The Bone Picker's Winter

• Chapter 1 The White Harvest
• Chapter 2 Frost on the Great Arc
• Chapter 3 The Cart and the Crow
• Chapter 4 Bleached Memories
• Chapter 5 Ghost of the Herd
• Chapter 6 Cold Iron and Old Sins
• Chapter 7 The Staking Ground
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Coulee
• Chapter 9 A Ledger of Horn and Marrow
• Chapter 10 The Shadow at Red Creek
• Chapter 11 Wind Across the Ribcage
• Chapter 12 Riders in the Blinding White
• Chapter 13 Ash and Sleet
• Chapter 14 The Hired Gun's Footsteps
• Chapter 15 Scavenger's Moon
• Chapter 16 A Fire Built on Sins
• Chapter 17 The Hollow Prairie
• Chapter 18 Blood on the Frost
• Chapter 19 The Valley of Skulls
• Chapter 20 Winter’s Reckoning
• Chapter 21 The Last Load
• Chapter 22 Frozen Tracks
• Chapter 23 The Quarry and the Hunter
• Chapter 24 A Blizzard of Lead
• Chapter 25 The Final Hearth
• Chapter 26 What the Plains Keep

A dead buffalo was worth eight dollars if you killed it ten years back for the hide, but in the late autumn of 1885, a scatter of dried ribs and an eye-socketed skull brought six dollars a ton at the railhead siding in Minot. Jesse Finch had done the math with a stub of carpenter’s pencil on the pine sideboard of his wagon. A ton took a hell of a lot of ribs. It took roughly seventy carcasses picked down to the grease and marrow, sun-baked, wind-scoured, and lightened by seasons of rain until they clattered like dry cedar shingles. Jesse’s back knew the weight of seventy dead cows better than any priest knew the beads of a rosary.

He knelt in the yellow needlegrass three miles north of the Souris River, his heavy buckskin gloves stiff with grease and dried earth. He gripped an iron-tipped pry bar, wedged it beneath a pelvic bone half-swallowed by the prairie sod, and heaved. The earth gave it up with a wet, tearing sound. A family of black beetles tumbled from the dirt-caked underside, scurrying away from the sudden light of a gray November morning. Jesse tossed the bone behind him. It struck the bed of the high-sided freight wagon with a dull, hollow thud that startled his near mule, a one-eyed wall-eyed brute named Barnaby.

"Easy, you old bastard," Jesse murmured, his voice rusted from days without conversation. "It’s only cousin to the one you smelled yesterday."

Barnaby blew a plume of white steam through his black nostrils, shook his collar until the harness hames chimed, and dropped his nose back into the frost-bitten grama grass. Beside him, the mare, a dun named Clara, didn't even bother to flick an ear. They had hauled thirty wagonloads of skeletons out of the coulees since the August heat had broken, and the smell of ancient tallow and river silt had long ceased to mean anything to them.

The prairie stretched north and west until it met the low, zinc-colored ceiling of the sky. It was an empty land now, shaved bare of the thunder that had rolled over it fifteen years before. When Jesse had first crossed the territory with a Sharps rifle across his pommel and grease on his knees, the herds had looked like charred timber drifting across the hills, miles wide, churning the yellow dirt into powder. Now, there was only the pale debris of that great butcher shop. The bones lay in ridges and arcs, marking the spots where hunters had stood with tripod sticks and heavy octagonal barrels, dropping thirty, forty, fifty beasts from a single stand while the foolish creatures simply watched their herd-mates drop and went back to chewing dry grass.

Jesse worked down the gentle slope of the swale. He gathered the long leg bones first—the heavy femurs and tibias that weighed down a load the quickest and stacked cleanest against the oak sideboards. They went into the wagon with a rhythm: lift, swing, clatter. Then came the ribs, curved like the timbers of ruined dories, five and six to an armful. He kicked them free of the matted roots, broke off the dirt balls clinging to the knuckles, and pitched them high.

A sharp northern wind whipped down off the Saskatchewan plains, biting through his mackinaw coat. It smelled of distance, dry scrub, and the bitter copper tang of early snow. The sun was nothing more than a pale grease spot behind the clouds, giving no warmth to the frozen ruts. Jesse took off his hat—a felt brim scarred with grease and powder burns—and wiped his forehead with a red bandana that had faded to the color of salt pork. His hair was iron-gray at the temples, cut blunt around his collar with shears he usually reserved for horse tails. At forty-two, his joints popped when he rose from a squat, and his right shoulder, where the recoil of the big .50-90 had hammered him through the boom years, carried a dull, grinding ache every time the weather swung toward freezing.

"Eight tons to go," he told the mules. "Then we buy flour, three sacks of oats, and we sit by a stove until April."

Barnaby twitched an ear back toward the voice, unconvinced.

Jesse reached down for a bull’s skull that sat half-turned toward the south, its horn sheaths long since slipped off by beetles and weather, leaving behind the gray, fibrous cores. The bone was porous, chalky to the touch. He shoved his fingers into the empty eye sockets, hoisted the forty-pound mass, and threw it up onto the pile. The horn core chipped against an iron sideboard strap with a sharp snap.

That was when he saw the glint.

It was not the white of calcium or the dull slate of buffalo horn. It was a pinprick of brass, nestled deep in the dirt where the skull’s heavy brow had shielded the ground from the churn of years.

Jesse paused, the pry bar held loose in his right hand. He crouched, his knees cracking in the silence, and used the blunt tip of the bar to scrape the frosted turf away. The metal was a casing—necked, thick-rimmed, green around the mouth with verdigris, but unmistakably brass. He picked it up. His thumb smoothed the rim, clearing the crust of dirt until the stamp emerged in the pale light: 45-70 U.S.G. 1876.

Government brass. Cavalry issue.

Jesse stared at the small cylinder sitting in his leather palm. The prairie around him seemed suddenly to contract, the great gray horizon drawing in like a tightened noose. He had not fired a Springfield carbine in nine years, but he knew the sound of them when thirty men fired them in ragged volleys from the scrub oak, their horses screaming while the smoke hung thick and sweet in the river bottoms. He had dropped plenty of his own brass into this very dirt, fifty miles south along the bend of the Rosebud, back when he was wearing blue wool trousers with yellow stripes down the seam and pretending there was an order to the world that made killing people sensible.

He closed his fist over the casing. His fingers were stiff with cold, but the metal bit into his skin, sharp and cold.

"A long way from the agency, soldier," Jesse whispered.

He dropped the casing into his coat pocket. It rattled against his pocketknife and three loose cartridges for his own sidearm—a battered, cap-and-ball Colt Army that had been converted to shoot metallic .44s, riding in a holster tied low to his thigh with a rawhide thong to keep it from flapping against his leg when he hauled timber. It was an old man’s gun now, out of fashion in a country filling up with shiny nickel-plated double actions from the Sears Roebuck catalogs, but it threw lead straight enough to stop an angry steer or an uninvited caller at a midnight fire.

A mile to the east, across the yellow dip of the draw, a dark speck moved along the high ridge where the old Red River carts used to track toward Fort Garry.

Jesse froze. His eyes, pale blue and narrowed by decades of glare, locked onto the motion. On the plains, anything that moved higher than a coyote was trouble until proven otherwise. The homesteaders were forty miles behind him, clustered like lice around the railway line; the Indians were penned up on the reservation at Fort Berthold, trading agency beef vouchers for moldy flour; and the hide hunters were all gone to Texas or into the earth.

The speck resolved into a horse and rider. The horse was moving at a slow, deliberate walk, picking its way along the crest where the wind blew the frost clear of the stones. The rider was upright, sitting deep in the saddle, wearing a long dark duster that trailed back over the horse’s cantle.

Jesse did not move toward his wagon, nor did he wave. Out here, a wave was an invitation, and Jesse Finch had survived twenty years on the border by extending invitations to no man living. He simply stood with his hand resting near his hip, his breath rising in thin, regular pulses, watching the silhouette trace the edge of the sky.

The rider stopped. For three long minutes, the horse stood broadside to the valley, its head down against the northern draft. The rider seemed to be looking down into the swale, directly at the high-sided wagon and the bleached pile of buffalo ribs stacked within it.

"He's got a glass on us," Jesse said softly to the team.

Clara shifted her weight. Barnaby snorted and tore at a bunch of prairie wool.

Jesse didn't reach for the Winchester tucked in the scabbard under the wagon seat. If the man had a rifle and bad intentions, the range was four hundred yards—too far for certainty with an open sight in a gusting crosswind, but close enough to make a fool out of anyone who made an aggressive move. Instead, Jesse turned his back on the rider, bent down, and picked up a massive bull femur. He hefted it, brought it to the wagon, and tossed it in.

Clack.

He reached for another. He worked with the steady, dull industry of an ignorant laborer, his ears tuned past the wind, listening for the rattle of loose shale or the strike of iron horseshoes on granite.

When he looked up through the crook of his arm five minutes later, the ridge was empty. The rider had dipped down the far side, toward the river bottom, heading west.

Jesse dropped the bone he was holding. He walked quickly to the front of the wagon, pulled the Winchester from its sheepskin sleeve, and jacked the lever. The mechanism was dry and clean; oil froze and gummed up the firing pin in this weather, so he kept the action dry, scrubbed with kerosene and wiped bone-clean with an old flour sack. The brass cartridge slid into the chamber with a crisp, greasy snick. He eased the hammer down to half-cock and laid the rifle across the seat, covered by a greasy canvas tarp.

The country was getting crowded. That was the third lone rider he had spotted since the leaves dropped along the Souris. The first had been a half-breed scout from down around Bismarck, looking for strayed army mules; the second had been an itinerant horse doctor with two dead teeth and a bottle of rye in his boot. But this one rode like a man who knew precisely which township he was crossing and didn't care to leave a trail in the valley dust.

Jesse spat into the grass. "Too many ghosts in this grass for company," he told the team.

He worked faster now, the rhythm of his gathering broken by a restlessness that crawled up between his shoulder blades. The wind was stiffening, whistling through the empty apertures of the buffalo skulls until the wagon bed hummed like an organ in an abandoned church. He cleared the swale in another hour, adding another half-ton to the load until the heavy leaf springs beneath the wagon box groaned and settled three inches closer to the axles. The wagon was nearly full. The bones rose in a white, jagged pyramid above the sideboard rails, held in place by two hemp ropes lashed from side to side in a diamond hitch.

It was ugly work, scavengers' work. When the men in St. Paul bought these bones, they ground them into fertilizer to sweeten the spent wheat fields of Indiana, or they burned them into bone-black to filter brown sugar until it was white enough for ladies’ tea parties in Boston. Jesse sometimes thought about that when he was chewing salt pork in the evening—how the great black herds that once shook the floor of the world were ending up as sweetening in some banker's porcelain cup, or scattered over a turnip patch in Ohio. It seemed a small, mean end for something that had once been so grand it made a man feel like an insect just to stand in front of it.

He tied the last knot in the hitch, pulled his gloves off with his teeth, and blew on his raw, red knuckles. The skin across the bridge of his nose felt tight, burned by the dry wind.

To the west, the clouds had turned the color of lead shot, dragging low over the swells. It was going to snow before midnight, not the light, powdery flurries of October, but the hard, driving gravel that came down out of the north when the Hudson Bay ice began to close. A man caught ten miles out on these plains without wood or a cutbank for shelter could freeze to death between supper and daylight, his team turning their tails to the gale and drifting until they plunged off a cut into the Souris.

"Up, Barnaby," Jesse said, taking the reins and climbing onto the high wooden box. "Let’s get this carrion into town."

The wagon jerked forward with a sharp creak of iron on ash. The team leaned into the heavy leather collars, their shoulders knotting, their iron-shod hooves throwing up frozen clods of black loam. Behind them, the wagon bed shivered, hundreds of dry ribs clicking together in a dry, skeletal chatter that followed Jesse Finch down the trail like the murmur of an army that refused to stay buried.

The iron tires bit into the crust with the sound of breaking china. Behind the seat, two tons of sun-bleached frame groaned against the sideboards, settling lower into the cradle of ash stakes with every jolt of the axle. Jesse kept the team at a slow, plodding walk, eyes roving between the ears of the mule and the long, sweeping curve of the horizon where the land rose toward the Great Arc. That broad glacial swell marked the northern divide, a high spine of prairie where water ran either toward the Souris or turned back south to die in the alkali sinks of the Mouse River flats.

By three o'clock the light had abandoned any pretense of silver. It went gray and slate-colored, the clouds sagging until they grazed the tops of the higher knolls. Frost had already begun to form in the hollows where the buffalo grass stood knee-high and brittle, silvering the windward side of every stone. It gave the plain the look of an abandoned floor in an unfurnished house, vast and cold and cleared out for tenants who had never arrived.

Barnaby kept his good eye cocked back toward the seat, ears twitching in irregular semaphore. The mule smelled the water before Jesse saw the willow brush that choked the cutbank of the creek.

"Easy, granddad," Jesse muttered, bracing his boot against the brake lever to keep the wagon from crowding the team down the incline. "You'll get your mouthful of ditch-slough soon enough."

The creek was barely three inches of brown drainage running over flat stones, skimmed at the margins with grease-ice that crackled under Clara's iron shoes. Jesse pulled up on the south gravel bar beneath the shelter of an undercut bank where the wind went over their heads with the long, flat hiss of steam leaving a boiler valve. It was not a home, but it was three sides of earth against a night that promised to drop below zero before the stars found holes in the cloud-cover.

He did not light a lantern. When a man was hauling sixty dollars’ worth of old slaughter across an open country, the only thing a kerosene wick did was announce to every drifting horse-thief and half-starved Metis hunter that there was coffee boiling in the bottom. Instead, he unhitched by the faint twilight, working with the practiced economy of a man whose joints protested every unnecessary motion. He stripped the leather from Clara and Barnaby, checked their heels for gravel-bruises, and hobbled them short on the dry bench above the bank where the scrub oak broke the draft. He tossed them each half a peck of oats from the canvas nosebags he kept under the seat, watching them bury their muzzles with wet, appreciative snorts.

"Eat it all," he told Clara, patting the coarse hair of her shoulder. "Tomorrow you'll be pulling through three inches of rime."

He reached into the front box, drew out his greasy wool bedroll, his iron spider, and a leather poke of salt pork cut into chunks no bigger than dice. Under the tailgate he kept an old flour sack filled with dry willow knots gathered two days earlier along the river bends; willow burned quick and sweet with little smoke, unlike the bitter green chokecherry that smudge-marked a man from three miles downwind.

He dug a pit no larger than a derby hat into the sand, sparked three shavings of fat-pine with his thumbnail against a sulfur match, and coaxed a small, fierce heat into being. Over it he balanced the iron pan, dropping in four cubes of white fat that immediately began to spit and hiss against the metal. From his pocket he pulled three cold soda biscuits, hard as river pebbles, and set them to soften in the bubbling grease.

While the biscuits soaked, his hand drifted back into the deep pocket of his mackinaw. His fingers found the brass shell casing he had turned up beneath the bull's skull that morning.

He brought it out into the firelight. The neck was cracked from frost, a hairline fracture running from the lip down through the taper, but the heavy web of the head was intact. 45-70 U.S.G. 1876. He rolled it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the small raised letters of the Frankford Arsenal stamp.

Nine years had done little to dull the memory of that summer. The army had been full of boys from the Ohio coal mines and Irish recruits straight off the Boston docks, men who couldn't tell a coulee from an alleyway until the lead started humming through the buckbrush. Jesse had been thirty-three then, serving as an unassigned packer for the Seventh's supply train out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, watching the long columns of yellow legs ride out with their new carbines and their clean canvas haversacks. Most of them had thought they were going on a grand buffalo chase with bands playing and flags snapping in the wind.

He remembered the smell of the skinning yards along the Yellowstone that same autumn, after the regiment had been cut to rags on the Little Bighorn and the civilian scavengers had swarmed in to strip the dead horses and the scattered bison carcasses that littered the valleys. A man could make forty dollars a week then just salting green hides for the buyers from Miles City, if he didn't mind sleeping with the grease under his fingernails until his own skin smelled like tallow. That was where he had met Silas Coyle, a red-headed teamster who had deserted from the infantry at Fort Keogh with four mules and an appetite for trade whiskey that would have killed a timber wolf.

Jesse set the cartridge casing on the corner of an oak axle-tree that stuck out from the wagon bed. The brass shone with a dull, oil-green luster against the gray grain of the wood.

A twig snapped on the bench above the cutbank.

It wasn't the heavy, double-beat stride of a mule or the lazy drag of Clara’s hobbled iron. It was the dry, deliberate crack of an alder branch yielding to the sole of a riding boot.

Jesse didn't turn around. He didn't drop the tin fork he was using to turn the biscuits in the grease. With his left hand, smooth and unhurried as water sliding over slate, he reached under the flap of his sheepskin vest and loosened the leather loop that held the hammer of the converted Colt. The click of the pawl was muffled by the spitting grease in the spider.

"A sensible man don't stand in the wind when there's an undercut twenty yards back," Jesse said to the dark behind him. He spoke in a flat drawl, not lifting his eyes from the bubbling salt fat.

The scrub oak rustled. A shadow detached itself from the gloom where the gray grass met the drop of the creek wall.

"A sensible man don't leave his wagon where the rib-bones catch the moon like church pickets," a voice came back. It was dry, thin, and had the harsh rasp of an old lung-rot behind it.

The rider Jesse had seen on the crest stepped down into the gravel bed. He was not a big man, but he was wide across the chest, wrapped in a long, dun-colored coat of duck canvas lined with wolf pelts. The pelt at his collar was missing half its hair, worn down to the black skin where a carbine sling had rubbed it raw over years of riding. He carried no long gun in his hands, but his right hand was thrust deep into the pocket of his coat, the canvas bulging forward in a shape that had nothing to do with gloves or tobacco.

"The horse is winded," the man said, nodding toward the ridge where Jesse could now hear the faint, blowing breath of a tired animal tied in the timber.

"Then hitch him," Jesse said. "There's three handfuls of grass left on the south slope before the frost ruins it entirely."

The stranger stood by the edge of the fire’s glow, his face half-hidden by a hat pulled low against the northern draft. When he moved his head, the yellow fire caught the line of his cheek—lean, scarred at the jawline by what looked like an old powder scorch, and eyes that were the color of stagnant puddle-water. He was fifty, perhaps older, with the yellowed stubble of a tobacco-chewer who hadn't seen a razor since the August fairs in Fargo.

"I seen your load from two mile out," the stranger said. He stepped closer, his boots crunching in the gravel. "You’re Jesse Finch."

Jesse took a biscuit out of the grease with his fork and laid it on a flat stone to cool. "That’s what they wrote on the freight bills down at the Minot siding."

"They say you're still buying five-cent paper vouchers off the Metis for carcasses they ain't even found yet."

"I don't buy vouchers," Jesse said. "I take what’s on the ground. The ground don't sign its name to a voucher, and it don't lie about how many ribs are left in a pile."

The stranger looked past Jesse toward the high-sided wagon. The bones rose against the night sky, their jagged white tips sharp as broken pottery against the dark clouds. A light flurry of snow, the first of the night, drifted down through the cottonwood limbs, the tiny flakes melting as soon as they struck the hot iron of the spider.

"You've got near three ton there," the man observed.

"Two ton and change," Jesse said. "Enough to pay the yardmaster at the Great Northern and leave me three sacks of meal and a side of bacon for the winter." He picked up the second biscuit, blew the gray ash off it, and bit into it. The grease was hot and tasted of iron and salt. "You didn't ride five miles off the Fort Garry trace to talk about freight rates, mister."

The man smiled, but his lips barely moved over his yellow teeth. He took his left hand out of his coat and pointed two fingers at the brass casing sitting on the axle-tree.

"That come out of the dirt by the swale?"

Jesse glanced at the small green cylinder. "It did."

"I knew the fellow who dropped it," the stranger said. He walked to the other side of the fire, turned an empty grease-tub upside down with his boot, and sat. He didn't take off his hat. "His name was Callan. Corporal, Company I. Got himself run down by four young men with lance-irons while he was trying to pry a jammed shell out of the breech with his thumb-knife. They found him three days later with his tongue pegged to his chin and his cartridge belt empty."

"A lot of men lost their belts that June," Jesse said.

"They did. But Callan was carrying forty-two hundred dollars in gold eagles in two leather saddle-bags that belonged to the regimental paymaster at Fort Lincoln. Major Reno had signed for them in Bismarck, and Callan was riding with the pack-mules when the dust came up."

Jesse chewed slowly. The biscuit was heavy and doughy in the middle, sitting like a lead weight in his gullet. He swallowed, took a tin cup from the grass, and dipped it into the creek, drinking the ice-cold brown water to clear the grease from his tongue.

"Silas Coyle told that same story in every saloon between Glendive and the border," Jesse said. "He told it until a blacksmith in Poplar River put two inches of an iron file through his gullet for being a loud-mouthed liar."

The stranger didn't blink. The snow was beginning to stick to the shoulders of his canvas coat, turning the brown ducking white.

"Silas was a blow-hard," the stranger admitted. "He liked the sound of gold more than he liked the weight of it. But he wasn't lying about the bags. He was with the rear guard when they crossed the dry fork of the Rosebud. He saw Callan take the pack-horse off into the draws when the shooting started to the north. Callan didn't die where the monument is, Finch. He died twenty miles from here, trying to make the border with a horse that had a broken splint-bone."

"There ain't no gold under them ribs," Jesse said, jerking his chin toward the wagon. "Nothing but calcium and old gristle. The fertilizer works in Philadelphia don't pay in eagles. They pay in bank drafts on St. Paul, and the railway agent takes ten percent off the top for the handling."

"Maybe," the man said. "And maybe you've been picking bones in this township for three years because you like the smell of dead cows."

Jesse looked the man full in the eyes. The fire between them was dying down, the willow knots burning to a red ash that gave off a heat you had to hold your hands within three inches of to feel. The wind took a turn from the northeast, bringing with it the true bite of the northern blizzard—not a drift of snow, but the dry, stinging salt of the polar barrens that could freeze an eye in its socket if a man turned his face into it for an hour.

"I gather bones because I’m fifty dollars behind on my wagon payments to the blacksmith in Minot," Jesse said. "And because the dead don't ask you what you did at the mouth of the Tongue River when the snow was four feet deep and the squaws were eating the bark off the cottonwoods."

The stranger's hand inside his pocket moved slightly. The duck fabric grew taut.

"My name is Vance," the man said. "I ride for the Land and Cattle Company out of Helena. We're running five thousand head across the line into the district of Assiniboia next spring, soon as the grass shows green. The company don't like scavengers squatting on the water rights."

"There's no water rights on the open range," Jesse said. "This is government land. Even the Indians don't claim it since the buffalo went out."

"Government's three hundred miles away in Bismarck, sitting by a round-oak stove," Vance said. "The company is six days behind me with eighty head of saddle horses and twelve men who get twenty-five dollars a month to see that the grass don't get stirred up by wagons."

"The bones will all be gathered by then," Jesse said. "Another year, two at most, and there won't be enough white on this prairie to make a button for a shirt. The rail's coming north from the main line. You can't run longhorns through a country where every five miles there’s a German with a plow and three miles of barbed wire."

Vance stood up. He was taller than he looked when seated, his shoulders stiff with the cold. He looked up at the rim of the cutbank where the two mules were standing, their tails tucked between their legs, heads hanging low against the increasing drive of the white pellets.

"You've got until the river freezes hard enough to bear the wagon," Vance said. "Then you move south of the tracks, Finch. If I see this bone-cart north of the Arc after the new year, I won't ask to see your freight bills."

"The wagon don't move well in four feet of drift," Jesse said, his voice flat.

"Then you can leave it for the cows to scratch themselves against," Vance said. "The wolves have had their turn at this dirt. Now it belongs to men who can buy the grass."

The man turned and walked up the slope, his boots slipping once on the icy gravel before he caught his footing on a willow root. Jesse didn't move. He sat by the red coals, his fingers still curled near the walnut butt of the Colt, listening to the crunch of gravel and the dry rattle of the brush on the high bank. After a minute, he heard the creak of saddle leather and the sharp, rhythmic strike of horseshoes on frozen limestone as Vance turned his animal back toward the high ridge.

The snow came down in earnest then. It was small-grained, hard, and drove nearly level with the earth, hissing as it struck the glowing ash of the willow fire. Within five minutes, the white scatter of bones in the wagon had disappeared under a clean, cold sheet, every skull filled with drift until the empty eye sockets seemed to glare with white blindness through the gray dark.

Jesse rose, his knees grinding with the sound of gravel in a dry hinge. He took the iron spider, scraped the remaining fat into the creek with his thumb, and rubbed the iron clean with a handful of snowy sand. He packed his tools into the box under the seat, climbed up into the wagon bed, and reached down between the ribs of an eight-year-old bull until his fingers touched the grease-soaked canvas of an old ammunition chest bolted to the bottom planking.

He didn't open the lid. He didn't need to. He knew what was inside: two spare boxes of Winchester .44s, five tins of sardines he had bought off a trader at Fort Buford three years ago, a spare pair of gray socks mended with blue yarn at the heel, and a pair of brass-mounted cavalry spurs that had belonged to a second lieutenant who had drowned in the spring rise of the Powder River while Jesse was holding the picket rope.

There was no gold. There had never been any gold. If there had been gold, Jesse wouldn't have spent fifteen seasons with his hands black from dried tallow and his back broken by the gray ribs of cows that had died to make some New York butcher five dollars on a hide.

He climbed down, pulled his heavy sheepskin coat closer around his neck, and went up to check the team.

Clara was shivering slightly, her tail turned to the wind, her coat already matted with small crusts of ice. Barnaby had turned his back to the storm, his one good eye shut tight against the stinging pellets. Jesse took an old wool horse-blanket from under the wagon seat and strapped it across Clara's loins, buckling the belly-band with fingers that had lost all feeling in the tips.

"Two days to Minot," he whispered to the mare. "Two days if the cutbanks don't fill."

He walked to the edge of the bench and looked north toward the Great Arc. The ridge had vanished. The whole world beyond the rim of the creek bottom had become a single, roaring wall of white, the wind screaming through the dry buffalo grass with the high, thin sound of a thousand iron files working on cold lead. The cold was sinking into the ground now, driving the last heat of the summer five feet down into the limestone, turning the prairie into something as hard and dead as the load he carried behind him.

He picked up the 45-70 casing from the axle, slipped it back into his pocket where it lay cold against his thigh, and crawled under the wagon box out of the wind. He pulled his canvas tarp over his head, wrapped his blankets around his boots, and lay with his head resting on a dry shoulder-blade that smelled faintly of old earth and vinegar.

Above him, the bones shivered in the gale, their dry knuckles knocking together in the dark like the heels of hanged men in a river breeze. Jesse closed his eyes and listened to the frost crawl across the oak sideboards, waiting for the gray light that would tell him whether he had a road left to travel or only a white drift to die in.