Winter 1871-1872: The Journal of Chester Goode

I crawl out of the crevasse back into those vicious screaming winds with snow coming in sideways hard enough to sting my eyeballs.

For a second I find myself thinking about Indians, Navajo Indians, and how they got that legend about them things they say run around in winter bringing evil and famine and got a shriek like death. I forget the word they have for it. Mr. Dillon told me our word is skin-walkers, and we aren't to say it out loud around the Indians. The sound of the wind and all that white and all the burning and stinging and hurting and bleeding and then Abner comes to and I hear him sounding like a hog that got stuck the wrong way in butchering and ain't died right away and I figure this is exactly what one of them skin-walker critters would do to a couple men.

But this ain't Navajo country, so I reckon we're just real, real down on our luck....Chester accompanies Doc and a rancher to haul lumber to Dodge, but a wagon crash in a blizzard leaves them trapped on an ice-covered hillside.