I managed to tell him politely that as we barely know each other, it is too soon to think of such things, but once he was out of sight, I couldn’t help it: for the first time in months, I began to laugh. I couldn’t stop. I laughed until tears ran down my cheeks and my sides hurt. I laughed like the deranged girl I know myself to be.
CHAPTER 35
Diary of James Reed, March 2, 1847
Margret, Virginia, and Jimmy have traveled with my fellow soldiers to Fort Sutter, and I have come to rescue Tommy and Patty. I had a long conversation with Virginia before we parted ways, and she informed me that the situation is dire and that the creatures are still hunting us. I only pray I am not too late.
I want to believe she has begun telling tall tales again, but her stories were not fanciful, nor were they exaggerations, and she wasn’t even telling me the half of it. She was trying to spare my feelings, telling me that she was fine, that it really hadn’t been so bad.
One look at my wife and I could see––Virginia’s stalwart bearing notwithstanding––that it had been much, much worse than I could ever have imagined, and it broke my heart.
I hurried my companions along, and we fought through the snowstorm and reached Truckee Lake a day sooner than anticipated.
Patty and Tommy are still alive, though my youngest boy is very weak. I have not left their side, so I have not witnessed the horrors in the other cabins. The Murphy cabin is apparently indescribable. There are pits outside with body parts in them. It seems Mrs. Murphy has gone insane, and the children in her care, the Eddy and Foster children, are so close to death that they can’t be moved.
Keseberg is holed up in the Murphy cabin with an injured leg. It sounds like a bullet wound to me, and I remember Virginia’s account of firing upon the werewolves. Each time I hear these stories, I want to deny them, to dismiss them as illusion, products of her vivid imagination, hallucinations induced by hunger and cold––but I have seen these monsters firsthand, and I will not deny their reality for the sake of having a more comfortable view of the world.
The Donners are also in bad shape. George Donner’s arm is gangrenous, and I fear he will not last much longer. Jacob Donner is dead. I have heard whispers that his children are alive only because they have been feeding on his body. Elizabeth Donner insists the meat her children are consuming is not her husband.
We are taking back those whom we can. Soon, we will lead the Breens and the rest of my family away from this terrible place. Most of our party will be made up of youngsters; it is judged that with the new rations, the adults left here can stay alive for some time.
I have seen no signs of wolves, natural or otherwise.
March 10, 1847
Our ordeal is not yet over. Young Isaac Donner died during the night. We have been snowed in on the pass for several days. I cannot convince the others to move on, so I am leaving them. I am carrying my children. Yesterday, I met Eddy and Foster and a man named John Stark on the trail and urged them to hurry, for I fear their children are in grave danger back at Truckee Lake.
March 12 1847
We have arrived at Sutter’s Fort. I fear Tommy will lose his toes to frostbite, and my hands are bleeding, but we are alive.
So ends our torment.
March 18, 1847
I feel that I must tell the last of this tale, though I was not there to witness it: the tale of this hell that never seemed to end, even when we thought we were free of it. Various parties were dispatched to bring the survivors out of the mountains, but with each rescue, we were forced to leave some people behind, and when we went back for them, we had to leave others behind.
Each time we returned, more were dead and more had been eaten.
Eddy and Foster finally made it to Truckee Lake, having hired four men at Bear Lake to accompany them, only to find their entire families dead. To their great credit, Eddy and Foster stayed to help those left alive.
Keseberg confessed that he had eaten the Eddy children. Though there is more to that story, much more, history will record it as a desperate act of cannibalism.
“Monster!” Eddy cried, and would have done for Keseberg then and there had he not been restrained. It was his four hirelings who stopped him, not truly understanding what had happened.
None of the outsiders truly understand what happened, for there is blame enough to go around, and humans were responsible for much of the misery. After all, not all who killed were monsters, and not all who died were human. Not all who were consumed were consumed by wolves. Such facts have muddled the narrative, even for those who were there.
Indeed, until the end, there were villains in human form. Mrs. Donner hired two of the rescuers to take her children to California, but they took her money and left the children at the cabins at Truckee Lake. But there were acts of selflessness, as well: for instance, if not for John Stark, who took it upon himself to help them though they were not his relatives and he was not paid to do so, the Breens and the Graveses would have died in those mountains.
Still, the nightmare continued. When the final relief party arrived, they found the remains of many poor souls along the trail, partly consumed. They found one-year-old Elizabeth Graves crying beside her mother’s body. They came upon pits containing more human remains, and found Keseberg in the Murphy cabin, in possession of the Donners’ jewelry and money, and Tamsen Donner missing. There was meat in the stewpot.
Enough. I cannot bear to go on.
Let history tell the rest, though history will never recount the true story of what transpired. I broached the subject of werewolves once with Colonel Fremont, and he looked at me as if I had gone mad. When I pretended I had meant ordinary wolves, I was rebuffed there as well.
“California is a land of beauty and harmony. There are no wolves. There are no monsters. And if there are wolves, they certainly don’t eat children,” he said.
I’ve left this record in any case, for those who wish to believe it. There are things in this world that may be denied in the full light of day, but should you find yourself in a winter storm deep in the woods of the high mountains, you will believe, for they are among us.
CHAPTER 36
Final testimony of Virginia Reed, April 1865
It has been nearly twenty years since those terrible events.
I shall be forever grateful that the tragedy was named after the Donner family and that our family’s reputation, which suffered enough, was not forever tarnished by the title the Reed Party.
Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated. It is this that impels me to once again put pen to paper. Honest Abe, they called him. I met him once, and in his honor, I have told the true story of the Donner Party.
That people should confess to killing and eating their fellows is terrible enough. Most of the other survivors cannot admit the whole truth about what happened, or they deny it, or have, over time, forgotten the true nature of the horror.
I believe my father, James Reed, remembered everything about those creatures of darkness, but he was a practical, rational man who would never admit to seeing demons, except to me.
When the fateful decision to take the Hastings Cutoff was made, it was Father who spoke most strongly in favor the new route. It was a mistake on his part, but an honest one. We were lied to, manipulated to our awful fate by Lansford Hastings, and later by the famous mountain man Jim Bridger. They were wolves in men’s clothing.
Listen to one last testimony.
One day, in that terrible winter, I ventured out of the cabin, hoping to find the carcass of a horse or ox exposed by the wind and the shifting of the snow. Instead, I found five men crouched over the body of another.
I say men, but they were more like animals than men. They stood upright, but were covered with hair, and their arms and legs were unnaturally long. They were bent over the body, and I realized to my horror that they were eating the corpse.
Hiding behind a tree, I continue to observe them, for I wished to bear witness to this atrocity. When the body w
as completely consumed, those five creatures transformed before me, turning back into men. They were naked, but they quickly covered themselves, talking and laughing as if nothing unusual had transpired.
I was not surprised to discover that three of the men were Keseberg, Spitzer, and Reinhardt, but then the two others turned around, and the sight staggered me.
I saw the man we had met so long ago in Missouri––Lansford Hastings, who had coaxed us to follow the trail that led us into these mountains. And I saw Jim Bridger, who had reassured us that the path was safe. Their faces were red with blood. I sensed that they knew I was watching, but didn’t care. Indeed, it seemed to me that they wished for me to witness their depravity.
It wasn’t human depravity I witnessed: I am certain of that. People would laugh if I told them this, but these were unnatural creatures, not men.
At first, after our rescue, some of us survivors tried to explain what had happened, but the only thing that made sense to anyone else was cannibalism. I believe now that we humans did not consume our fellows––I myself ate shoestrings and ox hide, insects and tree bark, but never tasted the flesh of another human being––it’s just that everyone has been led to believe we did, because no one is willing to believe the truth.
After so many years, that is what I have convinced myself of, at least.
Nonetheless, the history books shall forever damn us.
As I have recounted, my father eventually reached us, and after some further hardship, we made it to California at last. My entire family survived. During our journey out of the mountains, I made sure that we stayed far away from Keseberg and the others.
No one but me ever knew that Hastings and Bridger had been at that camp.
I spent the rest of my life tracking them all down. It was obvious that each of them met an unnatural end, but I made sure to cover my tracks. I killed them with bullets and blades, and made sure they saw my face before they died.
I saved Keseberg for last.
After we returned to civilization, he was nearly tried for murder, but no witnesses could be found. If all of us had coordinated our stories, something might have come of it, but we could not––or rather, would not. He continued to vehemently deny the charges, and eventually the reporters left him alone.
Years later, I tracked him to a small cabin in the woods. He was hiding in the farthest wilderness of Alaska. It was isolated; there was no one around to stop me, no one to act as witness. Boldly, I walked up to the front door and knocked.
The door opened, and there was Keseberg. His long red hair was streaked with white, and he had even more scars on his face than I remembered. He had a crutch under one arm. “Come in, Virginia,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
He stepped aside to let me pass, remarking, “You’ve turned into a beautiful woman.”
I ignored the compliment. “You are alone?”
“Of course. I have been alone for years. None of my kind wants to run with an old, lame wolf. Besides, the others blame me for what happened. As many of us died as you humans, you know. Turns out we were as trapped as you were. Ah, that was a winter like no other! We couldn’t find prey anymore than your hunters could.”
“You ate us.”
He snorted. “You weren’t worth much. One of you barely made a meal.”
“That didn’t stop you.”
He shrugged. “Of course not. I might remind you, it didn’t stop you humans either.”
This conversation wasn’t turning out the way I had planned. The others had tried to fight, or to run. Keseberg was doing neither.
The cabin had a peculiar odor. I made my way into the simple kitchen, keeping my revolver pointed at Keseberg the whole time. There was a rotten haunch of lamb in the sink, reeking of decay.
I looked around the place. It was clear that Keseberg rarely left the cabin, and that nothing was ever cleaned. It reminded me of the cabins at Truckee Lake.
I turned, startled, as Keseberg entered the kitchen behind me. He could barely walk, and I saw that the arm that wasn’t grasping the crutch was hanging uselessly.
“I relive those times every day of my life,” he said. “I think the Almighty has singled out me, among all the creatures He created on this Earth, to see how much hardship, suffering, and misery a being can bear.”
He hobbled to the kitchen table and stared at me. “Go ahead. I’ve wanted this for a long time. Kill me.”
We stood there for a moment, Keseberg and I, regarding one another across the table. Then I lowered the revolver and did something I had never once, in all my years of planning and searching, dreamed I might do.
I walked away, leaving him a tormented, living monument to those days at Truckee Lake.
His screams rang in my ears as I went out the door. “Kill me! Have mercy! Don’t leave me like this! Kill me!”
#
For all I know, he’s there still.
About the Author:
Duncan McGeary is the owner of the bookstore Pegasus Books of Bend, located in downtown Bend, Oregon. He is the author of the fantasy novels Star Axe, Snowcastles, and Icetowers, and the author of several horror novels, including Led to the Slaughter and the Vampire Evolution Trilogy. His wife Linda is also a writer; together they attend a writer's group in Oregon. Duncan has two children: Todd, an artist, and Toby, a chef.
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