by Alma Katsu
The first thing Stanton noticed was that it smelled smoky but not of wood smoke. It was as though Hastings had been burning herbs or flowers, and the smell recalled Tamsen sharply to him, the smell of her hair on his fingers, the way her skin tasted. Hanging from wooden pegs were dozens of Indian charms made of feathers, twigs, and string. The wagon looked as though it had been ransacked, the floor a hodgepodge of barrels and chests and hogsheads. As his eyes got used to the dark, Stanton saw a bulky figure cowering at their approach, crouched behind a leather-strapped trunk. A rifle barrel glinted in the dim light.
Under different circumstances, at a different time, Lansford Hastings might have been handsome; he had a square jaw, a strong brow, and dark, sharp eyes. Now his face was powdered with trail dust. His hair was roped in dirty strands.
Stanton came forward cautiously, all too aware of the rifle pointed at him. “Lansford Hastings? We represent another wagon party. We saw your handbill and expected you would be at Fort Bridger to lead us down the cutoff. But when we reached the trailhead we found your note.”
At this, Hastings’s eyes came to life and settled on Stanton. “Why didn’t you listen? You shouldn’t have come.”
“Look here, Hastings, we came all this way after reading your book,” Reed spoke up suddenly, ignoring the look Stanton gave him. “I don’t mind telling you that it was quite a shock to get to Fort Bridger only to find you’d gone. And that note. I suspect you’re nothing but a charlatan,” Reed said. “How could you write those things in your book if the route—”
“It isn’t the route that’s the problem,” Hastings said shortly. “The cutoff is a difficult passage, but it can be done. I’ve done it.” He shook his head. “It’s something else entirely. There’s something following us.”
The charms tacked to the walls stirred faintly, as if a phantom hand had passed along them.
Stanton frowned. “We know. The men told us. Animals—”
“They don’t know.” Now that Hastings was standing, Stanton could smell him; he smelled like something sick and terrified, a wounded animal. “It’s not an animal, at least, not any kind of animal I’ve ever seen.” His voice kept skipping into a higher register. “There’s no game in these woods—have you noticed? That’s because there’s nothing left. Nothing. Something’s out there eating every living thing.”
“A pack of wolves,” Reed said. But he sounded uneasy. “That’s what we’ve heard, as far back as Fort Laramie.”
“No,” Hastings insisted. “I know wolves. I know how they hunt. This is different. The Indians know it, too.” Hastings let out a laugh that sounded as if he were choking. “They took a boy, no more than twelve, I swear, and left him tied to a tree out in the woods back over the ridge. They just rode off and left him there. Left him for whatever’s out there, feeding. I can still hear him screaming.”
Stanton had heard of men unhinged by the wilderness, by too many years fighting the dark encroachment of the natural world. He wondered whether Hastings had simply come undone. But despite his filth and the way his hands trembled, Hastings didn’t seem crazy.
Terrified, yes. Crazy, no.
“Right after we left Fort Bridger, a little girl went missing,” Hastings said. Now his voice had dropped again, to almost a whisper. “Every man in the party went out to search for her to no avail. And then a couple miles into the woods, we found her body, ripped to pieces, nothing left but the skeleton.”
Stanton thought of the Nystrom boy, and the horrible mess of his body. The face turned sideways, as though he’d just lain in the dirt to rest. This girl had been found miles ahead of the wagon train, the same way they’d found Nystrom. The hairs on the back of Stanton’s neck lifted. The charms stirred again in the stillness. He was sweating. Being surrounded by Hastings’s trinkets agitated him, reminding him of Tamsen. This junk can’t protect you; nothing could protect them. He didn’t know where the thought had come from. But it was true.
“You need to tell your wagon party to turn around. Head for Fort Hall and the northern route as fast as you can. These men won’t let me go or I’d beg you to take me with you. Save yourselves.”
Reed didn’t speak until he and Stanton were well away from the stranded wagon party. “The devil take Lansford Hastings. I’ll never trust another lawyer for as long as I live.” Reed spit on the ground. “Has the man lost his mind, do you think?”
“No,” Stanton said slowly. “No, I don’t think so.”
Reed stared at him. “So you believe this story of monsters in the woods?”
“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Three days after the conversation with Hastings, they came across the remains of the boy he’d told them about—the twelve-year-old Indian, tied to a tree.
Reed’s hands were raw and so was his patience. It had been a bad passage. He and Stanton had returned to the group and, despite the warnings they conveyed, the group had decided nevertheless to continue on the trail. Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves didn’t like the trail from the start and complained to anyone who would listen, and soon enough Wolfinger and Spitzer and then the rest of the Germans took up the refrain. Reed suspected it was in part because they simply didn’t like the idea of him as captain.
But he’d had little choice but to step up. The news about Lansford Hastings blew all the bluster straight out of George Donner. He had simply looked blankly from Reed to Stanton when they told him, as if he hadn’t understood.
“We’ve made a terrible mistake,” Reed had said bluntly. “We were depending on that man and he’s deserted us. He lied to us. We’ll die out here . . .”
But Donner only shook his head. “I don’t know the way to the Humboldt River from here, none of us does. Perhaps we should turn around. We could take the northern route . . .”
“There’s no time for that,” Reed said. “If we try to take the northern route at this late date, we’d need to winter over at Fort Hall.” It would be ruinous for most families. Few had the money to sustain them over the season, not with the high prices the trading posts commanded. A dollar fifty for a pound of flour, and a family could easily eat a pound of flour in a day. Half the families would starve before spring.
Donner had turned away from them, sweating and trembling, refusing to decide. And since then, Donner hadn’t spoken a word to anyone outside his family. Reed was convinced that Donner’s breakdown was only temporary and got Stanton to agree to keep mum. Jacob Donner, his brother, had agreed to keep him out of sight, and the story going through the wagon train was that he’d fallen ill.
So Reed took charge of the route. Within a day, the forest choked up around them the same as it had done to Hastings’s group, and then the ground broke uphill sharply. On the morning of his second day as captain, one of Reed’s oxen had come up lame, setting his temper on edge. He ended up being a little too terse with Keseberg, the wrong man to provoke, and they fell into a shouting match that ended when Keseberg drew a knife and had to be pulled away by the arm.
The atmosphere up and down the line quickly turned tense and jumpy. Reed sent brothers-in-law William Foster and William Pike ahead to scout the way and got everyone else started chopping down trees, terrified in his heart that they would end up trapped in the forest like the other party. Reed suggested that everyone start pooling and rationing their food stocks, but he was quickly shouted down, and some men threatened to string him up if he ever raised the idea again.
A small hunting party went out after the wagon train had halted for the night, making the best of the last hour of light left before it would be too dangerous to hunt. Fresh meat was in short supply and no one was willing to slaughter any livestock, so every able-bodied man in the party with a rifle—and even some less-than-able-bodied ones, such as Luke Halloran—ventured out to look for game.
Reed trailed a smal
l group, behind Milt Elliott and John Snyder in the lead. His rifle weighed heavily, his arms aching from swinging an ax all day. He was still puzzling over what Snyder had told him last night—what he’d followed Reed into the woods to tell him.
You know what your trouble is, Reed? You don’t understand them people at all.
Only sheep will follow you meek like. The rest of them don’t think they need your help.
They’re not going to listen to you unless you make them.
Snyder was a twenty-five-year-old drifter who’d never done anything more difficult than bully and whip livestock. Reed had built a furniture business from nothing, led a company of men against Sauk and Kickapoo Indians in the Black Hawk War.
And yet Snyder was right—Reed didn’t understand people. The light was nearly gone and the whole time they’d seen nothing, not so much as a prairie squirrel or a single quail, but no one dared say anything out loud for fear it might further jinx them. Reed listened apprehensively to the idle chitchat of the men ahead, worried that Snyder’s exchange with Elliott was getting increasingly risky. Snyder knew Reed could hear what was being said and liked to bait him; it was the bully in him. Had he been trying to warn Reed last night?
There’s two kinds of men. Sheep and the men that bleed ’em. Don’t forget which one I am.
If there was one thing Snyder knew, it was how to make people do what he wanted. All it took was a look from those hooded eyes, a flex of one of his hands.
If Reed could go back in time, he never would’ve started up with him. He’d been reckless. But he’d been unable to get the feeling of Snyder’s hands out of his mind, and the thought of them—big and rough and powerful—had gone somehow from one of dread to one of intense need.
It was stupid. Worse than stupid—deadly.
Say the wrong word to the wrong man and you could find yourself in a jail cell waiting for the circuit judge. Reed had heard such a tale from Edward McGee. You had to be ready to act on offers when they occurred.
Snyder’s voice suddenly broke out angrily. “For crissakes,” he shouted, then let loose a string of cusswords. Halloran’s little dog yipped. Reed picked up his pace. Maybe they’d found game.
What Reed saw as he rounded the turn made his stomach lurch. Hanging between two trees were the remains of a corpse: wrists caught tight with rope, shoulders stretched spread-eagle, head lolling on the neck, but below that—nearly nothing. The spinal column ended abruptly in midair, its vertebrae suspended like beads on a string. Nearly all the flesh had been stripped away from the bone. On the ground: long leg bones, cracked pieces of rib. The spot beneath the body was churned into a frenzy and black with old blood.
“What in the blue blazes is this?” Milt Elliott asked, and nearly tripped over Halloran’s little terrier as it sniffed at the bones.
Reed couldn’t stop looking at the head, worried to a bloody mess by insects. Something—birds?—had gotten to the eyes. It had to have been a monstrous death, though whether it was worse than starving or dying of thirst high in the mountains, he couldn’t guess. He had to speak up before Snyder and Elliott and Halloran brought the news back to the wagon train and all hell broke loose. “We heard about this from Hastings,” he said. “The Indians did it. A ceremony of some kind.”
“A ceremony?” Snyder growled. He took out his big hunting knife and sawed at one of the ropes until it gave. The corpse swung to the left, so that one hand trailed on the ground. “What kind of fucked-up ceremony is this?”
Reed said nothing. He and Stanton had agreed they wouldn’t tell the rest of the party of Hastings’s fears. Something’s stalking the wagon train. It would only spook them worse. Snyder didn’t seem to expect an answer, however; like many, he feared the Indians and didn’t try and make sense of anything they did.
“Don’t it look kinda like that kid we found on the plain, before we got to Fort Laramie?” Snyder asked. He kicked at Halloran’s terrier when the dog began to chew at a wrist bone. “Quit that! That ain’t right. You can’t have a dog eating human flesh. He’ll develop a taste for it.”
“Quincy, come here.” Halloran looked green. Consumption had whittled him down to his bones. It would be a miracle if he made it another month.
Snyder reached down to pull the bone away from Halloran’s dog. Suddenly, the dog leapt up and bit him. Red welled to the spot immediately.
“Stupid dog.” Snyder brought the wound reflexively to his mouth. He swung a boot at the dog but missed and the terrier lunged for his boot again. Without warning, Snyder leveled his rifle at the dog and squeezed off a bullet, catching the dog in the stomach. The sound the dog made when it was struck was the eeriest thing Reed had ever heard, a high twisted note of surprise and pain that was almost human.
Halloran was a timid man—a sheep, in Snyder’s terms—and wasted by illness, but anger propelled him toward Snyder. His hands found the big man’s shirt front, but Snyder pushed him back easily. “What the hell? What the hell did you do that for?” He looked to the others for support, but Reed averted his eyes. No one was going to challenge Snyder, least of all Reed. He knew how Snyder could get, knew the power in those hands, and had the bruises to show for it.
“That mutt bit me,” Snyder said. “I got my rights. If a dog bites me, I shoot him.”
“He barely broke the skin,” Halloran said. Blood dribbled down his chin from the last bout of coughing. “Maybe I should shoot you.”
Snyder’s open-handed slap caught Halloran on the side of his face and sent him sprawling in the dirt. Reed flinched. Snyder only laughed.
“Quit crying,” he said. “It’ll only land you in trouble.”
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.
Halloran rolled off his back onto his hands and knees, his whole body buckling under the force of his coughing fit. Ribbons of bloody phlegm hung from his mouth. Reed was disgusted, and sick with himself, too; he should have stood up for Halloran, but he was too afraid.
Snyder and Elliott started back the way they’d come. Reed stood there, watching Halloran pawing through the dirt to his dog’s side. “Come on, Luke. Leave him.” It was almost dark, and Reed had no desire to fall too far behind the others.
Halloran didn’t even lift his head. “We got to bury him. I can’t just leave him here. Would you help me? Will you at least do that?”
Reed’s disgust twisted into anger. The ground was hard as rock and they had no shovel. Did Halloran expect they would dig with their hands? And there was tomorrow to think about, another day of backbreaking work clearing a trail, and who knew how many such days they had in front of them?
“Leave the damn dog.” Reed shouldered his rifle. “Or you can stay out here by yourself in the dark, see whether there really is something following us.” He was relieved when Halloran got to his feet, and felt a heady rush of guilt, too, which brought the taste of sick to the back of his mouth.
All the way back to camp, he pretended not to hear Halloran crying.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everyone said it was a miracle. It was God’s grace, and proof that they had not been abandoned.
Tamsen didn’t blame them; grace was in short supply, like everything was. And how else could you explain, really, what had happened to Halloran? If she had really been a witch, as everyone said, she might have had an answer. Signs, augurs, charms to keep away the devil, ways of reading the future in the drift of the clouds: There was no power in what she practiced, only attention—increasingly, of the unwanted variety.
But some power had touched Halloran, and healed him.
For a week, ever since his little dog got shot, he had barely been able to lift his head. It was a shame about the dog, but Halloran had let himself get too attached to it. He’d eve
n let the dog nip and bite him for fun, like a parent that doesn’t know how to discipline his children. Halloran was coughing up blood regularly now, though he tried to hide it, and would struggle for breath for hours at a time.
Tamsen had tended to him, even taking him into their wagon since he was too weak even to stay on a horse. She didn’t know why she felt sorry for him; maybe only because he was an outsider, and lonely, and despised, as she was. She’d spoon-fed him broth brewed from mushrooms scavenged by her girls, the only thing he could keep down. She’d made sure from the time the girls were little they knew the difference between a lacy yellow chanterelle and the deadly parasol, and they knew to try nothing before bringing it back first for her approval. (She gathered the poisonous mushrooms herself, when she needed them; she had a good handful of the deadly parasols, carefully cleaned and dried, waiting to be mixed with her homemade laudanum—all of her supplies hidden and stashed away, kept secret from the wagon party.)
Why Halloran had tried to make the trip west, Tamsen couldn’t guess. Halloran hadn’t let on how sick he’d been at the outset, knowing that he wouldn’t be allowed to join, especially as a man with no wagon or oxen, traveling alone, no family members to take care of him. Then again, no one had imagined the journey would be this difficult. Tamsen didn’t know if they were suffering bad luck especially or if everyone who’d made the trip before them had lied: lied in the newspapers, lied in their books like Lansford Hastings (vile, vile man, and mad, too, as it turned out; another reason to resent her husband, who had believed every word Hastings had written). Lured out west to die in the wilderness.
But then: Halloran’s breathing eased, the sweats dried up. By the end of the first day of his recovery, he could walk around without help, though not for too long. His coughing went away. The next night he fiddled for over an hour after supper. Previously, on his good days, everyone loved to hear him fiddle. People would crowd around and for a few moments, everyone would forget their grudges and disagreements. No one fought, no one bickered. Most people preferred lively tunes, jigs and reels, something they could dance to, but Tamsen liked the sad songs; melancholy was better suited to the land around them.