The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

by Daniel James Brown

They worked their way carefully and deliberately into the structure of each animal, probing with bloody, cold-numbed fingers for the openings in the joints where they could separate the parts with just a few cuts. Where they had to, they sawed through thick bones, but mostly the animals came apart easily under their expert hands. The women took the tails and got out hatchets and chopped them into short sections for making oxtail soup. Women and boys and girls stacked up the lean hindquarters and forequarters and sections of ribs and vertebrae with shreds of flesh still clinging to them, burying them in snowbanks for refrigeration. When they were done, the snow around all three cabins was crimson. But fresh snow was still falling steadily, and it soon erased every sign of the butchery. They wiped their knives clean and put them away for now, none of them yet knowing the terrible irony that lay latent in what had just unfolded here.