Will Andrews and J. D. McDonald

Will Andrews and J.D. McDonald meet at the expedition’s end in a conversation that places two kinds of disillusionment side by side. McDonald has lost the business and the dream he built around it; Andrews has survived the hunt but has not decided what its failure means. Their exchange moves from the expedition’s material wreckage to a dispute over whether anything can be carried away from it, and closes with McDonald offering Andrews a way out that Andrews does not yet take.

An encounter amid the expedition’s wreckage

Before their private conversation, Andrews asks McDonald why he is sleeping where he is, when Andrews has seen his office on the way in, and what has happened to him. McDonald laughs at the question and turns to Miller, who has returned after a winter in the mountains. He assumes the expedition has come back empty-handed; Miller rejects that judgment, insisting that three thousand winter hides remain hidden in the mountains. The exchange sets the terms for what follows: the expedition may have brought back no hides, but its participants do not agree on whether the venture has yielded nothing.

Miller and Charley Hoge leave after Miller declares their business finished. In the quiet that follows, McDonald adjusts the lantern, making the two men’s faces clearer, and Andrews moves closer to McDonald’s bed. McDonald acknowledges that Andrews has had the hunt he wanted, and recalls that Andrews has been left behind, just as he had warned. The brief exchange is both an accounting and a recognition: Andrews has gone through the experience, but McDonald sees its cost as the residue of a pursuit rather than a reward.

McDonald’s account of dreams and loss

McDonald argues that people are taught successive layers of falsehood, from childhood through school and into adult life, until they mistake the promise of something beyond themselves for knowledge. Only near death, he says, might a person recognize that there was nothing beyond the self and what that person might have done. The recognition comes too late, after the belief in a hidden secret or a world waiting to be conquered has already shaped a life. When Andrews protests, McDonald insists that the hunt has demonstrated the point: nearly a year has gone into pursuing a dream, yet the hides may rot where they were left and mice may nest in them.

His inventory of the expedition’s remains is deliberately concrete. Thousands of dead bison, carefully packed hides, a year spent, a destroyed wagon that beavers may turn into a dam, calluses on the hands, and the memory of a dead man: these are the returns McDonald can name. Andrews refuses to accept that this is all there is, but cannot immediately supply an alternative. McDonald presses him to say what remains, turning the conversation from a verdict on the expedition into a challenge to Andrews’s own understanding of it.

McDonald tests that understanding against the others. Miller knew the country better than anyone and believed he could realize his dream, yet McDonald asks what that knowledge achieved. Charley Hoge’s Bible and whisky did not make the winter easier or save the hides. Fred Schneider, too, is reduced in McDonald’s account to a name remembered by the living; Schneider himself has nothing left. Andrews confirms Schneider’s name, but cannot dispute the stark distinction McDonald draws between remembrance and what the dead can possess.

McDonald includes himself in the indictment. He says that he too has been left with nothing because he forgot what he had learned long ago and let the lies return. His dream differed from Andrews’s and Miller’s, but he had mistaken that difference for evidence that his own dream was not an illusion. He believes he now understands this, while Andrews has not yet learned it. The exchange therefore does not make McDonald simply an observer judging a younger man: he speaks as someone who recognizes his own failure in the same language he uses to challenge Andrews.

Departure offered, decision deferred

When Andrews politely asks what McDonald will do next, McDonald says he will leave the country. He may return to Saint Louis, Boston, or even New York; he cannot accomplish anything in this place while remaining in it, he says, because the country is too large and empty and fills a person with lies. He resolves to stop dreaming and take what comes when it comes. His proposed departure converts his bleak account into an immediate choice: rather than continue pursuing a dream in the West, he will try to escape the conditions he believes have sustained it.

McDonald asks what Andrews will do. Andrews says he has not decided, and McDonald invites him to come along. They know the country now, McDonald argues, and might make something of themselves by staying away from it. Andrews observes that McDonald sounds as if he trusts him; McDonald denies that, explaining that he hates office work and could at least pass some of it to Andrews. The offer is practical and teasing rather than a declaration of faith, yet it gives their relationship a possible future beyond the expedition: work together, elsewhere, on terms McDonald presents as a way to get by rather than a new grand dream.

Andrews rises, thanks McDonald, and says he will let him know later. He plans to stay at the hotel and asks McDonald to visit before leaving. McDonald shakes his hand weakly and tells him he is glad he is still alive. Andrews then leaves the narrowing circle of lantern light and walks toward Jackson’s Saloon, while McDonald’s invitation remains unanswered. The ending preserves the difference between them: McDonald has converted loss into a decision to leave and abandon dreams, whereas Andrews will not yet accept McDonald’s explanation or choose a destination. Their connection rests on this unresolved exchange—shared survival, an offered companionship, and a disagreement over whether the hunt has left anything of value.