Because she was so other-worldly in her moods eating had become wholly perfunctory; she would go to the pile of stuff by the wall and without looking at it would feel into it and around her; and if she felt something that she thought she could eat she would begin to gnaw at it, if it was old meat or hard old biscuit, or she would push it into her mouth, if it was dried fruit. The mice had worked all through her food and had spilled and eaten most of her sugar and flour. If her searching hand came to spilled sugar she would eat a little of it, or of the raw flour; or she would chew a coffee bean if she found one. Her hunger for food was on the level of her need to void and for her had no more significance. In the dead of winter when the cold was deepest and all her food was frozen and she was unable to gnaw at it, because her teeth were bad, she would suck at it. Sitting by the door with all the bedding around her and over her, she would put to her mouth a piece of old hard deer or elk flesh, and suck at it and watch for the moon.
In this terrible winter she went in December to the river for a pail of water. The river was frozen over from bank to bank. A week ago she had chopped a hole in the ice but had forgotten it; she now climbed the hill over her snowpath, to fetch the axe. She chopped until she was exhausted and found no water. This deeply troubled her, for she felt that her children’s plants needed watering. The next morning she went down and chopped again. She had at last a hole eighteen inches deep, but peering down, she saw that there was no water in it. Trembling with weakness and anxiety, she enlarged it. Because most of the ice chips fell into it as she chopped she now and then had to lie on her belly and reach down for them. Then, on her knees, she would chop again. With the kind of dauntless perseverance that had put Sam across the cold white prairies she kept at the task until she could see black water, two feet down. Her hole across the top was two and a half feet wide; around it all the way down it was jutting and jagged, like a talus slope, and lying face down, she tried to smooth the wall by chipping at it. Reaching down too far, she slipped and went headfirst into the hole. At the bottom it was too small to allow her to go through, and so she stood head downward, like a cotton-wrapped stopper in a huge ice jug. But at once she began to struggle and with almost the last of her strength pushed herself up and out.
Her axe was gone.
If the mountain men could have watched her now they would have spun another legend around her name. She got to her feet. Almost frozen, she rubbed her hands over each other as her strange eyes peered into the hole. She moved back to see if she had been standing over the axe, and when convinced that it had vanished into the river she did not hesitate but lay by the hole and reached into it with her right arm, and let her head and shoulders slip down little by little until her hand was in the water. She did not know that she was above an eddy whose black waters were six or eight feet deep. If she could have gone through the hole she would have entered the water to search for the axe.
After she had struggled back from the hole she was almost rigid, and hand and arm were numbed and senseless. They never recovered from the exposure. The loss of the axe was for her a bitter loss. Day and night she grieved over it and went again and again to the river to look for it, and in desperation she tried to build a fire to melt snow. Failing in this, and convinced that her plants would die, she sat, trembling and half weeping, bundled against the cold, her attention divided between the sky and the garden.
She did not know and during these years had not known the month, much less the week or day. Such things as Thanksgiving Day and Christmas she had forgotten. It was two days before Christmas in this bitter year that the second heaviest snow of the season began to fall. The first three days it was a quiet storm of the kind Sam loved, and day and night Kate sat by the door, looking up through a dusk of whirling flakes. Her path to the river was lost and all trails were lost. An hour or two each day with bare hands she pulled the snow back from her doorway and the bedding, and back from the sages where her children knelt; but she was so starved and cold and enfeebled that she had forgotten her flowers. Her consciousness was closing like a shutter but it would never close on her children before she died, or on the moon in whose light they came. On three sides of the cabin the snow at the end of the third day was over five feet deep and it was that deep on the roof. Time and again she tried to follow her old path to the river but always turned back, exhausted and weeping. Time and again she searched through the cabin for the axe. Then memory of it was gone too, and of the water pail, a d the path, the river. But for hunger pangs she would have lost all memory of food.
After three days of heavy snowfall the weather turned colder and for a week the cold steadily deepened, The northern winds came down. Sam would have said that at first they came in the opening phrases of an overture, or in a prodigal pouring of a dozen overtures out of the great northern ice caverns. They would take their time about it, these winds, for they had Beethoven’s patience, and his skill in devising variations on main themes and in building crescendo on crescendo. If Sam had been in the Wind River country, or here with Kate, where the winds were flinging their wild music headlong, he would have thought that the Creator was about to use all His instruments in a major symphony. Kate was barely aware of it. After the snow was up to her roof and her path was lost and the world all around her was winter white she was hardly conscious of the winds sculpturing magnificent snow dunes. At first they gave her only a little trouble. She daily pawed snow back from the sages, so that her children could kneel there if the moon came; and the first gentle winds played around the clearing she had made and sprayed it with snow gems but did not till it. After the opening chords of the first movement there were cold clear announcements from the horns, far in the north, and by morning of the third day of winds the first movement was in full flow. By noon the clearing round the plants had been blown level full, but neither in volume nor intensity was the wind more than a token of what it would be. It was a kind of molto adagio. The second movement would be of such percussive violence, with crescendo piled on crescendo, that her cabin would tremble and hum in the furious winter music, and her efforts to clear~the snow away from the plants would be only pathetic flurries in the cyclones of white that enveloped her.