Wintering in the valley

Wintering in the valley turns the hunting expedition’s pause after the blizzard into a prolonged test of survival and perception. Cut off by snow, short of food, and living through weeks that seem to lose their measure, Miller, William Andrews, Fred Schneider, and Charley Hoge fashion what they need from the landscape and endure a winter that alters their relations to one another and to the world beyond the mountains. For Andrews in particular, confinement makes the valley feel less like a place he has entered than the only place where his life has taken shape.

Confinement and the Work of Survival

The hardship began in the blizzard’s aftermath. On the fourth day, with the weather turning mild and the party running short of meat, Miller rode down into the valley to hunt. He was gone for nearly six hours before returning with no game. The storm, he concluded, had driven the American bison away before snow sealed the pass. Fred Schneider pointed out that little meat remained, the flour had spoiled, and only a sack of beans was left. The absence of the herd made the party’s predicament immediate: the men were not merely waiting for a pass to open, but facing a dwindling store of food in a place where the weather dictated when they could leave.

The men met the cold with repeated acts of practical improvisation. They cut narrow strips of hide into eye-shields against the glare, bent softened pine branches into crude snowshoes, and made rough hide boots to tie around their calves. They tanned hides for replacement blankets and fashioned broad fur coats. Their fuel demanded equal attention. They dragged heavy logs through the snow until the ground around camp became hard and smooth enough for the wood to slide, and kept a fire burning day and night, taking turns to feed it. During one half-night storm, William Andrews watched a dozen large logs burn down without raising a flame as the wind made the embers glow. Survival here meant constant labor, not a single heroic feat: each small piece of equipment, each piece of wood, and each night’s fire had to be made and maintained.

Separate Ways of Enduring

Miller met confinement by repeatedly leaving camp in search of food. He returned near dusk, often appearing without warning behind or in front of the men waiting at the fire, his face darkened and his beard glittering with snow and ice. Once he killed a bear and butchered it where it fell; when he brought its quarters back on his shoulders, William Andrews briefly mistook the burdened figure for a grotesque animal. While the others weakened on a diet of game, Miller’s strength and endurance increased. He could hunt all day, butcher his catch, prepare supper, and take on chores that Charley Hoge could no longer manage. At night he sometimes went into the woods with an axe, leaving the men by the fire to hear its sharp blows against the frozen pines.

The blizzard also deepened Schneider’s withdrawal. His complaints gradually lost conviction and then stopped, but his silence did not signal renewed closeness with the others. Though he slept in the hide shelter, he spent more time alone, answered only when addressed, and sometimes left camp while Miller was hunting, returning late in the day without explaining where he had been. William Andrews once heard him murmuring in a sing-song voice as if speaking to a woman. When Schneider turned toward him, his eyes seemed vacant and unfocused. Andrews felt uneasy and told Miller about the new habit. The winter’s isolation thus took different forms: Miller’s solitude was bound to his daily movement through the hunting grounds, while Schneider increasingly withdrew even when he was physically among the others.

Charley Hoge’s small, damaged Bible became another measure of the camp’s strained life. After searching in the snow, Hoge recovered the soaked book and spent much of an afternoon and the following morning drying its pages beside the fire. In the days that followed, he turned through its dirty, stained leaves during idle hours, sometimes with a weak mixture of coffee and whiskey. When William Andrews asked him to read aloud, Hoge looked at him angrily and returned to the text. The Bible offered Hoge an object to occupy himself with during the enforced stillness, but the episode also shows how little the men’s shared confinement guaranteed fellowship: even a request for company met with refusal.

A Valley That Swallows Time

The weather changed without providing a reliable sense of progress. Some days were bright and almost summerlike, with snow still on the pine branches; others brought gray winds that drove snow down the valley and piled it around the shelter until the camp seemed buried in a cave. At night, cold cut through the men’s bison blankets, and they slept poorly even when they pressed together for warmth. Snowfall, wind, and stillness repeated themselves across weeks until days and weeks blurred together.

William Andrews experienced that blurring as a loss of time’s meaning. He sometimes checked the marks Schneider had cut into a pine branch to count the days, but continued counting mechanically after the number stopped mattering. The months became perceptible mainly when Schneider periodically demanded his wages: Andrews counted out the money and handed it over, performing an obligation without feeling that it measured time passing. The winter held him in place, and the ordinary markers of duration no longer seemed to connect one day to the next.

His estrangement reached beyond the camp. Before the winter, Andrews had crossed the plains to reach Butcher’s Crossing; now that journey and the town itself seemed distant, confused, almost dreamlike. The valley’s enclosed landscape—its broad floor, encircling mountains, pines, and bright autumn leaves—seemed to give his existence its shape and location. That absorption sharpened the meaning of the confinement: the longer the party remained, the less imaginable life outside it became. Yet when the snow began to melt, Andrews found himself anxiously anticipating departure without knowing what he hoped to find or what he wanted to escape. His longing was more intense than clear.

Thaw and Departure

The thaw came slowly. From late March into early April, the snow receded first where it lay thin, breaking the level valley into patches of grass and dirty drifts. Meltwater dampened the ground, and new grass began to emerge through the old, winter-dried growth. By then, waiting had become another ordeal. Andrews repeatedly followed the trail Miller and Schneider had made toward the pass, only to find the narrow way between two rocks still blocked by deep snow. The others waited even as meltwater began running beyond camp, unable to hurry Miller’s decision.

At the end of April, Miller finally told the men that they would load the wagon and leave the next day. Schneider sprang up, shouted with relief, and slapped Miller on the shoulder, laughing and celebrating the news in circles around the fire. His exuberance gave visible expression to the release the others had awaited, but it did not erase the distinct meanings the winter had acquired for them: Schneider longed for ordinary comforts, while Andrews faced a departure whose destination mattered less clearly to him than the valley he was about to leave.

The winter also sits within a wider history of depletion. Before the expedition’s confinement, Miller had recalled the Kansas plains as once black with American bison, with hunters able to take a thousand or fifteen hundred in two weeks; by the time he spoke, small herds remained, and he expected that Kansas would soon offer no more hunting. He had also described the bones left by earlier hunts, stretching across the plains, as evidence of what those hunts had done. In the valley, William Andrews watched the herd thin among the carcasses until he understood that Miller would not leave while a single animal remained. Afterward, the commercial logic of the slaughter would appear even more starkly: hunters sold bison meat to the railroad company and left the hides to rot. Against that history, the winter’s food shortage and the herd’s disappearance are not separate misfortunes; they belong to a landscape already being exhausted by the hunt.