He sat up without hurry. Yawned, scratched his face. Tugged his boots on, got to his feet as if still groggy and extended his arms; stretching, he heard the crackling of his own musculature.
He felt his face color under Baraclough’s stare but he managed a short meaningless smile, shrugged for no particular reason except that it seemed a disarming sort of thing to do, and turned to the shelves on the wall to run his eyes over the canned-food labels. He still had the heavy coat on; he thrust his hand under it, down the sleeve of his leather flight jacket, and extracted a cigarette from the bicep pocket. He lit the cigarette, inhaled, choked, recovered, took down a can of stew and set it on the stove. During all this he never once looked at the woman.
Burt and Hanratty snored away. The Major was deeply asleep as well: the trek had been hardest, most exhausting, for him.
Baraclough must have had a few hours’ sleep and then relieved Burt on watch. He looked a little droopy but not likely to fall asleep.
Power of suggestion, Walker thought: he went into the sheet-metal lavatory and urinated into the john. The cubicle was no bigger than an airliner’s rest room.
He flushed the toilet but the noise was almost obscured by the steady roar of the blizzard against the log walls.
He stepped out of the cubicle zipping up his trousers and went back to the stove to test the temperature of the can of stew; left the can on the stove and sat down against the wall, midway between the stove and the woman. Baraclough sat beyond the woman, smoking; he had left the rifle leaning against the wall.
For a moment Walker thought it wasn’t going to work. But then Baraclough stood up, caught Walker’s eye, nodded toward the girl as if to say “Watch her,” and went into the lavatory. Baraclough was the kind of man to whom superficial manners were important: he probably killed politely. Walker had counted on that: Baraclough closed the door.
The moment the lavatory door was shut Walker scooped up his hat and mittens and crossed the room. Past the woman, moving swiftly and without sound. He picked up the rifle Baraclough had left tilted against the wall, and turned to sweep the rest of the room with a wary inspection.
Nobody woke up.
The woman was on her feet without a word, coming after him.
He had one mitten on. He put the other one in his coat pocket to keep his hand free on the rifle. Ducked under the nylon rope and walked between the horses to the front of the shed.
The woman’s face was upturned, alive, expectant. He pointed to the horse nearest the door and when the woman reached for its reins Walker made a signal with a jerk of his head to indicate that she should go first. With his mittened left hand he reached out and gathered up the trailing reins of the blue roan. Then he backed up against the front door and collected the lead-rope of one of the packhorses and wrapped that in his left hand along with the blue’s reins. Finally he nodded to the woman, braced the rifle across the crook of his elbow and slid the wooden crossbar back out of its slot. And shoved the door open with his boot.
The wind slammed in, banged the door back against the outside wall; the candles guttered out and he felt the woman go by, urging her horse through the doorway. The horse didn’t want to go out into that. Walker whacked it with the rifle-whacked where he thought the horse was, and seemed to hit it because it jumped and went rushing past him, almost knocking him over.
“What the fuck?”
“Jesus…”
“ What’s going on?”
The lavatory door slammed open with a tinny clank. If there were other sounds they were swallowed in the rock-crushing growl of wind.
Walker was through the door, outside, head bowed against the blast. Pulling the blue’s reins and the packhorse.
But something got stuck. He couldn’t see but it had to be that the two horses had wedged together in the narrow door. One of them screamed, a high whickering neigh; he felt the leather reins slide out through his mitten. Trying to grab for them with his right hand he dropped the rifle. And missed the reins.
Now all he had was the packhorse’s lead-rope and somebody inside the cabin started shooting.
Shooting at the door because they thought they were being invaded.
Walker dropped flat on his belly and rolled out of the line of fire.
He’d lost the rifle and he’d lost both horses. What he rolled into was a deep bank of loose snow that the wind had piled against the side of the shed. The gale had packed it semi-firm but the flakes were quite dry and didn’t adhere to one another, so that his body penetrated the drift and a small avalanche tumbled down over him. A sense of burial, of drowning, of being sucked under: impossible to get his breath.
He swam out of it and crawled on his hands and knees, shaking himself like a wet dog. His knuckles banged into something solid and when he felt for it he found the corner of the cabin: he crawled around into the lee of it and got to his feet.
Somebody fired two or three more gunshots and he heard a fellow bellow-the Major? — and the shooting stopped.
It occurred to him he could go back inside. They hadn’t seen anything; they’d never know he had tried to get away. But he had let the woman go and they would kill him for that.
Then he felt a thud and heard the slam as if from a far distance, and knew he no longer had the choice of going back inside: they had shut the door and now they would be lighting candles, counting heads.
He was behind the cabin; the woman had gone in the opposite direction. He had to find her. He had no horse, no blanket, no gun, no food. She had all those things except a gun.
He reached the corner and stepped into the shrieking wind. There was a little light, it was gray rather than black, but the grayness was opaque. He had to feel his way forward along the side of the cabin and when he reached the front corner he hesitated, half expecting the front door to slam open and the others to come charging out with guns. He stood paralyzed by that fear until the realization crept into him that they weren’t going to come out after him: they couldn’t see any better than he could out here.
The woman had gone straight out from the front door. He stepped away from the cabin, only two paces but it seemed to put him in the middle of nothingness. The wind came at him against the front of his left shoulder and if he kept the wind on that quarter he ought to be able to keep moving in a straight line toward the woman.
If she had stopped: if she was waiting for him. But why should she?
He had to find her. Find her or freeze to death out here all by himself.