The Old Blog in the Desert

Most folks think of Nevada as sun-blasted rock and open desert, where heat dances above the sage. But the men who’ve wintered in the high country know different. When the mountains turn hostile, the wind comes off the ridges like a honed blade, and the cold can reach into a man and test his soul.

Christmas morning found Andy Mercer and Lucas Hale working their way along an old mining trail north of Ely. There were no dogs and no sleds, just two pack mules and snow so deep a man had to fight for every step. It wasn’t mushing, but it was close enough for any reasonable man.

Lucas had known weather like this before. He took it with the sort of quiet patience you see in men who’ve survived more winters than they care to count.

But Andy was from Mississippi, land of soft winds, warm rain, and summers that wrapped you like a quilt. Snow, where he came from, was a curiosity, not a hardship.

Why a man raised on warm ground would choose Nevada for prospecting was anybody’s guess. Andy never offered a reason, and nobody pressed him. What they did know was this: he hated the cold with a pure and righteous hate.

They pushed through drifts that swallowed their boots, drifting snow swirling around them in a wild dance. Lucas kept an eye on Andy, and sure enough, the man was suffering.

“Talk of your cold,” Andy muttered, pulling his hood so tight only his nose stuck out. “Feels like this wind aims to chew me down to the bone.”

The wind didn’t just cut—it stabbed. It slipped through wool and canvas the way a knife slips between ribs. A man could lose track of his own body in weather like that.

Andy had bundled himself in enough clothing to outfit a small town—two sweaters, a handful of scarves, and socks pulled over the outside of his gloves. And still he shivered like a wet pup.

“Lucas,” he groaned, “this country ain’t fit for man nor mule. Feels like something sharp’s tryin’ to punch its way clear through my coat.”

“Keep moving,” Lucas said. “A man stops out here, he doesn’t start again.”

More than once, Andy blinked too long and his lashes froze together. Each time he whimpered, “Lucas, I’m blind. My face is froze shut,” and Lucas had to pry them apart.

“Quit blinkin’ like you’re expectin’ trouble,” Lucas told him, but the words held no meanness.

The mules blew frost from their nostrils. The air burned their lungs. Every step forward felt like dragging iron boots through frozen tar. It was misery from daylight to dark, but only one of them announced their suffering with regularity.

Every few minutes, Andy had something new to say.

“Lucas, I’m freezin’ alive.”

“Lucas, I can’t feel anything below my hat.”

“Lucas, if we die out here, I’m blamin’ you.”

It might’ve been funny if the cold hadn’t already worked its way into their bones.

Yet for all his talk, Andy never stopped. He stumbled. He cursed the weather, the mountains, the snow, and at one point, both mules by name, but he kept going. Lucas respected that. Plenty of men talked big until the world turned hard. Andy talked when it got hard, but he walked just the same.

By midday, the sky thickened again, heavy with a new storm, and Lucas called a halt beneath a ragged stand of junipers. As they stamped out a flat place for camp, he looked over at Andy—the man trembling so hard his teeth rattled—and he couldn’t help but laugh.

“Andy,” he said, “you complain more than any man I ever met… and still you keep right on going.”

Andy sniffed, breath turning to ice between them. “Quitting means stayin’ in this cold longer. I aim to survive it, Lucas, then find someplace warm enough to remind me why men were meant to be comfortable.”

So they carried on through that brutal Christmas, two men and two mules forging a trail across Nevada’s high country—one quiet and seasoned, the other cold, miserable, and stubborn as a knot in raw rope—on the coldest trail either of them would ever see.