Snowbound by Richard S. Wheeler

Author:Richard S. Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Captain Andrew Cathcart

I could scarcely remember a worse night. Sleep was impossible. A bitter wind tormented us, piercing through every fragile barrier we had erected, crawling under canvas, probing through caps and mittens, making a mockery of blankets. I had never known such cold, relentlessly fingering me as I lay abed. I wanted to be anywhere but there, half-frozen, my body as wretched as my soul, my mind filled with black thoughts.

It wasn’t my plight alone that haunted me but that of every other man and the miserable mules, which had started to give out. Yesterday they stumbled, and we could scarcely put them on four feet. This morning there would be not a stitch of feed to warm them after a night of brutal wind that would steal life from them. I wondered, as I lay there in that bitter dark, whether we would see one mule alive at dawn.

A plague on Frémont. We should have retreated from this icy mausoleum long ago, whilst we could. In the dawn, if I lived through the rest of the night, I would watch. There was yet one remedy for the mules, a great deal of sugar the colonel was hauling to flavor his tea, I imagine. In the British Isles we knew all about sweet feeds and how they perk up an animal. This dawn I would see whether Frémont would spare his mules or let them perish. He had enough sugar and some macaroni, too, to fashion a hot meal for them, a meal heated up with boiling water. I could show these Yanks a thing or two. We’d see.

I tugged blankets this way and that and dug into my kit for more woolens, only to find I was wearing all that I possessed. I wanted more gloves, layer on layer to pull over my numb hands, and more stockings to cover aching feet, but there were none. I could lie still until dawn or brave the subzero air and walk and stomp about and maybe bring some prickles of life back to my aching limbs. I chose to lie still. That bloody wind would kill me if I left my bedroll for long.

Dawn came slow in that time of year, but the men didn’t wait for it. They were in the same condition as I and chose instead to build fires under the flinty stars and warm themselves. It took some doing to start a blaze with wood so cold, but a little gunpowder and some pine shavings and a lot of shelter from that gale finally did the trick. But it was as if we had no flame at all. The wind raked away the heat faster than the fires could burn, and the whole predawn exercise was a worse misery than lying in our icy robes. I was no warmer after a half hour beside the roaring fire than I had been in my miserable blankets.

We could not see the animals, and as we sat about

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