was a hero, and our hopes soared. A kill like this from time to time would solve half our problems! Part of the meat came to our family, thanks to him, and we lived off it for many days.

That’s how it was for the first month at the lake camp. We were wilderness gypsies, making our way from week to week.

Charlie Stanton and the Indians stayed in our cabin then. mama didn’t have to feed them—they foraged on their own—but at night they were inside, along with Milt and our whole family, in a room no bigger than our woodshed back home. I’d never been that close to snoring men, nor had I known nights as dark as some of our nights there at the lake. We had no windows, just one low door, and a chimney to let the smoke out. At that altitude the stars are so bright and numerous they can make a silver blanket across the sky, but in our cabin you could never glimpse the stars. No moonlight leaked in. Sometimes the wind would come up strong and whistle through the cracks and chinks and blow out the coals, and then it was as dark as the whale’s insides must have been for Jonah.

The days were somewhat nicer, at least in the early weeks, when most of the early snow had melted off the valley floor. The lake hadn’t frozen over yet. When the sun came out, the sharp blue sky made the evergreens greener, and the blue lake bluer. Sometimes I would take Tommy on a long walk to the lake and make up stories about all the things we’d do when we got to California. I would describe the armies coming across the mountains to rescue us. When we got to the shoreline I would point to the pass and tell him that’s where they would come from, hundreds of men with horses and bugles and wagons full of biscuits and buttermilk and johnnycake and cornmeal mush and fried bacon and apple pie. I would tell him we would see papa first. He would ride through the pass waving his hat, and his horse would rear back and kick its hooves high in the air.

By the time I finished such a story I would be hearing papa’s voice. The first time I heard it, I thought he was already at the top of the summit, calling down to us. Later on I knew his voice was inside my head, and he was talking right to me from wherever he might be, and I would answer.

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