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She had no weapon with her, not even a knife. It was as if in that hour of utter loneliness and loss she gave up to heaven all weapons and all sense of weapons for she would now go defenseless to the river for water, to the bottomlands to look for food, to the hilltops to look for her husband. Standing by the lean-to and trembling with hope, her eyes wide open and staring, her ears open to all things between earth and heaven, she went back up the hill and stood by the graves. She had seen but had not recognized the four skulls; and an hour later, when she walked north and east over the hills, looking for her husband, she passed close to one of the Indian heads but seemed not to see it. Her sense of what had happened since that morning was only a faint pallor; it had all been dimmed by sorrow and fatigue and soul sickness. She went almost a mile into the hills, pausing now and then to call softly, to look round her and. listen; and then returned to the graves. She would go again, and again—to the lean-to, to the massacre tree; for he would call to her again and again, in the weeks to come. In the dead of night his voice would arouse her from shallow sleep and she would sit up, saying, "John?" He would call to her as August passed and September came in, and the aspens and cottonwoods turned golden.
Now and then she saw him in the distance and ran toward him. She knew that someday she would find him. A rational mind would have seen here a world unlike the one Kate saw. Standing by the graves, he would have looked north or south and seen the long irregular line of trees that hid the river. In the west, beyond the line, he would have seen hills that looked empty and dead, but for their thin dress of stunted cedar. Looking the other way, to the east, he would have seen the same kind of hills, and sky pallor and thin gray loneliness; and in all directions he would have sensed an expanse of silence and emptiness. Kate saw none of all that, or saw it so indistinctly that it was only the haze upon the clear world in which she lived.
The world in which she was to live her senses did not build at once; it was evoked by prayer and longing and hope, by dreams and visions, and it came into being slowly, out of heaven. For God was kind to her. There had to be this evocation, or there had to be madness that would have thrust her down to the level of beasts. Without her vision she would have wandered away and been killed, by wolf or Indian; or she would have starved or died of cold when winter came. Within a few months the roaming free trappers, having learned her name, would be talking by campfires of that crazy Bowden woman. She would never go home, she would live and die there by the graves. It was enough to make a man feel cut loose from himself and pulled down in deep water like a gone beaver. It was enough to make a man crawl into a deep thicket and cry like a child.
Legend was to say that John Bowden was there. His wife knew he was there; she saw him now and then, always at a distance, always smiling at her, his smile and his eyes saying that he was all right, all of them were all right, and someday they would be together again, with God. The time was to come when she would no longer call to him or run toward him. With a smile she would answer his smile, her eyes saying yes, it was so, they would be together again, they were together now.
Her most remarkable transformation of loss and loneliness enveloped her children. About three weeks after Sam rode away she looked at the graves and thought they needed a loveliness. Up and down the river she searched for wild flowers and found a few, but the plant that caught her eye was a species of sage, with a soft greenish-gray beauty all its own. With the shovel she took up a few of these plants without disturbing the earth that hugged the roots, and set them in holes at the south end of her tiny cemetery. She carried water from the river to give them drink. They flourished, and the time came when she had a garden, there on the barren hillside. The time came when she no longer knew exactly where the graves were. The time was to come when there would pass from her soul all memory of them and all need of them; for her children would no longer be in the earth but above it, smiling at her use—their father smiled.
The first vision was in a cold moonlit night, before the fading memory of the graves had completely left her. She had come from the shack and walked over to the graves, to kneel there and pray, when suddenly she was transfixed by the dim heavenly figure kneeling behind a clump of sage, or within it, or of it—she would never be able to tell where it was. This vision was of her daughter. It was not her daughter as she had actually been in life: this girl in the sage, or behind it, was so ethereal, so like a filmy moonglow, so dreamlike, so like a pale and delicate part of heaven, that Kate, looking at her, held her breath and thought how sweet it was to die. After long moments she moved toward it, only to see it fade and pass away, not quickly, but as a moving cloud dissolves and fades. Horrified, she retreated, and as slowly as it had vanished the vision returned, coming out of nothing into an exquisite apparition that was looking at her and smiling, and gently inclining its head, as though moved by a breeze. Kate had eyes only for her until, looking at other plants, she saw her sons; and they were exactly of the same heavenly moonglow radiance, behind a sage, or in it or of it. Like the daughter, they were looking at her and smiling, and gently moving their heads a little up and down.
All night until the moon was gone Kate filled her soul with the three faces. She would have been worse than mad to doubt that her children were there. If she shut her eyes she did not see them. If she advanced too far toward them they simply dissolved into the night and there were before her only the sage plants. But every time without fail they returned when she withdrew and they smiled at her in the same angelic way. They looked to her like exquisitely scented and clothed beings just down from heaven. The eyes of all three smiled steadily into her eyes, not to probe her soul but only to reassure her. "My darlings!" she would whisper to them, smiling, and like them moving her head up and down.
They did not come in the daytime or when there was no moon; and if the moon was only a slice or a quarter, or was wan, they did not come. Her husband came at any time of day or night in any season. She might see him riding a horse and leading a packhorse, going up or down the river; and he always waved to her and she waved to him. She knew that he had a man’s work to do. Or he might come at night when she was asleep; in the morning she would End by her door, or just inside it, a leather sack filled with things for her, and in another skin, jerked elk or buffalo. She would find powder and ball, needles, thread, flower seeds, sugar, salt, coffee, flour; and once there was a shining new knife, and time and again there were ta
She never fired her gun to frighten away the killers. She came to think of her world as a world without hunters and hunted, though the wolves now and then forced her to take another view of it. It was in early November of her first autumn here that she was awakened one night by piteous crying. Her first thought was for her children; seizing the axe, which she kept by her bed, she rushed outside. There was no moon but it was not a dark night. She listened. The cry came again; it was continuous now, a bleating begging cry of pain and torment, and it was not toward the river but somewhere back of her house. Ru