They reached the East slope of the Sierras
about a month and a half later than they were supposed to,
because of the route running into so many difficulties
that they had not anticipated, because
of the treachery of the guide who had written the book,
and the quarrels within the party itself,
which slowed them down.
It begins to snow before they can
get through the first pass in the Sierras.
And they take alder bushes and bend them down and put stones
on the tips of them.
And take blankets out of their wagons, in some cases,
cut the covers off of the wagons and put them
over the tops of the bushes, to make little tents out of them.
And they let the snow fall on the roofs of those.
Now these are all prairie farmers and small town
merchants from that Midwestern and Northern border state area,
where a snowfall in the last week of October
would melt in a day or two or three.
There's nobody in the group who has any experience of living
at 6,000 feet.
And they don't know that that snow that's falling
will continue to fall, and it'll still
be on the ground in March.
It does snow for three days.
When that gets up, there's a sleet storm for three days,
and that's followed by another snow for another three days.
On the 10th day, the first person is able to come out.
And he finds that the snow then is already
about three feet deep around the side of the creek
and around the lake nearby, that is eventually
to be called Donner Lake.
They go up and measure the depth of snow in the pass
that they're supposed to be bringing their wagons through,
and the snow is five feet deep in the first of the passes.
In this episode, Donner and his wife
are living in one of these huts with their three daughters.
Donner's wife's name is Tamsen.
His children are Eliza and Frances and Georgia.
And they have Wolfinger's widow living with them also.
They have now been living in this situation
for about five weeks.
When the children were asleep--
Oh, I'm sorry, I should mention.
Donner, who speaks the poem in the first person,
has a severe gash on his hand that he
suffered when he was trying to repair a broken axle.
And gangrene is setting in, and he
has moments when he becomes delirious and the pain
is moving up his arm.
When the children were asleep, Tamsen took my hand
and dressed the wound with a clean cloth
while I held my breath.
The pain was swelling far up my arm.
She opened her blouse.
"Look at this," she whispered.
"You can count my ribs.
Feel here and press your fingers in."
She unpinned her hair and shook it out,
so the auburn braids dropped down her spine
and seemed to steam against her skin.
When she turned, her breasts were as pale and cool as wax.
She whispered, "look how my hips hardly hold a skirt in place
anymore."
As I joined her in the blanket on the pine floor,
she made a remark about the slack skin
that flapped on my legs.
She liked to see the way they shook.
But I told her, "if it's a matter of their shape,
surely yours look better."
She laughed, lying in my arms with my hand
at rest on her small waist.