Beyond the sunset

by Arthur D. Howden Smith

"Dis time Peter hafe der choke on you, eh?" He shook a feeble fist at me.

"You t'ink I die, eh? Nein, we need bear's grease for der Winter, dot's all."

But it was many a long week before Peter was able to be up and out with us at our daily chores in the valley. Most of his wounds healed rapidly, thanks to the magic salve that Tawannears had concocted, and the healing balsam pitch of the fir-trees; but his mangled shoulder was stubborn, and we made him give it time. After the first month there were plenty of small undertakings for him about the cave, and in his own placid fashion he was able to keep sufficiently amused; but no other man I ever knew would have suffered the torments Corlaer did in regaining his health, let alone the physical strain of his struggle with the bear, and come through alive and untouched in sanity.

We never built the cabin we had planned, for we could not have moved Peter with safety a second time. Instead, Tawannears and I sealed up the entrance to the cave with bowlders and mud from the river, leaving a recess for fireplace and smoke-hole. 'Twas a tight, weather-proof habitation, the most comfortable we enjoyed upon our travels. But Tawannears and I were seldom within doors except for meals and sleeping, for there was more work to be done than we could well attend to, especially in the opening months of Winter.

Naked as we had been before Peter's fight with the bear, we were less covered there afterward; and we had pressing urgency for furs to shield us from the cold. But for the hardihood we had acquired we must have died from exposure during the first week, whilst we were tanning skins of deer and sheep and drying sinews for use as thread. If I stick to the truth, I shall admit that we made no very careful job of that first tanning emprise. Our wants were too pronounced. But later Tawannears took the pride of his people in curing and dressing to the softness of woven goods the store of pelts we captured.

For lack of the required materials he could not use the Iroquois method, which I hold to be unmatchable; but, assisted by the devices of the Plains tribes, he turned out robes and garments that no white man could have matched. In place of cornmeal for the dressing process he cooked a paste of brains and liver. His final stage, after soaking, scraping and dressing, was to rub the skin over the rounded top of a tree-stump. Squaw's work, he called it, laughing; but it made a pelt as pliable as a woolen shirt, and of course, 'twas vastly warmer.

We did not want for anything all Winter long. We killed only what we required, and the animals that swarmed in the valley were not frightened away. We had firewood in abundance within twenty steps of our door. We had a warm, dry house. And we found delight in manufacturing for ourselves all manner of little utensils that we had dispensed with on our wanderings, vessels crudely molded in clay—Peter would have toyed with these by the hour; barken bowls and containers; cups and knives and spoons carved from horn.

We furnished our abode with the loving care of housewives. We labored tirelessly over tricksy devices which were unnecessary, merely to surprise one another. But in the long run we wearied of it. The call of the unknown country beyond the Eastern vent of the valley cast its spell upon us. The hunger for the untrodden trail welled up again in our hearts.

One evening as we listened through the open doorway to the drip of the melting snow on the lower hillsides I broke a prolonged silence, a silence compounded of three men's unspoken thoughts.

"Peter," I said, "how many miles did you do today!"