The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

  “You came just in time,” Mary said, trying to sound cheerful. “The light’s going fast.”

  Harriet gave Elitha a long sideways look as she sorted through clothing. “Well, it’s not of my choosing. I wasn’t planning to do my washing tonight, but Elitha begged me to come with her. She was too afraid to come down by herself.”

  Elitha said nothing as she worked in the shallow water, but her shoulders were hunched high about her ears. Elitha Donner was fidgety and nervous, like a spooky horse. “Is that so, Elitha?” Mary asked. “Is it because of that boy? There’s no shame in that. I think it’s put everyone on edge.”

  The girl only shook her head, so Mary tried again. “Is it the Indians, then?” Mary was actually excited by the idea of finally getting to meet an Indian. They’d seen a few in the distance the first day they’d entered Indian Territory, a group of Pawnee coolly watching from horseback as the wagon train meandered through a valley. But they hadn’t come any closer.

  Most of the people in the party were scared of Indians, always telling stories of raids on livestock and white children being taken captive, but Mary wasn’t. One of the settlers on the Little Blue River had told her that among the Pawnee, the women were in charge. The men did the hunting and went to war, but it was the women who made the decisions.

  The idea had amazed her.

  “It isn’t the Indians I’m afraid of,” Elitha said. She was working quickly and kept her eyes trained on her hands, refusing to look up. She obviously didn’t intend to be there a second longer than she had to.

  “She’s afraid of ghosts,” Harriet said with a sigh. “She thinks this place is haunted.”

  “I never said that,” Elitha shot back. “I never said they were ghosts.” She hesitated, looking from Harriet to Mary. “Mr. Bryant says—”

  Harriet snorted. “Is that what’s bothering you? One of Mr. Bryant’s stories? Honestly, you should know better than to listen to the man.”

  “That’s not fair,” Elitha said. “He’s smart. You said so yourself. He came out here to write a book about the Indians. Says they told him there are spirits out here, spirits of the forests and the hills and the rivers.”

  “Oh, Elitha, don’t mind Mr. Bryant and his talk,” Mary said. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Mr. Bryant. He was very knowledgeable. That was obvious. And he’d proven himself capable enough when he set Billy Murphy’s leg after he broke it getting bucked off his horse. But there was something disconcerting about the way he seemed to wander around with his attention fixated elsewhere, as though he were always listening to a voice only he could hear.

  “But I’ve heard them.” Elitha’s brow furrowed. “At night, I’ve heard them calling to me. Haven’t you?”

  “Calling you?” Mary asked.

  “She’s highly suggestible. Her stepmother lets her read novels. All those stories have left her giddy,” Harriet said to Mary over Elitha’s head.

  Mary felt a twinge of irritation. 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.

  Mary reached over to pat Elitha’s hand. “I’m sure it was nothing. Perhaps you overheard people talking in the next tent over.”

  “It didn’t sound like two people talking. It didn’t sound like that at all.” Elitha bit her lower lip. “It sounded like . . . someone was whispering in a high voice, only it was very weak, like the wind was carrying it in from far away. It was strange, and sad. It was the scariest thing I ever heard.”

  A shiver went down Mary’s spine. She, too, had heard strange things at night since they’d started following the North Platte, but each time she’d told herself that it was her imagination. The cry of some animal she’d never seen before or wind whistling down a hollow canyon. Sounds carried differently over wide-open spaces.

  “Now you’re just letting your imagination run away with you,” Harriet said. “I think you should be careful going around talking about spirits and the Indians and such. People might start thinking that you have heathen inclinations, like Mr. Bryant.”

  “Oh, Harriet, really,” Mary said.

  Harriet was undeterred. “Why, there might be a man in this wagon train with his eye on you already—but he won’t want to marry you if he thinks that you’re a silly, scared girl.”

  Mary gave her last item an extra-hard twist, imagining instead that it was Harriet’s neck, then dropped it in her washtub to carry back to the wagon. “She’s only thirteen,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “That’s a bit young to be worrying about marriage, don’t you think?”

  Harriet looked insulted. “I do not. I was fourteen when I got married.” Then she turned a cold smile on Mary. “And what about you? Have you ever had a sweetheart? It seems strange to me that you’re not married yet.”

  “I was engaged not too long ago,” Mary said shortly, rinsing her hands in the water. “But he died unexpectedly before we could be wed.”

  “How sad for you,” Elitha murmured.

  “Fate can be fickle,” Mary said, as cheerfully as she could. “You never know what life has in store for you.”

  Harriet drew herself up again, looking down her long nose at them. “I’m surprised at you, Mary. You’re a good Christian. God decides what happens in our lives, all in accordance with his plan. He must’ve had a reason for taking this man away from you.”

  The words didn’t bother Mary, but Elitha gasped. “You can’t mean that, Harriet. God wouldn’t be so cruel to Mary.”

  “I’m not saying it’s Mary’s fault,” Harriet said, though her tone seemed to disagree. “I’m saying that these things aren’t random. God was telling Mary that the marriage simply wasn’t meant to be.”

  Mary bit her tongue. Harriet was enjoying being cruel, but she was correct in one respect. Mary would never admit it to anyone, certainly not her parents, but she’d known in her heart that she wasn’t ready to be married. Her sister Sarah had been happy to wed Jay Fosdick at nineteen—but Mary wasn’t like her older sister, a fact that became more apparent every passing day. When her father announced that they would be moving to California, she’d secretly been elated. She was tired of the small town she’d lived in since birth, where everyone knew about her family’s humble beginnings, that the family burned cow dung for warmth so that they could sell their firewood for money, until the plantings took hold and the harvests got better. People would always expect her to be exactly as they thought she was and would never let her be anything more. It was like trying to walk forward and finding that your head had been yoked in place.

  When her fiancé was killed, her greatest sense was of relief—though she was mightily ashamed for it. She knew her father had pinned everything on her planned marriage and the better circumstances it would have allowed all of them.

  Her sister’s marriage had been practical, but it had also been one of love. For Mary, Franklin Graves had always had other plans, she knew. He’d always imagined she’d be the one to make the kind of advantageous match that would save them all. She could hardly count the many times he’d told her she was his only hope.

  She could hardly count, either, the many times she’d wished that Sarah had been born the prettier one and not her, the one on whose shoulders others’ happiness rested.

  Harriet stood, cradling her washtub on her hip. “God has a special plan for each of us and it’s not for us to question the wisdom of his ways, only to listen and obey. I’m going to head back to camp. Are you coming with me, Elitha?”

  Elitha shook her head. “I’m not done yet.”

  Mary placed a hand on Elitha’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait with you and we can go back together.”

  “Very well,” Harriet called over her shoulder as she started back. “Dinner won’t make itself.”

  Elitha waited until Harriet was
out of earshot before speaking. “You don’t mind me talking to you about this, do you, Mary?” Her eyes were suddenly huge and round. “Because I just have to tell someone. It wasn’t the voices that scared me, not like I said.” She glanced furtively over her shoulder again. “It’s always been like that with me. Tamsen says that I’m sensitive—to the spirit world, she means. She’s interested in all that. She had her palm read by this woman back in Springfield. Had her fortune told with the cards, too. This woman told Tamsen that the spirits liked me. That they found it easy to talk to me.”

  Mary hesitated, then took Elitha’s hand, cold from the water. “It’s okay. You can tell me. Did something happen?”

  Elitha nodded slowly. “Two days ago, when we came across that abandoned trapper’s cabin . . .”

  “Ash Hollow?” Mary asked. She could still picture the tiny makeshift shack, boards bleached bone-white by the relentless prairie sun. A sad, lonely place, like the abandoned farmhouse she used to pass every Sunday on her way to service. Stripped nearly bare by the elements, dark empty windows like the hollow eye sockets of a skull, a stark reminder of another family’s failure. Let that be a lesson, her father had said to her once as they slowly rolled by it in the wagon, not too many years after they, too, had been on the verge of losing everything. But for the grace of God, that might have been us.

  The world was fragile. One day, growth; the next day, kindling.

  Elitha squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes. Ash Hollow. Did you go inside?”

  Mary shook her head.

  “It was filled with letters. Hundreds of them. Stacked on a table, held down with rocks. Mr. Bryant told me that pioneers leave them so that the next traveler heading east can take them to the first post office he sees.” Elitha looked at Mary uncertainly. “Would you think I was bad if I told you I read some?”

  “But, Elitha. They weren’t meant for you.”

  Elitha blushed. “I figured it wouldn’t harm anyone. It would be like reading stories. Most of the letters weren’t sealed, only folded up and left on the table, so the writer had to know that anybody could read them. Only it turned out they weren’t letters.”

  Mary blinked, uncomprehending. She looked at Elitha crouched before her, pale as the rising moon. “What do you mean?”

  “They weren’t addressed to anyone,” Elitha said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “And there wasn’t any news in them . . . I opened letter after letter, and they all said the same thing, over and over.”

  “I still don’t understand.” Mary felt as if a spider were tracking up and down her spine. “If they weren’t letters, what were they?”

  Elitha thrust a hand awkwardly in her apron pocket. She drew out a small folded square of paper and handed it to Mary. “I kept one of them. I thought I should show it to someone, but I haven’t yet. I didn’t know who to show it to. Nobody would believe me. Maybe they’d think I wrote it myself, to get attention. But I didn’t, Mary. I didn’t.”

  Mary took the paper. It was brittle and fragile from many days in the heat. She unfolded it carefully, afraid it might disintegrate in her hands. The ink was faded, as though it had been written a long time ago, but she didn’t have any problem making out the words.

  Turn back, it said in a thin, spidery hand. Turn back or you will all die.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They found the Nystrom boy, or what was left of him, later that same night.

  A knot of dread clogged Stanton’s throat as he followed George Donner through the circle of wagons and headed into the dark, empty plain.

  Two of the teamsters had made the discovery just minutes before, as they were driving the cattle out to graze for the evening. Through the fading light, they’d seen a depression in the tall grass and went to investigate. Both were hardy men, but nonetheless what they found had made one of them heave.

  Dots of light floated ahead in the darkness and at first Stanton thought they were an illusion of some kind, but as he got closer the pinpricks became flame, and then torches. A dozen men were already assembled in a circle, the torches like a halo of flame over their heads. Stanton knew most of them—William Eddy, Lewis Keseberg, and Jacob Wolfinger, as well as Edwin Bryant—but there were a few from the original wagon party, friends of the boy’s family, he’d seen only in passing. A strange noise, halfway between a cry and a howl, rose off in the distance, rolling toward them from across the empty plain like a wave.

  “Damn wolves,” someone muttered.

  As Stanton shoved his way inside the circle, the first thing he saw was Edwin Bryant on his knees. What looked like a red, wet smear in the grass turned out to be a body. He shut his eyes momentarily. He’d faced ugly things before but was hard-pressed to recall ever seeing something as monstrous as this. He opened his eyes again.

  The head was intact. In fact, if you only looked at the face you wouldn’t think anything was wrong. The boy’s eyes were closed, long brown lashes stark against chalk-white cheeks. His fine blond hair was plastered against his skull, his tiny mouth closed. He looked peaceful, as though he were sleeping.

  But from the neck down . . .

  Next to him, George Donner let out a whimper.

  “What happened to him?” Lewis Keseberg asked, prodding the ground by the body with the butt of his rifle, as if it might yield answers. Keseberg and Donner were friends, though Stanton couldn’t imagine why. Keseberg was all black temper and violence, hard lines: your side, my side. Hard to believe he had the patience to be a father but he had a little daughter, Stanton had heard.

  “It’s got to be wolves, body torn up like that.” William Eddy rubbed his beard, a nervous habit. Eddy was a carpenter, good at repairing broken axles and busted wheels. For this reason, he was popular among the families on the wagon train. But he was jumpy, too, high-strung. Stanton wasn’t sure he trusted him.

  “What do you think, Doc?” Jacob Wolfinger asked, in his mild German accent.

  Bryant sat back on his heels. “I’m no doctor,” he reminded them. “And I couldn’t say. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was wolves. It seems too neat.”

  Stanton shuddered involuntarily. There wasn’t even a body, not really. There was almost nothing left but the skeleton. Tatters of flesh and scattered bones in a flattened, blood-soaked circle in the grass, intestines lying in a heap and already dark with flies. And another thing troubled him: They were six miles up the trail from where the boy had first gone missing. Wolves wouldn’t drag a carcass before devouring it.

  “Whatever it was, it was hungry,” Donner commented—his face was leached of color. “We should bury the remains. We don’t want any of the women or children to see this.”

  Eddy spat. “What about the parents? Somebody’s got to say whether this is the right boy or not—”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere. The next white settlement is days away,” Wolfinger said. “Who else could it be?” Wolfinger had emerged as the leader of the German emigrants in the party, translating for the ones who knew no English. They kept mostly to themselves, and often huddled around their campfires at night, speaking rapid-fire German—though Stanton hadn’t failed to miss Wolfinger’s pretty, young wife, Doris, whose hands looked like they were made for playing a piano, not carrying firewood or tugging on reins.

  In the end, a couple of men went for shovels. Others wandered back to check on their families, to wake their sleeping children or simply to look at them, be reassured by their presence.

  Stanton rolled up his sleeves and took a turn digging.

  They didn’t need a large hole to accommodate the remains—there was so little of the boy—but they wanted it deep so that no animal would go after the bones. Besides, the physical exertion felt good. Stanton wanted to be tired tonight when he went to bed.

  Too tired to dream.

  Predictably, although George Donner stayed, he did nothing more than heap a few shovelf
uls of dirt onto the grave. When at last they were done, Donner said a brief halting prayer over the fresh dirt. The old words sounded thin in the night air.

  Donner and Stanton walked back to the wagons together, along with James Reed and Bryant. Stanton didn’t know Reed well and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d been well known among business leaders back in Springfield, but not well liked.

  Reed held a dying torch overhead, but the flame could do little against the darkness that surrounded them. He and Donner floated in and out of the light, their pale faces bobbing on the periphery like ghosts. The ground was uneven and treacherous underfoot, broken up by prairie dog tunnels and clumps of tall grass. The hot summer air, so oppressive during the day, had cooled but was still dry and dusty.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Reed said at length, breaking the silence. “I agree with your earlier assessment, Mr. Bryant. If it were an animal that attacked, it would have been messier. The answer is obvious. Indians—it had to be Indians.” He raised a hand to stop Bryant from interrupting. “I know you claim to be some kind of expert on Indians, Mr. Bryant. You go live with them and talk to them and take all manner of notes for this book of yours. But you’ve never fought them, never faced them in anger as I have. I know what they’re capable of.” Reed told anyone who would listen that he’d fought in the Black Hawk War, probably so the tough old trail hands would stop treating him like a tenderfoot.

  Bryant’s voice was mild. “That’s right, Mr. Reed. Everything I know about Indians I’ve learned from talking to them as opposed to shooting at them from across a field. But arguing won’t resolve anything. Even you must agree that if we let people think the Indians are responsible, things will go bad pretty fast. We’re traveling through Indian territory. The last thing we need is for people to panic. Besides,” he said, as Reed opened his mouth to object, “I’ve never heard of an Indian custom where they slaughter and dress a body like that.”