The seventh day of September, in the year of our Lord 1602:
As our vessel doth cleave through the icy waves of the Siberian coast, I am beset with thoughts as chill as the bitter wind that doth scour this desolate shore. The starkness of this land, where the very breath of life seems to freeze upon the lip, doth remind me of the cold and unyielding grasp of death itself. Here, nature’s face is a grim visage, unsoftened by the hand of man, and the bleak expanse doth stretch forth like an endless purgatory.
Methinks, this barren wilderness, where naught but the cry of the raven and the howl of the wolf break the dread silence, doth mirror the desolation of my soul. Were I to be stranded upon these frozen wastes, better to implore the heavens for swift deliverance, than to linger in such an unmerciful clime. Forsooth, even the stars do seem distant and uncaring in this forsaken realm.
Yet, in this very harshness, there is a strange and austere beauty, a reminder of the resilience of life and the inexorable march of time. Here, amidst the ice and the snow, I find a solitude that doth prompt deep reflection upon the mysteries of existence and the unfathomable designs of Providence.
—Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
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Flem Quitman was the first man I woke up when I got down to the dark forward hold. He was one of the few lucky cases that had a bunk. The others, like I'd been, were wrapped up in their bedrolls on the floor, most of them using saddles for pillows. I scratched a match and lighted the kerosene lamp on the wall only a few inches from Flem's face, then turned it up bright.
"Jesus!" he muttered, blinking hard at the light. "What the hell you think yer doin', woman?"
"Time t' get up. We'll be there pretty soon."
"Good Lord. Don't this goddamn boat never get no place except in the goddamn middle a' the goddamn night?"
"C'mon Flem. T'night's somethin' really special "
Ike was now awake in the bunk beneath Flem. "Hell, Angel, Russia ain't about t' disappear on us. It's been there a hundred years."
Some of the others were starting to wake up now. Ike started to pull on his boots and said loudly, "Bust out, fellers! Your pleasant ocean voyage is comin' to an end!"
Ike, who was really a little on the heavy-set side, was sort of an assistant ramrod to Flem, and made ten bucks a month more than the rest of us. Like Flem, he could give an unpleasant order in such a way that it didn't sound too bad, and the men would do it without hardly thinking twice. Come to think of it, if a younger, kinda green kid like me had just gone down there and lighted the lamp and yelled "Get up! I'd have more than likely been bruised and battered somewhat severely during the process.
Judd Fry stood up groggy and mad, his stomach hanging over his belt. He rubbed his small dark eyes between his mass of matted black hair and scrubby beard.
"Damn hell!" he grumbled. 'I just barely got m'self t' fuckin' sleep!"
"No one could ever guess it, Judd," Ike said. "You wakin' up just now is a vision a' rare beauty."
But some of the others had the same kind of excitement jumping in them that I had. Sam Justice sat up near where I'd been sleeping beside the rope barrier separating us from the cattle starting to stir around in the main hold, where the yellow cow had stepped through the ropes onto my foot. "Hey!" he said. "Russia?"
"Unless the captain's made one hell of a mistake." Slim was now up and shrugging into his Mackinaw jacket.
"Death" Crawford sat up and whacked his brother, Coyote, on the butt to rouse him. "Heard me, one time, that them Roo-shuns are all coal-black an' got themselves horns."
"Loco Weed" Hardy was sitting up next to Death, buttoning his shirt. "Just grow some horns an' you'll be right at home."
Sam and a couple of the others grinned, and then grinned, and then "Steel" Arnold said, "That's bullshit, a' course. But I really damn well did hear that they skin their enemies an' tan their hides an' make tents outta 'em!"
"Hell," Coyote yawned, half awake now. "In that case, me an' Loco Weed oughtta be worth a fortune betwixt us. If they like black tents."
Loco Weed grinned, now standing up and buttoning his pants. "The two of you'd look a lot fuckin' better as a tent than you ever did in real life."
"Gitcher gear packed an' then come on up topside," Ike said. "We ain't no sailors from a Herman Melville yarn. We're cowboys, an' it's high time t' at least halfway earn your keep."
I went back on up with Ike, thinking of the men getting ready below. Thinking of the whole actually pretty fair outfit. What old Charlie had said about being right-side up, or maybe dead or alive and all, was still kind of on my mind.
The boss, Preacher Morse, always came to my mind first and most.
Maybe that was because after my parents died in the big blizzard of '66, he'd kinda naturally become like an older brother to me.
I was just four that hard wintertime in '66, and my Ma and Pa had frozen to death in the little cabin they'd built, both of them hugging each other in bed one night to fight off the awful, persistent cold. The reason I'd lived is that they were hugging each other with me in between them, to give me the last little bit of warmth they had in their lives.
Preacher had found us, and pried their arms apart from around me. He'd put his head on my chest. And Old Charlie, who was with him, described it one time to me later by telling me my heart "sounded" like the hopeless, tiny wingbeats of an exhausted baby sparrow inside me trying to fly."
Preacher sent Old Charlie on to check the blizzard-stranded cows they'd been looking for. Then he ripped up some of the inner planks from the floor of the cabin. That was the only wood in miles that wasn't too frozen to burn. He built a fire and not getting too close, he wrapped me in a blanket and hand-rubbed me for maybe twenty-four hours.
Then, finally, when my heart and breathing were stronger, he left me in the blanket by the fire and hand-rubbed me for maybe 24 hours.
Then, finally, when my heart and breathing were stronger, he left me in the blanket by the fire and went out to dig graves for my Ma and Pa with a pick in the ice-hard ground.
Preacher buried them there, and built fires over the newly loose ground to thaw it down. That way, with the earth melted, it would freeze over solid again, and wild animals couldn't get to them.
Old Charlie came back the next day to find him standing, kind of bent over, near the dying fires on the graves.
"The girl?" he said.
"She'll be okay." And then, "The cows?"
"Froze."
Preacher nodded slowly. "Everything out here'd be dead if they hadn't kept that kid between 'em."
I guess it was then that Old Charlie noticed Preacher was standing there over those graves in that bitter gray, freezing late afternoon in his shirt sleeves.
Along with the blanket he'd wrapped me up in, he'd also put his coat on me.
When I came around, they'd brought me back to the nearest line shack on Clarence Hunt's ranch, and Preacher was forcing lukewarm water between my teeth with a beat-up tin spoon. Old Charlie was standing quietly just off to one side near him.
I gagged a little on the water, and kinda looked around, and then first thing asked where my Ma and Pa was.
The answer was clear, but gently so, on Preacher's face. And, somehow, he did a strange thing. To the best of my memory, he never really quite said they were dead, but instead he talked onward, toward the future. And because of that gentle way he had, they've never even been truly dead in my mind, even to this day.
He told me to try a little more water 'cause it was good for me. And then he said that, me being a young woman already, he'd get me a job milking cows and chopping firewood and such at the main ranch house. And since he'd told me, in just t hat certain way that he did, that I was now a "young woman," I could only cry a little bit around my folks. But there were good tears.
And then I worked a lot and grew up some, and that was the way it was.
Right now, Preacher was pushing close to forty, or maybe he was even over the hill there. In any case, Ike and Old Charlie were the only ones among the fifteen of us who were older than him. Preacher had shoulders that were about an ax handle wide and he stood over six foot high, with no gut at all and a minimum of ass, which is always about as good a way for a fella to be built as any fella. As far as his face was concerned, he had more than his share of nicks and scars from run-ins with men, beasts, and violent acts of Our Lord. But you had to look close to see those marks 'cause a lot of rain and wind and snow and sun had covered them over into one tough, no too ugly looking, but damn well used face. He had light-blue eyes that could nail you like twin iron spikes if he was mad about something, which was fairly common. Preacher never grew a beard, like a lot of the older fellas used to do, but favored the sloping longhorn mustache, which drooped slightly down around t he edges of his mouth toward his rocklike jaw.
But the main thing 'bout Preacher was a rare kind of strong inner quality that stuck out like a sore thumb. He was a natural-born man and also a natural-born boss. I guarantee that if Preacher had been a new private in George Washington's army, and George Washington was figuring out his new attack and happened to see Preacher standing there, he'd have just naturally had to go over to Preacher and said, "What do you think?" And I double guarantee that whatever Preacher told him would have been smart enough to get him put on General Washington's general staff. And if that staff didn't happen to go along with him, he'd have had those poor bastards shaking in their boots in no time. He was purely tougher than a spike. And yet, hard as he was, Dusty never asked anything from any man that he wasn't willing to give twice back.
Funny thing too that was part of Preacher's quality. He was as good or better than any of the rest of us at the things we were best at. Like Old Charlie, hands down, was the wisest and best-read man in the outfit.
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