Chapter three - Stalled

The Story of a Stranded Wagon Train

Stalled

Chapter Three

I dread calling to mind the experience that I’m about to relate since it tested my resolve to live. Swift moving storm clouds overtook and swathed us under a white sheet that settled and obscured anything with shape or color. We were swallowed into a storm that ebbed, then intensified, growing ever stronger. If an order to stop came from the front of the train, we never knew. Wagons just stopped, not well-ordered, but helter-skelter. I couldn’t see the one ahead, and when I realized he’d stopped, I veered my team off to the right and stopped sideward. It would be three days before we’d see the disarrayed order of the wagons.

The first winds had set upon us from our right rear, sweeping through our ranks, and driving heavy snow into and around each man and beast. We generally walked alongside the wagons to avoid the jolting ride. While walking, we could also goad the oxen and crack the bullwhip like a gunshot over their ears to keep them moving. But now that driving wind found its way into our wrists and ankles and neck causing me to climb into the wagon box and find some shelter from the wind.

The oxen worked hard to pull their weight while plodding through the ever-deepening snow. As soon as the wagon in front made tracks, the wind filled them in with snow so that the next in line had no readymade trail. Their short legs kept stumbling into holes or on rocks and moved us forward only because we forced them to.

I remember thinking maybe this ordeal will be over soon, and we can get rolling again. The oxen still stood in their yokes from which they should’ve been released and let to drift with the wind at their backs. They couldn’t have gotten so far that we couldn’t have rounded them up after the storm had passed. But danger didn’t seem to register with our leader Un-Able, and we just sat around waiting. 

The howling gales stopped our attempts to build fires to warm ourselves. My Irish mother told          stories of the female banshees who would wail and scream through the night predicting the death of someone. Was it a banshee who screamed our fate and buried us in this raging white? The story came alive in my thoughts and as the hours passed I kept imagining the banshee had come for all of us. The storm stopped everything except my fears and images of doom.

We lost all concept of time; we couldn’t see the sun, only the faint light of day and the consuming darkness of night. The oxen stood yoked to their wagons and snow kept piling around them and our wagons. Soon it became next to impossible to wade through chest high drifts with the wind blowing the way it was. We were all hungry. I had some jerky in my pocket to chew on, but it didn’t do much to kill the growl in my stomach.

We wrapped in our buffalo robes to keep out the cold and lay there shivering. Strange thoughts came and went, maybe that’s the way a freezing man thinks, not making sense, imagining a baby cry or a woman scream in the midst of our pitiable lot. My oxen went down sometime on the third day as the snow drifted over and around them where soon they became mounds that blended into the featureless landscape. How long can we last like this?

Next: The owner sets out looking for his wagons