Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

One time on such an occasion they scrambled up the mountain only to meet a bear. The bear saw them before they saw it. It had smelled them coming and laboured a time between curiosity and fear. Then when the men’s heads appeared the bear froze. It watched them like creatures landed from the moon. Briefly it crouched and in those moments seemed to belie its own reputation for ferocity. Brown’s head came up above the rock to the ledge. He saw the bear and let out a curse, and whether it was the noise or the wide whites of his eyes or the sharp tang of fear that burned on the air then, the bear rose. Brown called back to the others behind him. He tried to get them to retreat, but already the bear was coming forward. It was less than an instant, then the noise of the bear and the size of the bear both achieved that aim and the men turned about and sought places below them to jump. But there were none. The bear roared. It stood and made as yet no other action, as if such were not required but that the demonstrated evidence of its own magnificence was sufficient to make surrender all enemies. The men pushed backward and were close together and reached for weapons. The bear opened its jaws and roared again and slavered a whitish loop. It moved forward in a massive lunge at the blond head of Lieutenant Brown. Then Tom Foley shot it. The bullet hit the bear in the forehead. Its head twitched backward as if tugged by some wire or other attachment to something greater than itself. The men saw the puzzlement register in the eyes of the bear and then this the bear dismissed and came forward again and Tom Foley shot it again and Cartwright shot it, too. The bear howled out and shuddered and twisted and its right leg gave beneath it and it fell.

The silence regathered in the mountains.

“You saved our lives,” Brown said. Then they moved away from there and left the great corpse of the bear on that ledge and were like men chastened or obscurely stained.

They went on. All through the rest of that summer and into the autumn that unit of the Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army travelled up and down the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains. They drew maps and charts and sent these sometimes by rider back to Fort Laramie. But they did not find a way to bring the railroad through the mountains. The air turned cold in the beginning of October. The rider brought back two mules laden with heavy blankets and other supplies for the winter. The first snows fell. Mountain lions came down and prowled and Tom and Cartwright sat watch and fired rifle shots. At the campfire Brown told the others they could go back. He said the winter would be harsh and long. He said he himself was going to stay on, that he could not give up now, but that for any that wanted he could issue orders to return to the fort.

None of the men left him. They watched the way his eyes burned when he spoke of what they could achieve, and the candles lit in their own eyes, too.

The winds became knives. The skin of their faces peeled off, then the new skin dried hard and cracked and in wrinkled lines turned scarlet as though branded by the burning feet of crows. Their lips blistered and opened at the corners and the burst skin puffed with pus. Their legs froze on the flanks of their horses. In their long boots their toes turned numb and they had to jump down and fall over and pull off the boots and try to beat the blood back into their feet with their hands. Two of the horses died overnight. They froze like things iced in fairy tale. From then on the men tethered the horses together and blanketed them and made their own rests beneath their legs so the meagre heat of their bodies might rise to the animals. They came on snows thick to the waist. They dug out small tunnels and made tiny progress and one time encountered the upright body of a frozen man with bluish face and finger pointing as if at the way to eternity. The fierce season made even emptier that empty place. They seemed the only ones then and the rest of the world might have perished or been taken in judgement and they alone were overseen and endured in that white and pure domain.

In those days, then, in that place where time seemed ceased and the very change of which they were to be the agent was nowhere evident, Tom Foley’s mind wandered into the past. He thought often of his youngest brother. He lay beneath the wide magnificence of the night skies there and tried to recall the stories of the stars Teige had told when they were younger. He looked for the Great Bear and Cassiopeia and Cepheus and he remembered stories of winged horses and charioteers and deeds heroic and fantastical. In his mind he heard Teige tell them the way he had learned them from their mother, and through those constellations that hung there the family was then connected and the past and the present made one. For days then Tomas’s mind drifted. He rode with visions. He passed a white day moving through the mountains but was in all but body thousands of miles away in the green fields of the island of the saint. He was there with Teige and his father. And his mother, Emer, was there, too. And the twins. And all were as they had once been and were not aged or changed, and his mother’s hair blew on the soft breeze in that place she had never seen. They were walking over the way toward the tower. He saw the blossoms on the berry bushes. He smelled the furze and the blooms of May and let his hand touch against them as he went. And all of that verdant loveliness that had entered him once now rose and screened the other world. He sat his horse and let limp the reins and walked it forward behind the others, rocking softly in the saddle and drifting back to that place where he last felt a sense of home. Snow flurried and crowned his hat. The muffled clop of hooves made a rhythm slow and hypnotic, and Tom Foley’s eyes dulled into that look that in his country was called away with the fairies. It endured for a certain time. But it stopped abruptly when he saw the face of his wife, Blath. Then the grief rose through him. He saw the ghostly faces of those multitudes dying on the roadways and their shrunken bodies and pulled himself upright on his horse and lifted his face into the wind that it might sear him.

They are dead now, he thought. All of them.

They did not find the route for the railroad that winter. Nor at any time in the year that followed. They sent plans and drawings and their suggestions east but heard nothing in reply. They imagined themselves forgotten. Brown used this then as his principal motivation. He told them the politicians were arguing among themselves. He said there was probably no one who thought it could be done and that the finances of the country were being spent elsewhere. He said he believed the gold in California had finished and so greed no longer fuelled the enterprise. He told the men this and they sat hunched and worn and aged about a fire. And then he raised his voice and said that he was still going on. Who would continue with him? After a time it became needless to ask. They rode on. They passed across the mountains and down into Fort Bridger but were met there with looks curious and askance, full beards and tattered uniforms lending them the air of renegades. None felt welcomed. For they were not engaged in the business of that army proper and might have been like some figments or ghosts travailing in a shadow-world. They left then and rode back to the mountains and felt they were men grown intolerant of all but each other’s company.

They travelled northward up into the lands of Montana. The seasons slipped past them. They crossed over the Rockies and down past the Big Horn. They rode wide of the villages of the Indians. And not Crow or Blackfoot or Cheyenne or Arapaho did they kill in that time.