According to our maps, we are more than half way there.
My hands were frozen into claws around the climbing rope.
The cold was crawling into my legs, biting me through my clothes and I just knew that if I let go, I'd slide all the way down the mountain back to New York.
Shivering in the cold, I open my eyes and all there was was that rope, disappearing into the blizzard.
Let me take you back three years.
I was working for Sam Carver, putting up posters for his speeches.
Sam Carver, venture extroadionaire, had seen all known continents of the world.
Now, Mr Carver said that Americans had a right to everything to the west of us.
He called it manifest destiny and I just could not get it out of my head like,
It was a hymn to the Lord and Sam was the mouth of God saying, 'Go west, my son, go west.'
So when Sam said he was going to California, I told him I was the kind of woodsman that could chop down a tree with a stick and a sharp rock.
Hell, I could start a fire with a piece of wood and some wet moss, you see,
I grew up in the mountains of Kentucky where just breathing is like pulling a tornado into your lungs and spitting out the debris,
Where sunset is like all the gun powder in the world going off in reverse on the horizon.
Mr Carver, he said that sunsets in California were like the pacific closing its eyes.
According to our maps, we were more than half way there and Sam said that God spoke to him.
Told him to turn south, turn south,
And some of us thought we was going the wrong way,
Especially when we starting climbing that mountain, but he just kept repeating, 'South, we've got to go south.'
Now, I'd have trusted that man as long as I still had teeth in my head, but then there was that rope.
Disappearing into the blizzard.
Manwell yelled back through the snow, 'Richard! There's blood coming outta my shoes!'
And I ripped off his boots, and his feet, they were rotten from the bottom up,
Burnt black like firewood, with coals glowing in the centre.
He asked me to shoot him right there but a Christian man can't kill no one so we built him a fire and just left him there.
I was leaning back on the rope, pulling Johnson up an ice shelf and when he came up over the lip his leg snapped.
I ran up to Carver and said, 'John's leg damn near broke off!', but all he said was, 'Well, he'll have to get it put back on when we get to California.'
And then the meat ran out.
I caught myself staring at McNab as he laid down in the snow.
I'd never been so hungry.
And when Sam smiled, I saw the gates of Heaven clanging shut and he said that Providence wanted us to eat,
Wanted us to have this,
And I bit into his raw and frozen thigh.
His blood tasted like every single word a manifest destiny spit out and a howl from the Devil.
The last thing I saw before I passed out was Carver, heading West with two human legs hung over his shoulder.
He was just whistling, walking to California.