Bending low, he touched lips to her gray hair, saying, "That’s for my mother and you and all mothers." He had hoped she would open her eyes and look at him when she smelled the hot coffee, but maybe smell was not one of her senses any more. Returning to the shack, he mixed flour and water and cooked the batter and called it bread. He steamed raisins in hot water until they were swollen and soft, and he made another pot of coffee. What a feast it would be! If only after he had feasted he could sit back with his pipe and think of vengeance!
Out in the frozen wastes the eyes of man or beast could have seen the smoke rising—and wolves did see it and try to smell its odors. A few of them came within two hundred yards of the shack and trotted round it, smelling the hot odors; and Sam smelled the wolves and knew they were there. He took to Kate a tin plate of hot venison, raisins, bread, and coffee, but she refused to look at it or see it. Kneeling, he held it right under her face, so that the fragrance would enter her nostrils; and he said, as if to a child, "It’s hot food and you should eat it." He arranged her robes so that he could set the plate in her lap and the cup of hot coffee at her side, and returned to the shack. He had warmed a spot of earth for his own bed this night and he now sat on the spot and ate, but very slowly, because sensations of nausea filled his throat. The warmth had made him feel drowsy and ill; he guessed that in the morning he would go out to the hills and find a deer. Until midnight he kept the fire burning in the shack, and Kate sat out by the graves. He went out to tell her that if she would move he would make her bed for her but she gave no sign that she heard him. "It’s warm inside," he said. "Wouldn’t you like to go in?" Had she forgotten what a fire was? He seized the edges of the robes around her and pulled. He almost toppled her over but he managed at last totake the robes away. After holding one before the fire to warm it he went out and draped it over her, saying, "There now, you’ll feel better." He ought to have known that she would feel worse. To his amazement she began to cry. After staring at her a few moments he picked her up, bedding and all, and set her inside the cabin door. Her plate of food he put by the fire to keep warm; and while sitting by the fire, feeling ill himself and not far from tears, the thought came to him that this woman would eat nothing as long as he was with her. He could no longer doubt that she felt him to be an enemy. He fetched wood until he had a big pile in a corner, and then, with rifle and knife close by him, stretched out on his robe on the spot of warm earth and was soon asleep. When he awoke two or three hours later and looked over at Kate’s bedding she was not there. He went to the doorway and looked out. She was in the snowpath between the graves, with bedding under and over her; and she was talking, as if to her children. Sam looked up and saw a round frozen moon in the sky. He went over and stood behind her and saw that she was holding a Bible. She had her hands in a fold of blanket which she used as mittens but he thought her hands must be frozen, for it was a bitter night. A large robe inside the door he thoroughly warmed at the fire and then spread it over her and down across the book. Not once did she interrupt her talking or praying, or whatever it was she was doing.
Inside the cabin Sam laid wood on the fire and stretched out on his robe. When he next awakened he looked over and saw that Kate had come inside. But at daylight her pile of bedding was empty. Looking out, he saw her halfway to the river with the pail in her hands; and he knew now that all winter long she would carry water up the hill to plants that needed no water. Someday she would venture out on ice too thin and she would fall into the cold black waters and drown.
After a big breakfast he cleaned and loaded the rifle and went out to the hills for deer, elk, or buffalo. His first beast was an elk, and as soon as he had the belly open he pulled the liver out and ate most of it. This did for him what the old food in the cabin could never do: it dispelled the nausea and warmed him with vigor. He was still extremely weak; he took four journeys and six hours to carry the elk to the cabin, a chore he could normally have done in two. The hide he spread, fur side up, under Kate’s pile of bedding by the door. The next day he shot two deer and brought them in, and hung them from rafters in the cabin’s east end. He also ate their livers and hearts but he still felt so undernourished that he cooked one roast after another and ate them all.
The winds had gone south. The sky was frozen in gray-winter cold. After bringing in the elk Sam saw that during his absence Kate had been in the flour and raisins; he prepared plates of hot food for her but she would not touch them. To a cup of fragrant coffee under her nose she gave no response. When lying in his robe after supper, with hre snapping its flames through aspen and chokecherry and cedar, he would look over at her, sitting by the door, and he would think that she could have a little fire going all day and all night, if she would, and be cozy. He told her that he had to go south now but would be back next spring. Only God knew how many wolves had slipped up to the door to sniff at her, or whether after he had gone they would leap across her to get to the frozen deer hanging from the rafters. While making moccasins from skins he and other trappers had left here he wanted to talk to her, for he was lonely; and after the moccasins were made and laces for snowshoes he cooked roasts over two fires outside, and looked at the meat and at Kate, back and forth, and into the south and the west. He had intended to be gone before another night fell but when he looked at the cold empty world toward the Bighorns, and then into the cabin, smelling of roasted flesh and fire, he surrendered to weakness and decided to stay another night. At dusk he watched Kate move a part of her bedding outside, and a little later he looked out to see her sitting there, talking to her angels. Now and then she would incline her head, as though in assent; or seem to listen before speaking again. Down on the river was a hole where she had chopped through ice, with the impression of her knees in the frozen snow around it. He knew that she had knelt there to wash her underwear, for a piece of underwear was hanging from a tree limb, so ragged and patched that it looked as if it would fall in pieces at a touch. He would buy undergarments for her, and plenty of flour and dried fruits. If he were to lie on his belly back in the cabin and play soft music he wondered if it would frighten or please her. He would find out. He played a hymn and then another, very low and far away, and then heard her voice. It was a soprano and it sounded cold and cracked but it was singing the second of the hymns he had played; and he went outside and stood behind her and sang with her, in a lower and softer key than hers. It all seemed to him natural and right. After five days of silence and misunderstanding it seemed proper and fitting that she should be sitting deep in bedding in zero cold, more than a thousand miles from her people, and in a thin ghostly soprano sing old hymns of hope and faith; and that behind her there should be a tall lonely man who had lost wife and son, and who now looked down at her gray hair and sang softly with her. For two hours or more she sat and he stood in the cold and they sang together. He then picked her up, bedding and all, and set her inside; gently kissed and patted her gray head; and stretched out in his robe to sleep.