Relentless

“But first we’ve got to get there. Steve, you might tie the lady’s hands together and leash her to her horse. Then let’s get moving.”

2

Walker felt the numbness of his ears and nose and hands and feet. The wind almost tore the hat from his head and he tied it down around his chin with a ripped-off concho thong. The wind was a swirl of snowflakes and foaming mist; he batted his gloved hands together.

The wind was a sound now, he could hear it frothing through the pines, beating the branches together. It wasn’t yet carrying very much snow; most of it had vaporized into a whirling chalk-dust fog. Walker’s flesh trembled inside the coat: he tried to hunch himself down inside it for warmth.

Burt and the packhorses trailed him on the nylon rope; the woman was in front of him—then Baraclough, then Hanratty, finally the Major in the lead. He could barely make out the Major’s grayish shape swaying in the mist.

The Major had assigned the order of placement and it was easy to see why. It put Hanratty between the Major and Baraclough; it put the woman between Baraclough and Walker; it put Walker between Burt and, at one remove, Baraclough. All the unreliable ones accounted for—and Walker right behind the woman, responsible for her: the Major had told him in a mild voice, Anything that happens to her happens to you. Bear that in mind. It she tries to break for it you had better bring her back. If she gets away from you don’t bother to return—you can forget your share of the money.

Baraclough had wound coat-hanger wire around Mrs. Lansford’s wrists and twisted the ends together with a pair of pliers. Not tight enough to cut the skin but too tight to be slipped. The nylon rope ran from Walker’s bridle through Mrs. Lansford’s wrist bindings to the bridle of her horse. She could get down and walk but she couldn’t get free of the rope.

The wind was against his left shoulder and the horse wanted to turn; Walker had to fight it with the reins. The white horse’s coat had a curious pigmentation that he had seen on a few horses before: when it was wet the white hair turned pale blue—some kind of secretion in the hide underneath. It came up dappled, like drops of blue ink on a white background; that was why this sort of white horse was called a blue roan.

He scrubbed his ears and tied the scarf up around his nose and mouth. An arm of cold wind got into him and shot dry agony through the tooth cavity in his upper jaw.

There was no reckoning the passage of time. The sun was gone, light was draining out of the day. The only way to tell direction was by compass and the Major had the only one of those. Walker closed his eyes up to slits and blinked back the tears of icy wind. They were climbing steadily along the side of a steep slope that seemed endless, doing switchbacks now and then when the Major decided it was time. Walker could feel the shifts by the changes in wind direction. Probably the Major was tacking—so many steps right, so many steps left, trying to keep a balanced compass course somewhere between. But the wind hit the exposed face of this south slope with wicked fury and Walker wondered when they would get behind something that would help break its force.

A swift blast of gale swayed him to one side and he grabbed the saddle horn wildly and when he righted himself he could only just see the whipping tail of Mrs. Lansford’s sorrel four or five feet ahead. The mottled pointillism of whipping snow enfolded him that quickly: now he could only see the blue’s ears, he couldn’t even see the ground, and he bent forward low over the withers in a useless try at evading the hard clout of the blow. Disoriented, he couldn’t tell if they were still climbing or if they were descending. He clung to the saddle and closed his eyes and tried to hide his head between his shoulders.

3

He blinked sluggishly and jerked himself upright. No good going to sleep. No good. His legs felt rubbery and he was having trouble keeping his knee-grip on the saddle. He tested the knot with which he had tied the reins to his right wrist. He couldn’t see it until he brought it up within a few inches of his face.

He lifted his right leg over and slid to the ground. Almost fell; kept his grip on the saddle, straightened, felt his way along the reins to the bit and found the nylon rope. Took a grip on that and staggered ahead.

He kept his eyes closed because there was no point in trying to see anything. His nose and lungs burned with the in-and-out rasp of frigid air. All the layers of clothing didn’t seem to help: the wind came up inside his cuffs, inside the sleeves of his coat, under the coat skirt, down the back of the neck.

His feet burned and tingled when he stamped them on the ground. He would put a foot out and test his footing and then stomp down hard and bring up the other foot. It got to be like that: you thought about each step and you took time executing it. It meant the others were going just as slowly. But that made sense: the Major had to find the way, had to keep from blundering into trees, keep from falling over precipices.

The earth seemed to change its tilt underfoot but it was impossible to tell which way it had shifted until he detected an almost imperceptible drop in the force of the wind. They must be on the backside of a slope now. Going down, or at least going around something. He kept walking into the rump of Mrs. Lansford’s horse and in a dulled way he began to worry that he might do it once too often and get kicked in the belly by the horse.

He kept the reins wrapped around his glove and whacked his hands together with energetic sweeps of his arms.

He stumbled over something and went down. The horse made a vague sound that was whipped past and away on the wind; he felt a jerk of reins against his hand and scrambled for footing, got one leg under him and tumbled forward, dragged by the reins. Terror hit him: the rest of them were going on regardless, they couldn’t see him or hear him, he’d get dragged to death. His feet spun and scrabbled and finally he got upright after a fashion and lurched forward: found the saddle, hooked his arm around the horn and let the horse carry him along a little way while he sawed icy air in and out of his laboring lungs and fought down panic.

The wind tumbled and howled, beating at him like fists. He walked alongside the horse’s head with his grip on the reins choked up tight: if he fell again he would be able to pull himself up.

His boots were sliding a little; feathery soft snow on slippery pine needles made a treacherous footing. The wind was a vast pounding thunder in his ears; it flayed at him willfully. He knew what it was like to be a blind man now. Tingling pinpricks of sensation burned in his feet and hands. His ears hurt him with a sharp agony; he took a long clumsy time untying the scarf and snugging it down over the top of his hat, tying it under his chin, tucking the ends into his coat and wrapping the collar around.

4

It was madness. Every animal had the sense to get shelter and hide out a blizzard.

No way to judge the passage of time but his extremities were almost without sensation and fatigue had set in; he could hardly lift his knees. And then the tilt of the ground changed again, for the fiftieth time, and the wind almost knocked him off his feet. The noise was earsplitting. He had a handkerchief wadded in his mouth and he was breathing through it but it was begi

He walked into the sorrel’s rump again and stopped, waiting for it to go on, but it didn’t move away. The line had stopped. Something wrong. The Major—had he fallen down? Not Hargit; nothing knocked Hargit down.

Something tugging the nylon rope. He turned, afraid, puzzled. Something banged into him and he recoiled; a hand gripped him and Baraclough’s voice rasped an inch from his ear.