...of dumbfoundedness

I was going fast. I didn’t care about keeping low. I had my eyes on the spaces between trees. I was looking for the place where we’d left Simon and the sleigh. I thought I’d see Simon first, maybe his breath above a bank or beside the trunk of a tree. I slipped on a little snow the wind hadn’t blown from the path we’d took. I still had the gun in my right hand so I lost my balance. When I put out my left for support, it went into a drift to my elbow and into the barberry thorns. I jerked back and fell hard. Hans and Pa found it funny. But the legs that lay in front of me weren’t mine. I’d gone out in the blazing air. It was queer. Out of the snow I’d kicked away with my foot stuck a horse’s hoof and I didn’t feel the least terror or surprise.

Looks like a hoof, I said.

Hans and Pa were silent. I looked up at them, far away. Nothing now. Three men in the snow. A red scarf and some mittens. . . somebody’s ice and coal . . . the picture for January. But behind them on the blank hills? Then it rushed over me and I thought: this is as far as he rid him. I looked at the hoof and the shoe which didn’t belong in the picture. No dead horses for January. And on the snowhills there would be wild sled tracks and green trees and falling toboggans. This is as far. Or a glazed lake and rowdy skaters. Three men. On his ass: one. Dead horse and gun. And the question came to me very clearly, as if out of the calendar a girl had shouted: are you going to get up and walk on? Maybe it was the Christmas picture. The big log and the warm orange wood I was sprawled on in my flannel pajamas. I’d just been given a pistol that shot BBs. And the question was: was I going to get up and walk on? Han’s shoes, and Pa’s, were as steady as the horse’s. Were they hammered on? Their bodies stolen? Who’d left them standing here? And Christmas cookies cut in the shape of the kid’s dead wet behind . . . with maybe a cherry to liven the pale dough . . . a coal from the stove. But I couldn’t just say that looks like a hoof or that looks like a shoe and go right on because Hans and Pa were waiting behind me in their wool hats and pounding mittens . . . like a picture for January. Smiling. I was learning to skate.

Looks like this is as far as he rid him.

[The Pedersen Kid, Gass, W. H.]