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In every direction, the prairie unfurled like a blanket, occasionally rippled by wind: mile after uninterrupted mile of buffalo grass, disrupted only by the red spire of Chimney Rock, standing like a sentry in the distance. If he squinted, the wagon train looked like children’s toys scattered in the vast, unending brush—flimsy, meaningless, inconsequential.
Around them, the regular morning chaos whirled. Teamsters herded the oxen, the ground rumbling beneath the animals’ weight. Men dismantled their tents and loaded them into their wagons, or smothered out fires beneath sand. The air was filled with the sound of children shouting as they carried buckets of water for the day’s drinking and washing.
The empty shack had been turned into a frontier outpost of sorts for the pioneers crossing the plains, who had taken to leaving letters behind for the next eastbound traveler to carry to a real post office for delivery onward. Many of these letters were simply folded pieces of paper left under a rock in the hope that they would eventually reach the intended recipient back home. Stanton had been strangely comforted by the sight of all those letters. They had seemed a testament to the travelers’ love of freedom and desire for greater opportunity, no matter the risk. But Bryant had gotten
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Whoever had first thought to call the pioneers’ wagons “prairie schooners” was quite clever; the canopies did look like the sails of ships, blazing white under the brilliant morning sun. And the thick clouds of dust kicked up by wagon wheels could almost be mistaken for the swell of waves carrying their miniature ships across a desert sea.
When she was confined in a wagon all day she began to feel that clawing, discontented restlessness rise up inside her like a trapped animal, the way it used to back home. At least outside, the beast—the unhappiness—could roam and give her space to breathe and think.
It was like one of those old fairy tales, of children suddenly whisked away into a netherworld, taken by angry spirits.
She’d known plenty of women like Harriet over the years, women who looked as if their faces had been slowly compressed between the pages of a Bible, all pinched and narrow.
In this, at least, his grandfather had been correct. Evil was invisible, and it was everywhere.
He knew the mangled body of that young boy should be bothering him . . . and it was. But something else was bothering him, too, persisting like the stench of blood in the air. It was the nagging feeling that something vitally important—some invisible thread—was about to unravel.
Had Stanton imagined how eager they were to leave? Eager to put bad luck and the memory of the butchered Nystrom boy behind them? Eager to separate themselves from the fractious Donner party, as the California-bound group had come to be known?
Clouds floated in the sky, fluffy as cotton still on the stalk and so low that you would swear you could reach up and touch them. The plain stretched to the horizon, great patches of green and gold, and Little Sandy snaking through it. A gentle river, and, true to its name, not wide at all. It was hard to imagine anything bad happening here.
So many women seemed to turn their words over in their mouths like sugar cubes, until you could never be sure of the shape of the original thought.
She stared at him with those wide, gray eyes. Like the sky heavy with clouds, or the flint-gray of a Boston ocean.
I turned around and fired blindly into the blackness. The flash from my rifle illuminated something in the trees, and I fired again. This time I heard a yelp of pain, distinctly animal, and—my eyes having adjusted to the darkness—I saw the glimmer of yellow eyes and teeth, and then whatever they were, they were gone. I focused every bit of my attention on sound, trying to tell if they were circling around to attack me from another angle, but all the noises died away suddenly.
And then of course, there were the voices. She’d always heard them, but they had taken on more urgency in the past month, first at Fort Laramie, and now here. Not the voices of the other members of the wagon train laughing and arguing at all hours. The voices no one else heard. The ones that had told her to read those letters at Ash Hollow in the first place. The same ones that told her to avoid the wild man in the chicken coop, chained up like a dog—the one who’d attacked Mary Graves. But even from afar, she heard him, too. He had a voice, just like the other invisible voices, that reached
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moonlight bathed the courtyard in blue-gray light. A crisscross of whispers tickled at her mind, and she knew they were not really whispers but voices. She tried to clear her mind and focus. From the buildings she heard the sound of muffled voices—real ones—the occasional stab of a voice raised in anger. Another argument, perhaps between the Eddys and the Reeds.
The wind tugged at the paper in Donner’s hand, as though a ghost were trying to snatch it away.
“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”
What else had Snyder said to him last night? You think you know how the world works, but you don’t know shit. Men like you make me angry. You’re so fucking stupid that you don’t even know how stupid you are.
Luke Halloran loved that fiddle like a child. Again the idea came to her that this was not Halloran, that Halloran had died and this was somebody else. But that was insane, obviously. Far more likely that the weeks of illness had changed him in some way. Or perhaps he’d always been this way, and the illness had obscured it. When she had imagined the journey, she had imagined hardship, and hunger, and dirt that clung everywhere, like another skin, and could never be sloughed off. But she hadn’t imagined this—the people, that she would be surrounded by so many other people, unable to escape
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The pulse transformed to a single, unifying rhythm. She was afraid. She could hardly breathe for the smell of rotting. What had happened to him? She had known disease to come back but not like this, not so quickly it would hollow a man in an hour.
Why had she left her lantern up on the bank? The darkness was so thick it felt like the pressure of a hand.
“I’m hungry.” Again and again: a whispered note of agony. “I’m hungry, Tamsen.” He opened his eyes again, and she saw nothing but a deep pit, and she saw, too, that he was smiling.
He bared his teeth. Give me what I want or I’ll take it . . . I’m starving. The face she looked into wasn’t human anymore.
The voices had only gotten worse since Fort Bridger. The only one she knew clearly was the voice of Luke Halloran, who for a week had moldered in the wagon, hovering between life and death. She knew now that the others were dead, and they mostly spoke gibberish.
And the voices came back now, more furious than ever, an angry rush of them, until she knew they were the ones pulling her legs, drawing her under, turning her under the whitecaps.
Spirits prowling the woods, dressed as men. My name is Legion, for we are many. Mark 5:9.
Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all. “I’m afraid so,” Reed told her. He was surprised to feel a sudden tightness in his chest, watching his child place her doll in the dirt, carefully, as if it were a true burial.
For many people did not like the truth, it seemed—thought it was a dirty and distasteful thing, impolite and complicated. They didn’t have the patience for it—for numbers, liters, rations, portions, reasons. Many simply preferred the sweet, momentary pleasure of hearing whatever they wanted to hear.
“Then the Lord must be mightily displeased with you, because he has led you into the valley of death. Make peace with your Lord before it is too late, because the hungry ones are coming for you.”
the figure squinted and moved back slightly into the shadows, crouched. She blinked in the darkness. She could see that he was lean and rangy and crusted brown all over like a skeleton caked in mud or as if he’d grown an outer coating of bark. Like he was part of the wilderness.
The lantern was too dim to show much: only shadows, impressions, movement. A chill lifted on her neck. The way they moved was all wrong. She thought of Luke Halloran, the broken way he’d crawled and lunged. They were like wolves: They circled the way wolves did, they spoke without saying anything out loud. Wolves separated their prey, isolated them, and picked them off, one by one.
The children began to bolt. “Stay together!” Tamsen screamed. But it was hopeless. They scattered, children darting through the sage like rabbits, eyes wide with fright.
The wide black sky, the vastness that usually filled her with optimism, made her feel small and fragile that night. Nature had shown them these past few months how vulnerable they were.
The early fall heat had finally broken, releasing refreshing winds from the north, blowing clean the sheets and wagon covers, breathing renewed energy into the party.
Hope, Tamsen realized, could be a very dangerous thing, especially when dealt to desperate hands.
The snow kept falling over Alder Creek: It was dainty, pretty, even. Unrelenting.
“We’ll try to find a pass through the mountains tomorrow,” Breen said now as they gathered around the fire. But he’d been saying the same thing night after night, and if this storm didn’t blow through soon,
All around them, the snow came so fast it blurred the world behind a veil, and swallowed the sound of the babies wailing in the cold.
The sky was thick with clouds. Snow fell lightly; the storm wasn’t over yet.
The Donners had been more than a week at Alder Creek, and every day, it snowed. Elitha felt like the whole world had shrunk to the size of the tent, to the sprawling branches of the giant alder tree, to the distance between firepits.
Death had been chasing them a long while, she knew, but it had never gotten this close. Now it was at their heels like a begging dog; the smell of it was in their hair and under their fingernails. It was everywhere, and it was waiting.
He turned blindly, swinging the branch like a club. Heard it connect, saw the dark and twisted thing, half man and half beast, fall back between the trees. A kind of demon. A monster. There was no other word for it.
