The History of the Old American West – 4 Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Emerson Hough
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veiled by the suffusing white breath of the animals, turned into vapour on the instant that it strikes the arctic air.
At first the cattle turn their backs to the wind, and so stand huddled and motionless, the little calves pressing deep into the mass of the shivering creatures and bleating piteously. In a few moments the whole herd is covered with a blanket of white. The two men who are now up with the herd strive to break apart this blanket of white, riding along the edges with bent heads, seeking to open out the cattle so that they can get them moving. It is useless! The white veil shuts down too sternly. The men can no longer breathe. Their eyes are blinded by the stinging riffs of fine ice. They are separated in the storm. A shout is answered by a shout, but though the one ride toward the other as best he may he can not find him now, for ever the voice calling seems to shift and evade as though the spirits used it mockingly. Crack! crack! comes the note of the six-shooter, but how small, how far away it is! Again and again, and again also the answer! These two men have not lost their heart. They will yet find each other. They will turn the herd, they two alone, here on the wide, white plain, in this mystery of moving white! But where was the last shot? It sounded half a mile away. It might have been a hundred yards.
There comes a mightier wail of the wind, a more vindictive rush of the powdery snow. All trace of the landscape is now absolutely gone. The cowboy has wheeled his horse, but he knows not now which way he heads. The hills may be this way or that. A strange, numb, confused mental condition comes to him. He crouches down in the saddle, his head drooping, as he raises his arm yet again and fires another shot, almost his last. He dreams he hears an answer, and he calls again hoarsely. The scream of the wind and the rumbling of the voices of the cattle drown out all other sounds. He is in with the herd. His partner is in with it too. But neither he nor they both will ever turn or direct this herd. This he knows with sinking heart. They are lost, all lost together, out here upon the pitiless plains. And there are firesides of which these men may think!
The herd moves! It recks not human guidance now, for the storm alone is its final guide and master. The storm orders it to move, and it obeys. With low moans and groanings of suffering and of fear there ensues a waving movement of the long blanket of white which has enshrouded the close-packed mass of cattle. They stagger and stop, doubting and dreading. They go on again and stop, and again they sway and swing forward, the horns rattling close upon each other, the heads drooping, the gait one of misery and despair. The drift has begun!
Lost in the drift are the two boys, and they know they may as well follow as stop. Indeed, they dare not stop, for to stop is to die. Down from their horses they go and battle on foot among the dull-eyed cattle. Over their hearts creeps always that heavy, wondering, helpless feeling. They freeze, but soon cease to know they freeze. Their stiff legs stumble, and they wonder why. Their mouths are shut fast by the ice. The eyes of the cattle are frozen over entirely by the ice that gathers on their eyelids, and their hair, long and staring, shows in frosty filaments about their heads and necks. Icicles hang upon their jaws. They moan and sigh, now and then a deep rumbling bellow coming from the herd. The cows low sadly. The little calves bawl piteously. But on and on goes the drift, all keeping together for a time. And with it somewhere are the two cowboys, who should have known the import of the blizzard on the plains.
This horrible icy air can not long be endured by any living being, and soon the herd begins to string out into a long line, the weaker ones falling to the rear. If the cattle be strong and well-fed, they can endure any cold, but starvation has here been long at work. The horrible and inexorable law of Nature is going on. The strongest alone may survive. Those which fall back do not at first stop. They stagger on as far as they can. A little calf falls down, sinking first to its knees, and then dropping stiffly, its head still down the wind. Its mother stays with it, pushing at it with her own frozen muzzle. It can not get to its feet. The mother looks after the indistinct forms slowly disappearing in the driving mist of white, but goes no farther on. In the spring they will find the mother and calf together. Farther to the south are the bunches of yearlings which were weak and thin of flesh. Then come the heifers and cows and steers as they fell out and back in order in this white cold mist of the great drift that cleared the range from the foothills to the railroad fences. In places the followers of the drift may find gullies or deep ravines packed with carcasses of animals which here met their death. When the wind had swept the coulees full of snow the treacherous white surface looked all alike to the dull eyes of the drifting cattle. They walked into the yielding snow and fell one above the other in a horrible confusion, those above trampling to death those beneath until all was mingled in a smother and crush of passing life. Again there may be noted a spot where, under the lee of some cut bank or bluff, the cattle paused for shelter from the storm. Here the snow piled up about them, drifting high around into an icy barricade, until they had left but a tiny feeding ground, swept bare by the eddying winds. Here, hemmed in and soon without food, they stood and starved by inches, perhaps living for days or weeks before the end came. Here, had rescue been attempted, they would have charged furiously, with such strength as they had left, any human being daring to come near, for the greater the strait of the range animal the greater the unreasoning rage with which it resists all effort at its succour.
All day and all night and into the next day, perhaps, the cattle drift, their numbers less and less with each passing hour, leaving behind a trail of shapeless heaps, thick and thicker as the long hours drag by, the numbers of the survivors growing still fewer and fewer, weaker and more weak. Out of the whole herd which started there are but a few hundreds or thousands which come to the fences of the railroad, seventy miles from where the drift began. Here it ends — ends in a row of heaped-up carcasses along the wires that held the remnants of the herd from further travel; ends as you may see as you gaze from the car window in the spring as you are whirled across the great plains — ends in a blanket of hide a hundred miles in length. The skinning parties which follow the drift when the weather has grown warmer use the wire fences as their drying racks.
And of the men who were caught in the storm? One they found in a coulee back toward the beginning of the drift, where he crawled under a little ledge and thought he could weather out the storm. He had no fire nor fuel nor light of any kind, and neither had he any food. He cared nothing for these things. He felt cheerful, and he fell asleep, dreaming. The other man went much farther Before he lay down. Then, resourceful to the last, he shot and killed a steer in a little hollow where the wind was least. They found him crouched up close to the body of the animal, his arm between its fore legs and partly about its neck, his face hid in the hair of the creature's chest, But the blood of both had turned to ice before they fell. In the spring the sky is blue and repentant, and the wind sings softly in the prairie grasses. But one can not forget that awful picture of the blue-gray time, and ever he hears the death songs of the legions of the air which urged on the herds in their solemn march into annihilation. Such is one picture of the range.
There is another picture of a strenuous sort. This time it is summer, and it is at night. At evening, when the great herd of trail cattle bedded down on the hillside, the sky was clear and the stars were shining luminously large in the pure air of the plains. It needed an old plainsman to know what this foreboding quiet meant, this ominous hush, and he alone would have noted anxiously the dark line of cloud along the horizon. Any of these hardy riders could tell you a storm was breeding, but they have seen many storms and do not fear them. The cook whistles as steadily and discordantly as ever as he washes his dishes in the dusk, swearing fluently when a stray whisk of air blows the ashes out of his fire pit into his eyes. The cook pulls the wagon sheet tight to-night, however, and he makes his own bed inside the wagon. The night herder turns up his collar as he goes on watch with the horse herd. The drive boss sits with his knees between his hands smoking a pipe, which glows dully in the darkening night. The camp is quiet. All about come up the faint night sounds of the plains. The men are tired, and one by one they unroll their blankets and lie out in huge cocoons, each with his head in the hollow of his saddle and his hat pulled down over his face. Jim, the foreman of the drive, does not go to sleep just yet. He sits smoking and watching. Now and then a wandering whiff of wind blows the ashes in a fiery little stream out of his pipe bowl. Jim puts an extra man on the night watch, who departs into the dark, singing softly to himself.
Jim sits thus for some time with his knees up between his hands, perhaps nodding now and then, but afraid to go to sleep. He notes the steady play of the lightning on the rising