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By Root 769 0

wind had ceased and a steep cold now gripped them. Henri and Lafayette had built up the fire and were drying themselves before it. Henri was playing a jig of stirring joy. Lafayette was beating a hand drum and jumping up and down, singing a song loud and wailing wild as the blizzard. The Buckendorfs cursed and screamed as they emerged, damp, into the horrible cold, but the music, which Henri told Joseph was meant to pluck up their spirits, had an effect. Something in the song, which Joseph began to repeat with the guides, worked on him. As he turned himself to each direction before the fire, and sang, a startling awareness came over him. The violence of the storm, the snapping and growling of the fire, the flame reflected on the dark faces of the guides and on Bull’s sweet features and in the strange white eyes of the Germans, struck him with indelible force. A sudden, fierce, black happiness boiled up in him. He laughed out loud and looked into Henri’s eyes, glittering over the roan body of violin, and saw how narrowly they had escaped. If the drift hadn’t covered them, they’d have iced up in this extremity of cold and frozen to death in their sleep, welded fast to one another by ice, a solid mass until spring allowed the weird human sandwich to loosen and rot.

Joseph didn’t get much chance to reflect on that prospect; for the next four days they plunged along and even drove themselves through a black night and over the next day, their usual consecrated Sunday of rest, across a poker-table-flat belt of prairie twenty-five miles wide, for fear of the wind in that unsheltered expanse. The guides used the North Star for direction, and the party stopped in confusion when ice fogs swept over them every few hours. When the oxen stopped, the Buckendorfs dropped off the sledges as though shot, and fell asleep in the snow. Emil beat his brothers awake, and the men and oxen staggered on. At one point, drowsing as he walked, words came to Joseph. Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power…. Having been spared the night of the blizzard, Joseph determined that it would not be for nothing if he was also spared now. It was true that his original purpose on this expedition had been to become a rich man, but now in the measureless night he understood it was more than that. He’d seen the blizzard sweep out of nothing and descend in fury upon them and then return to the nothingness it came from, so like all men. There was something powerful in store for him. He must be ready for it. He fell completely asleep walking and when he woke, one of the oxen was down. The men were coaxing it with wild blows to rise. The poor beast’s fetlocks had swollen big as teakettles and each step left a gush of blood in the snow. Joseph leapt toward the ox, hunched over the massive head, breathed his own breath into its foamy muzzle, and spoke in a calm clear voice until the animal groaned to its feet and labored on into the waste. It was the first one they killed for food.

This was a bad sign—to slaughter their oxen before they had even reached their destination. Henri looked a little grim. But that night as they roasted its withered heart and salted the charred flesh and ate, and as the little spotted terrier with the brown eyes worried a bone to one side of the fire, Lafayette played and the two guides sang again. Only this time it was a French chanson about a black-haired woman, and even the Buckendorfs, once they understood the refrain, roared it willingly and in good timbre until they turned in, still joking, as though drunk. The fresh meat and the French song did their work on the men and that night Joseph dreamed of Dorea for the first time. She’d put a new plank in his bedstead, she said as she drew him close. The other men also, from the looks of them at daylight, had been disturbed in their slumbers, for they began the next day hollow-eyed, downcast, subdued. Throughout the day Bull heaved cracking sighs and gazed too long at the horizon.

“Is she there?” said Henri