He rose and started down the mountain toward the Missouri. His feet hurt and the hands in his belly were tying knots but otherwise he felt pretty good. He thought he could make it to the river before midnight. Down steep ravines where there was little timber he tobogganed on the robe, using knife and hatchet to pull him along or to brake his speed. He thought snow was one of the Creator’s finest works of genius and he pitied people in hot climates who had never seen it. He had heard Windy Bill say that if there had been plenty of snow in Africa there would be no blackmen with thick lips and flat noses. Bill was full of such fancies. Sam loved snow as he loved rain, winds, thunder, tempests; people who said, "I don’t see how you can like snow," or, "I don’t see how you can like a wind," he thought unworthy to be alive. Yonder, far south of him, were the Wind River and the Wind River Mountains, and endless miles of eroded colorful formations that winds had made. Kit Carson said that somewhere down the Colorado was an immense area of natural bridges, monuments, and stone formations that looked like old castles. For centuries, for ages, ever since the beginning, the winds had been blowing there and they certainly were a better sculptor than Phidias. No matter where a man went, from the marvels in the Black Hills to the granite faces of the Tetons, from the Yellowstone’s canyon to that of the Snake and the Green and the Colorado, a man saw the wonderful parthenons that winds and water had made. "Ya doan like it?" Bear Paws Meek had said to a greenhorn sneering at the Tetons. "Wall now, I doan spect the Almighty cares too much fer ye either, so why doan ya go back to yer ma?"
Down from the mountains Sam stood on the white plains, looking through cold winter haze at the line of the river. Then he began to walk on long strides in snow above his knees all his senses alert, for he knew that moving against the white background he was as conspicuous as a black mole on the nose of a lovely woman. If there were Indians on the river they would see him coming but he had seen no sign of smoke. Dusk was filtering down from the wintry sky when the river, it seemed to him, was still ten miles away; it was two hours after dark when he reached it. There were trails in the snow but he saw no living thing and heard no sounds.
Here and there along the water’s edge he found bones, and choosing a couple of thighbones and pieces from a neck, he sat hidden near river brush, while with sharpened green stick he dug marrow out. With tongue and lips he sucked the marrow off the stick. It was worse than rancid; it tasted like extreme old age, decay, and death. But it was food of a kind, it would help him to keep moving. After eating marrow until he was sickened he searched in river brush for wild rose, and gooseberry, serviceberry, and currant. He found hips and a few berries still clinging, and with a handful of them he returned to the bones. The pulpy rose pods had always tasted to him like old wood. He mixed them and a few withered currants and serviceberries with a marrow paste and devoured the nauseous mess, cheering himself with stories of men who had lived for days on such fare as this. He also chewed and swallowed some bone splinters, after he had shattered a thighbone to get at the marrow. The bones were tough to chew and had no flavor at all.
He spent about two hours making his supper. It wasn’t loin steaks and hot biscuits in hump fat, or roasted grouse basted with kidney butter, but it would do till morning. After eating he bound together pieces of driftwood with tough berry vines. With his weapons wrapped in the robe, and a long pole in his grasp, he shoved the raft out into the current, and on reaching mid-channel lay on his belly, chin on his forearms, to survey the moving scene before him. Though he knew that he might starve or freeze to death, or again be captured, he could not put away his insatiable delight in the astonishing world, from the majestic cordilleras to the smallest pouting mudpot. Under him was a marvelous panorama of color and light. The water on the bottom all the way across the river had been freezing, and the ice formations down in the depths were catching the light of a full moon and making patterns like some he had seen in caverns in the Black Hills. Because the current was bearing him north at about half a mile an hour the scenes under him, though similar, were never the same. When with the pole he moved his craft toward the eastern bank and came to a deep and gently swirling eddy he saw three or four feet under him a multitude of what mountain men called suckers, a species of whitefish, with absurd little round mouths that puckered and pouted as they breathed. If only he had a dozen of them, and his steel and flint to make a tire, what a feast he would have!
An hour later he stood on the east bank and looked east. Judith River and mountains were somewhere ahead of him but he could see no sign of them in the prairie night. For a hundred and fifty miles there might be nothing, except the wolves trailing him. A well-armed man, well-provisioned, with a couple of warm robes, might not have hesitated to undertake such a journey, even in below-zero temperatures, but one thinly clad, with one robe and no food and no way to get food, would surely die on the way. The mountain men would have said that, for even if he could walk thirty miles a day without food it would take him at least five days to reach the Musselshell.
These were Sam’s thoughts as he crawled under a snow-laden shelter of willows to wait for the morning. He did not dare fall asleep. When daylight came at last, gray and bitter cold, he searched up and down the riverbank. There was nothing to eat but the sickening old marrow, a few rose hips, shriveled currants on their vine. He drank a quart of river water and he looked into the southeast. "Sam," he said, speaking aloud, "here’s where we find out if you’re man or boy." He knew the words were pure bravado. He had no reason to think he could cross that vast white distance but there was no choice, except to float down the river and be captured again. After he had walked a mile he stood on a hilltop in the white waste, a hairy giant in tawny buckskin, a robe over his left shoulder, a useless knife in one hand and a, useless hatchet in the other. Gesturing at the heavens, with the knife flashing in pale cold sunlight, he cried out, "Almighty Father, You have helped me this far, now help Your son a little longer!" That was all he said; but he was thinking of the words in Crow language: Old wornan’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are, in the sagebrush they are crying. Yonder she was, without a fire, huddled in her blankets in ten-below-zero cold, talking to her children there in the sagebrush crying. If a woman could endure such winters, for love, could a man endure less for a dead wife and son?
Tom Fitzpatrick had said to Jim Bridger, "I’ve never known a man who loves life like Sam. Every hour for him is a golden nugget." That was pretty fancy talk for a mountain man but Tom had read a lot and had a way with words. Part of the force that sent Sam trudging across the white prairies was love of life, a gladness for health and youth that filled him as Mozart’s gayest music filled him; and part of it was his belief that the earth on which he walked had been designed by the greatest of the artists, and that if a man had the courage and fortitude not to fail it, it would not fail him. In Sam’s rough mountain-man philosophy those persons who became the wards of sadness and melancholy had never summoned for use and trial more than a part of what they had in them, and so had failed themselves and their Creator. If it was a part of the inscrutable plan that he was to live through this ordeal, and again cover the bones of wife and child with mountain lilies, the strength was lying in him, waiting, and he had only to call on it—al1 of it—and use it, without flinching or whimpering. If he showed himself to be a worthy piece in the Great Architect’s edifice he would live; in Sam’s philosophy that was about all there was to it.
He intended to call on all he had, to the last desperate gasp of it. He would walk and rest, walk and rest; and if there was nothing to eat, he would rest, and walk again. The sun’s nimbus told him that the temperature was falling. Cold might be better for him than falling snow, for if he had to buck deeper snow than this he would fail fast. Nothing wore man or beast down faster than wading in soft snow, crotch-deep. As he walked Sam sighted his course on a line just a little north of what he thought was the little Belt Mountains. It was about seventy or eighty miles to Judith River, where he might find berries and bones, or a rabbit at which he could hurl his knife, or the stiff hide of a dead old bull. To appease by a little the gnawing in his stomach he now and then cut a short tassel from the fringe up and down his trousers. A man could chew a piece of tanned leather for an hour, with no result, except that it would become a soft impermeable pulp that would ill his mouth. What Sam did` was to chew out the smoke and tanning fluids and swallow them. When he was far enough from the river to feel secure he burst into song; and what a picture he was, a tall tawny creature on a white map, singing at the top of his voice a Mozart aria to Lotus! He was remembering the times when he sang to her and played and the few times she sang with him.