Stanton, exhausted, went down on his knees when another gust buffeted him off balance, and his hand hit something hard in the sand. It was a palm-sized gun, too small for a man as big as Keseberg. He struggled to his feet and managed to claw himself back inside the wagon, feeling his way on his animals’ leads.
Once inside, Stanton lit a lantern. He loaded his rifle first in case Keseberg came back and only then looked at the pistol. It had a singular mother-of-pearl inlay he recognized immediately. There was probably not another like it west of the Mississippi.
He felt a stab of disbelief and also disappointment. It was Tamsen Donner’s gun.
* * *
• • •
IN THE MORNING, Stanton rode up to James Reed. Reed looked as if he hadn’t slept. His clothes were streaked with salt and his fair Irish skin was so red that he looked burnt.
Reed gave him an appraising nod. “Looks like you came through the sandstorm all right.”
“By a hair,” Stanton said, and tried to keep his voice even. “Someone tried to kill me last night.”
He led Reed over to his wagon and showed him the hole made by the bullet.
Reed crouched low to get a clean look. “Did you see who did it?”
Stanton hesitated. He couldn’t see a reason to reveal Tamsen’s and Keseberg’s involvement. Better to keep the particulars secret until he had a better sense of where their scheme was headed. “No. Too dark.”
“It’s gotten that bad, has it, that we’re trying to kill each other?” Reed took off his hat and smoothed his sweat-drenched hair. Stanton remembered how Reed had first looked when they set off, like a big-city boss, still starching his shirt collars and shining his shoes. “What are you going to do?”
“I’d like to volunteer to ride ahead. To Johnson’s Ranch. We need the food, and most of the families are in a bad way. Some are near the end of their supplies. The ones that aren’t won’t share with those in need.”
Reed squinted at the wagons in the lead, far down the flats. They were as small as beetles. “We could take a day or two once we’re out of the desert and slaughter some of the livestock, dry the meat. That would tide us over for a while.”
“No one who still has cattle will part with it, not for love or money,” Stanton pointed out. “A good number of the cattle died in the crossing or ran off. The people close to starving are the ones who started with almost nothing—the Eddys, the McCutcheons, Wolfinger and Keseberg. And don’t forget all the single men. Single men with rifles. Things will get ugly soon.”
Reed nodded and glanced again at the tear in Stanton’s wagon cover. “They already have.” He sighed. “I suppose it might give whoever took a shot at you some time to cool off.”
That or he’d risk isolating himself further.
But it was still safer than the alternative, for now. He had to get away.
“So it’s settled, then.”
Reed nodded.
Not for the first time, Stanton wondered where Bryant was now and tried not to read the worst into the lack of promised letters. Hopefully, Bryant was nearly to Yerba Buena, enjoying that fabled sunshine.
“I want to take another man with me,” he said slowly, watching Reed’s reaction. He didn’t expect to find many eager men for the job. There were plenty of things that could kill a man between where they stood and Johnson’s Ranch.
“Will McCutcheon,” Reed said. “I think he’s the right man to accompany you.”
Stanton nodded, understanding: Everything the McCutcheons had was strapped to the back of their family mule.
“I can ask Baylis to handle the oxen while you’re gone. Mrs. McCutcheon can look after your wagon.”
Stanton only nodded again.
“We are much obliged to you, Mr. Stanton. Much obliged.” Reed dusted his hands before extending one to shake.
* * *
• • •
HE FOUND TAMSEN TRUDGING in the shadow cast by the tall canopies of the Donners’ wagons. She had draped a white shawl over her head to protect her from the sun. He dismounted and began to walk beside her.
“Mr. Stanton.” She didn’t seem surprised to see him. He admired her control. “What are you doing here?”
He reached into his saddlebag. “I believe this is yours.”
She froze at the sight of her own revolver. She seemed altered to him suddenly, no less beautiful but smaller somehow, like a flame narrowed by lack of oxygen.
“You might as well take it,” he said. “I know it belongs to you.”
She did, but with a look of distaste, as if it were a snake or a large insect that might bite her. He stared at her hands, wondered briefly if she might aim the weapon at him, and something in him leapt at the uncertainty of it. Then he hated himself, for it was this kind of attraction—to wrong things, to danger, to her—that led to ruin, and he knew it, and the knowing somehow only made it stronger. Her lips were taut and pink. He looked away, suddenly furious with her, with the pinkness of her mouth. She didn’t even have the grace to look guilty.
“Don’t you want to know where I found it?” he asked, pressing.
She looked at him blankly.
“I took it away from Lewis Keseberg,” he said.
“Lewis Keseberg?” She shrugged coolly, pushing the weapon back to him. “Whatever he did, it wasn’t me who told him to do it. I didn’t give him the gun, either. He must have taken it.”
“And when would he have had the opportunity to do that? You like to keep busy, don’t you, Mrs. Donner? I must say that I’m happy you’ve found another plaything.” It was wrong of him to imply such a thing, but the beast, chained inside him, held down for these last few months, had reared its head. Stanton was losing control of himself—or he already had, long ago.
Her whole expression curdled around a look of hatred. “You have no right to speak to me like that. Not after what’s been between us.”
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” he said, hating the growl in his voice, hating her power over him, yet drawn to that power. “I’m reminded every day, when half the train whispers as I pass, and the other half shuns me and rumors spread like a sickness. I’m reminded when Franklin Graves threatens me with hanging if—” He broke off. He hadn’t meant to mention Mary.
But Tamsen just shook her head. “I never told anyone.”
“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.” He gathered up the reins, ready to swing into the saddle, but Tamsen touched his arm for his attention, as quickly as though she were touching a hot iron.
“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said, in a low voice. “Listen to me, won’t you? I am not as bad as you may think.”
He squinted and turned away. The mountains that had looked like distant hieroglyphs, ragged tears in the sleek shell of blue sky, now seemed far closer. He could make out snow-capped peaks, valleys already frozen over with ice that never melted. He had to hurry.
“No,” he said finally, though he still wouldn’t look at her. He thought of Lewis Keseberg’s hot, whiskey-laden breath, and the reckless way he’d dived after Stanton, almost like an animal. There was no way Tamsen would allow a man like him into her bed, or even, he hoped, conspire with him at all. He let out a sigh. “I suppose you are not.” He knew Tamsen was much like the revolver itself—powerful, deadly even, but only when put in the wrong hands.
He glanced down at his own, then gripped the reins, mounted, and spurred his horse into a gallop.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Indian Territory
My dearest Margie,
I am lost. For how many days, I can no longer say with confidence. I write to you as a diversion, to lift my spirits. I don’t know if I will come across another human being, someone who will send this letter on its way to you. If I don’t, I’ll leave it by a river or other place where it stands a chance of being found.
My
food is gone. There is no game to be had. I’m only able to survive because of what I learned from Miwok Indians I met years ago, “diggers” forced to forage for their survival. I have been experimenting with anything that looked edible, even bitter acorns and weeds, but because of the drought even these are in short supply. I might’ve killed and eaten my horse if I thought I could get out of the wilderness on foot. I may still be forced to, if things don’t get better soon, though the thought fills me with revulsion.
In this near-delirious state, I recently stumbled on the remains of what looked to be a camp. There was a clearing with a ring of stones laid around an old fire pit. Due to time and weather a single rough lean-to of unstripped logs was falling apart, its roof collapsed. I shifted through the dirt around the fire pit and found things that made me think white men had been here, a group of prospectors, most likely: a tin coffee cup, a half-decayed book of psalms with many of the pages torn out (no doubt for kindling), a few silver coins, two empty bottles that could only have contained whiskey. Among these few items, however, there were many, many fragments of bone. There must have been game here not long ago, I thought, though there was none now.
The bones were curious, however: too big to be rabbit, the wrong shape to be deer. I blame my confusion on a delirium brought on by starvation, or maybe it was just that I somehow anticipated the truth, a truth too horrible to contemplate outright.
It wasn’t until I went into the lean-to that I realized something gruesome had happened here. There were human skulls scattered about the floor of the hut. They’d been cracked open, each one of them, as though bashed in with rocks. The long bones I found there were unmistakably human, with their thinner cortical walls. The heads of the major bones—the ones found at the joints, hips and shoulder and so on—were not intact, which they would be if the body had been torn or fallen apart, but showed distinct signs of cleaving. Indeed, there was a rusty hatchet nearby; there could be no question of how these people had met their end.
I staggered outside, dizzy from horror. Whose camp was this? Bridger and Vasquez had told me of vanished prospectors several years back, and this had to be it. I found prospecting tools, pickaxes and shovels, moldering under some bushes.
I struggled to recall how many men Bridger had said were in that party. What could have happened to them? Who had killed them? Was it the Anawai? None of the evidence pointed to them, though none pointed away from them, either. The cause was just as likely to have been a disagreement among the group that got out of control. An insane stranger stumbling out of the woods. A pack of outlaws, torturing them to give up a cache of gold they were sure the men were hiding. There are, I suppose, any number of reasons a group of men might have turned on one another.
Even though I am not one to spook easily, I knew I could not spend the night there. I rode away as quickly as my horse would take me, eager to leave it far behind.
I have been riding ever since.
Margie, seeing that this might be the end for me, it seems only fair that I should explain why I decided not to remain with you in Independence but continued west. While we had talked about it—and bless you for not trying to stop me—I didn’t give you the full truth. You asked me, before I left, why I was so fascinated with Indian folklore and I gave you the answer most people will accept, namely a curiosity about their ways, a desire to contrast their beliefs with those of Christianity and so forth. I didn’t mean to deceive you or talk down to you but was afraid that if I spoke with frankness, you might have second thoughts about marrying me and I was afraid to lose you. Here in the wilderness, I’ve had plenty of time to think about our time together, to think about you, and I see now that I should’ve told you my true motives. Forgive me for not trusting you with the truth before now.
Funny how dearly we hold on to some truths about ourselves, the power these truths have over us. I told you a little bit about my upbringing. My father was a backwoods preacher in Tennessee. Some would consider him a revivalist, same as the men I exposed in those articles I wrote. But unlike frauds like Uriah Putney, my father made no attempt to deceive. He tried to preach and minister as best he could with his limited education. There was no tolerance in him, no forgiveness. He saw himself as a man of God, but his God was judgmental, fierce-tempered, demanding. And naturally, he modeled himself after his God.
As you can imagine, my childhood was hellish. It was a stifling atmosphere for a curious boy. My father allowed no questioning of faith or his interpretation of that faith. He allowed no questioning, period. I decided at an early age that I would not follow in his mold but would learn to question everything.
I resolved to become a man of science, and there is no greater science of our time than medicine. I apprenticed with a local doctor, Walton Gow. He may have come from the mountains of Tennessee (and would later take me with him to Kentucky), but Dr. Gow was no backwoods sawbones. Walton was highly respected for his skill and thoughtful approach to medicine. His powers of observation were remarkable. He developed a reputation for being able to save the lives of patients in the most dire of situations, but most know him as the man who saved Davy Crockett by removing Crockett’s burst appendix when he was in the Tennessee legislature. Walton was a young man at the time and just happened to be one of the few surgeons in the territory.
Being a nurse, dear Margie, you understand that a doctor sees things that make him question what he thought he knew about the world. This happened to me and to Walton Gow one night not long after we’d moved to Kentucky.
I never told you the story, fearing you would think me mad. But in order to understand, you must know the truth.
We were making rounds in a very remote region when we heard of a curious case in Smithboro. We were asked to attend a local man who had been attacked. The curious thing was that his wounds didn’t look quite as though they were made by an animal. He told us he wasn’t sure what had attacked him, but there was something about his story that rang false. After Dr. Gow insisted we needed the truth in order to help him, the man told us that he had been attacked by a demon that lived in the woods surrounding Smithboro. This demon was known to the locals, but for obvious reasons they were reluctant to discuss it with outsiders. The demon, he explained, had once been a man, but he underwent a strange transformation—no one could say why—and suddenly began living in the woods like an animal. He attacked his neighbors’ livestock to survive, killing sheep and goats and dragging their carcasses into the woods.
We thought the townspeople were suffering from a kind of collective insanity. They were adamant that the story was true. And the man’s wounds did look odd, too vicious to attribute to a human!
Gow and I refused to believe their tales, of course. But person after person came forward to tell us of a sighting, an encounter. They told stories of Indians they called skinwalkers who had the power to change into animals, usually for nefarious purposes.
It is commonly accepted that mythologies around the world, in all cultures, often contain narrative elements that derive from a desire to explain unusual natural or medical phenomena, and after a while, Gow and I couldn’t help but wonder if such a notion might be at work here. If so, it meant that this disease, if it was one, had affected people in a variety of locations and at different times throughout history, appearing in various waves or epidemics.
I became obsessed with this bizarre case. It was partly the reason I gave up medicine and decided to become a reporter instead. Writing for newspapers, I was free to travel widely and ask questions. Walton didn’t understand why I couldn’t live with this unsolved mystery, and yet in his most recent letter to me he has finally admitted to feeling haunted by it, too.
Here and there, I came across other stories of people attacked by wolves who appeared to recover but then became strangely violent. There was even one stupefying case where a family in Ireland was suspected of having been transformed into creatures much like the old European tales of werew
olves, except for one member, a young girl. The rest of her family had disappeared like the man from Smithboro, but she remained and, mystifyingly, showed no sign of the affliction. Is it possible for certain individuals to be able to resist a particular disease and, if so, how to account for it?
What I have seen and heard seemed to overlap with various Indian beliefs and legends and this was the purpose of my Western journey: to meet with the tribes in question and speak with them directly. Not to learn their mythologies, exactly, but to try to discover whether some of them share common roots in actual medical histories.
But as I write these words, lost in the wilderness, I am forced to question what good will come out of my endeavors. I thought I was chasing the truth and knowledge; I fear now that maybe all I have done is throw my life away.
Dearest Margie, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the foolish choice I have made. I can only hope that God smiles on my quest and will keep me alive. With his help, I will return to your side.
I remain your loving
Edwin
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Who knew that Eden could be found in the foothills below Pilot Peak? After crossing that godforsaken salt desert, the dry, cracked-brown patch of land looked like the most beautiful place Reed had ever seen.
Hell, it seemed, was behind them.
The livestock tore hungrily at scrub grass and crowded three deep at the tiny watering hole. People tumbled out of their dust-caked wagons into the spring-fed creek, gulping down muddy water, pouring it over their heads. Lavinah Murphy and her family were on their knees, hands joined and eyes closed, thanking God for their deliverance.
Reed watched all this with satisfaction but also with a bruised ego. He’d taken over as leader, had gotten them through the worst trial of the journey, but did anyone think to thank him? Of course not. Instead, many found ways to blame him. The group’s loyalties, he’d come to realize, had little to do with fact and all to do with feeling. And once again, Reed was forced to accept that he did not inspire people to like him—hadn’t and perhaps never would. 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. Which was Donner’s skill in spades, or had been, before the once-jovial man had caved in on himself.