On the Good, Red Road

“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said. “We need ‘em.”
“For what?”
“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck out—”
“I ain’t eatin my horse.”
“Circumstances like this ain’t the time to make declarations a what you will and won’t
do.”
It was snowing again by nightfall, and it didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.
Oatha could tell by the brightness of the tarp that the sun was out.
McClurg snored.
Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said, “He left.”
“Who?”
“Who ain’t here?”
Oatha saw where the wall of snow had been broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown and sagging.
“Where are the horses?” Oatha asked.
“Dan took one. The other’n keeled.”
Oatha’s head was hurting again—dehydration instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger. He’d eaten the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.
“We botched it,” Nathan said. “Should’ve walked out after the first storm. Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve froze, but we’d of had a chance.”
“You don’t think we got one now?”
They butchered the calico that had just died, cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them over a low fire. The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of what little fat there was burning off gave Oatha a charge of energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.
The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it and slept for the rest of the day.
“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later as they roasted the last of McClurg’s horse. “God’s been waitin for this, and I know he’s enjoyin ever minute of it. You just had the misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my ass.”
“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or Silverton,” McClurg said.
“I hope he’s froze. Don’t mention his name again.”
“He might come back and save us.”
“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings toward the man.”
“So tell me,” Oatha said, “you boys weren’t going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”
Nathan glanced at McClurg, let slip a little smirk. “Let me put it this way. This horrible weather saved your life.”
“I don’t get your meaning.”
“Sure you do. You was gonna try and take your leave of us your first chance. If I’m wrong, you can have my portion a Barney the horse.”
“You was gonna kill me?”
“Dan would of done the honors, him bein our resident cutthroat.”
Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over the horse’s leg.
“Why?” Oatha asked.
“For whatever money you had. For your horse. Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take you apart.”
Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever been in his life.
“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.
“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a luck, we’re in it together now.” Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife. “Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”
Two days hence, their eleventh in the shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen straight through. He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their reentry into civilization.
Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.
Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”
“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.
“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”
The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.
He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.
At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.
The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill. Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.
In the dusky silence, he thought about what Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of some deep virus in the fabric of his character.
Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.
Damn if he hadn’t been right about something.
Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long dead on a Virginia hillside.
After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning bright, the snow soft. Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the agony behind his eyes.
There passed periods of sleep, stretches of consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked up, the sky stood empty.
The next day, no one left the shelter, the men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of color.
“We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.
Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in wonderment.
“Ya’ll hear that?”
“What?” Nathan said.
“Dan’s come back.”
Oatha cocked his head. “I don’t hear nothing.”
“He’s callin out for me.”
“You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said. “Ain’t a soul out here but us. Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze. Saw him two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it, but there you go.”
“That’s sad,” Marion said.
“No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of the situation. Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”
“Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha asked.
“Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever done.”
Oatha lay there considering it, decided Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the strength to stand, much less walk the remaining ten or however many miles it was into Abandon. And for the first time, lying there with the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t seem so bad.