Beyond the sunset

by Arthur D. Howden Smith

But our last farewell we received after we had left the village and were skirting the horse-herds grazing west along! the river-bank. I heard a whinny of delight, and Sunkawakan-kedeshka, the mottled stallion, came trotting toward us with his attendant band of mares. He stopped some distance off, with a neigh of inquiry, as if to demand why I would not stop and play with him. I thought for an instant he would follow us, and so pretended to ignore him; but when we had gone on for perhaps a mile and reached the crest of a slight ridge he evidently lost interest and trotted back to the herd. The incident amused me, although I saw in it no significance and it slipped my mind completely as Tawannears pointed to the cold, gray aspect of the northern sky.

"Somewhere there is snow," he commented.

"Ja," assented Corlaer. "Andt der wind comes this way."

The flakes commenced to fall during the afternoon, but we were on the edge of the storm and they were never thick enough to obscure our vision. At night we contrived a shelter of brushwood, and lay fairly warm beneath our buffalo robes. Yet we knew that in a severe storm we should require more protection, and in the morning were relieved to discover the snow was no more than three inches deep with the sky above us a clear blue.

Two days afterward the belated Winter broke in earnest. A wind like a giant's sickle howled out of the northwest, and the snow reared a dense, white, fluttering wall a hand's-breadth from our eyes. It was all a man could do to lean against the blast and keep his footing. A yard apart we were lost from each other. Our voices might not carry through the soft, bewildering thickness of it and the shrieking of the wind overhead.

Ill-fortune had caught us in a bare valley between two hills, and the nearest shelter we marked down before the snow blinded us was a clump of timber a mile south. For this we made as best we could, stumbling and falling, never sure of the way, the breath torn from our lungs by the tug of the gale, the snow freezing on us as it fell, our faces smarting from the bite of the sheer cold.

I think 'twas Corlaer's giant strength carried us to safety. He strode betwixt Tawannears and me, and when one of us faltered, his arm was swift to lend support. In his quiet, bull-headed way, too, he found the right direction, despite the dazing isolation, the stupefying impact of the storm. He saw to it that we quartered the wind, and steered us straight to the very wood we had aimed for as the snow blotted out our surroundings.

Here in the wood it was just as cold and dark as in the open, and the snow sifted through the branches like the moulting feathers of bird flocks incredibly vaster than those that had passed over the Ohio; but the trees at least served to break somewhat the force of the wind, and we had the added comfort of work to do, for we knew that we could ward off the death foretold by Nadoweiswe only if we hastened to improvise a weather-tight habitation—no easy task in the white darkness and the chill that seemed to strike into the brain.

In the heart of the wood we came upon an immense bowlder, and with our hatchets we felled a number of trees so that they toppled across it. They were firs, heavy with foliage, a dense, impervious roof. We also felled saplings to heap up for end-walls, and fetched in many arm-loads of pine-boughs for bedding and fire-wood. As we worked our blood flowed faster, and we conquered the numbing force of the storm. And the snow, steadily floating down, improved our handiwork, heaping an extra roof and more substantial walls to shut out the cold. When we had crawled inside, and by skillful use of a few pinches of gunpowder induced the beginnings of a small blaze out of damp wood we felt cheerful again. A meal of jerked meat and a night's rest under pine-boughs and buffalo-robes, and we were ready to discount the continued fury of the storm upon awaking.

Three days it snowed. The first two days there was no diminution in the storm's vigor, but the third day the wind became less violent, although the snow fell uninterruptedly. It was on the third day that we heard a far-off, mournful howling.